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Have you ever studied any language besides your first one? This post is only viewable by Asia Friendfinder members. Join Asia Friendfinder now! |
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Actually, some people say Korean is some parts similar to japanese. Do you agree? French was ok when I was a beginner, now that I am in intermediate level I find it difficult.
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At high school French Latin German - 55-60 years ago - Latin was useful in understanding English; French I can still somewhat understand but not speak, and at German I was quite advanced, but obviously have receded. Chinese I have now studied for over 20 years, but am only upper intermediate. Japanese Spanish and Russian are other languages I have dabbled in but never mastered. I'll just have to persevere with the Chinese, to the point I can read the literature. The Korean alphabet is excellent, modern, easy to learn read and speak ... Japanese with two alphabets plus Kanji is a nightmare, so I gave it up.
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Some persons are certainly language oriented and others are not, I fall into the second category. I was never even interested in studying my first language, English. I did try a Chinese language class but could not hear the four different sounds that distinguish various words. So I am very impressed with those who can use more than one language, amazing to me.
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I was once fluent in French after three years of study in Junior High School. 15 years of Chinese and I am functional but far from fluent. My brain just doesn't want to work with it. 
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aliceyumi replies on 4/30/2019 4:51 am: Fluent with 3 years of study sounds amazing! Weren't you in obligation of studying any language in high school? Or did your choice was chinese? I have met someone that was fluent in chinese on linkedin group. I was e-mailing in japanese with him, but he quit after some time. Unfortunately it's not easy to meet people interested in language exchange. My school district required 3 years of foreign language in Junior High (grades 7-9) or 2 years in High School (10-12). I took the earlier option. I didn't begin studying Chinese until 2002 in preparation for my first visit to China in 2004.
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alice: italki.com has many people wanting to exchange language! I have been teaching there for 6 years now.
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Oldghost, are you a ESL teacher? Or just teach for fun? Thanks for the tips, I am going to check italki.com
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goannaoil, So glad to hear you loved Japan also, I love it too. You mean by romance languages, por ex., italian, french, spanish? Me, being a portuguese speaker, I think those languages are not so difficult to understand, though to master them I think it's touigh.
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But each character (Hanzi) doesn't just represent one word. One character can represent many words. Only context can help you. And don't forget, that it takes multiple characters to represent some words. And....when they write there is no spacing between characters so you can't tell if any giving string of characters is supposed to be read as the individual characters or grouped to mean something entirely different. A simple example: 面包。When you see these two characters, would you read 面 (a smooth surface or flour) and 包 (bag or to wrap)? [It COULD mean a flour sack!] or, do you read 面包 (bread)? Context will tell you! But what if there are other words you can't be sure of in the same line of characters? Context fails if you don't already know at least most of what the rest of the line mean. There are only 412 syllable pronunciations (pinyin) in the Chinese language. Those can be represented by about 86,000 total characters (Hanzi) . There are also a possible 4 tones to alter slightly the pinyin pronunciations. Given an even distribution (ha!), that would still give you 50 different characters for ever single pinyin syllable! Now.....there are about 190,000 different word in the Chinese language represented by those 86,000 characters. So those 86,000, depending upon how they are (or aren't) combined make up those 190,000..... Oh heck. You get the idea. For a non-native Chinese is a mess. And I haven't even gotten into the fact that most daily conversation is not direct speech but idioms--expressions like "It's raining cats and dogs." Yes, we use them in English, but Chinese does that at a whole other level. So even if you hear correctly (another major issue!!!) and understand exactly what words were used, you still probably won't have any clue what they are talking about........ So, after 17 years of study, I can function. And even share smallish bits of information. But I am nowhere near intermediate. Some people just have a talent for languages. I don't. My gifts lie elsewhere. Oh well....LOL
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XiWangdeXin, Thanks for your contribution, I think it's very interesting to hear the opinion of a Western who has been studying chinese for a long time. Xiexie!
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