Quote:
Originally Posted by PunkinDrublic
Don’t feel bad bro. I’ve been in China since September and I can’t hold a conversation in Chinese for shit. Learning a different language is ****ing hard.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hog's Gone Fishin
I would imagine chinese would be very difficult to learn. What are you doing in China ?
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I learned Mandarin Chinese back in NJ with a private tutor in 1994 after going to China/Hong Kong many times beginning in Feb of that year and feeling so completely helpless. At that time, there were very, very few English speaking Chinese except in places like hotels and that was about it. No lower level people spoke English. She taught me to speak, read and write.
You learn about tone and the Chinese radicals, which are symbols hidden in the letters and words to signify whether they are water symbols, fire symbols, earth symbols, animal symbols, human symbols, etc.
It is hard as **** to learn and it took me two weeks of practice with the teacher just to learn the phonetic alphabet. I needed a tape recorder to realize I was saying the tones wrong. You learn the "Pinyin" system of "Ma Ba Pa, Chr Zhr Shr, along with the four tones; flat, rising, dipthong, and drop tone.
You take a word like "Ba". It has 4 meanings based on your tone. The number 8, a target, a father, and a handle/plow like object.
I would NEVER take Cantonese as they have 8 tones and many are throat tones like the word NG, where you don't even open your mouth!
My breakthrough in learning the tones came as one night I imagined my voice traveling down a road looking ahead.
If the road was flat, my voice stayed even.
If the road was an incline, so did my voice.
If the road had a dip, I did the same speaking.
Lastly, if the road dropped down a hill quickly, so did my tone.
That was my AH HA moment.
