An easy way to remember our numbers is that the zeros come in 3s. 1 000 is one thousand or 1k (kilo), 1 000 000 is one million or 1M (Mega). Going the other direction from the decimal point works the same too. 0.001 is one thousandth or 1m (milli). Then we have Greek symbols for smaller. But it follows the same pattern. We learn this by drawing a number line with a point at zero and the line extends infinitely both directions. We draw arrows to indicate that the line continues beyond whatever numbers we write on the line. We also have scientific notation which works on the same principle. I'm not sure how to write an example with a keyboard though. Then of course, there are some other special numbers which have names and symbols that are not part of this pattern. They are mostly irrelevant unless you work in specific occupations. An example of this would be centimetres (cm) as a unit of measurement instead of millimetres (mm), where centi (c) is 0.01or one hundredth.
I agree with you. Context does help, and you will notice this when you live in China or speak to Chinese people in real life. They explain when you talk to them. I once talked to a security guard and he asked me 南非的首都是什么? And I didn't know what does 首都 mean. So he then said 中国的首都是北京. And now I could understand he wanted to know the capital city of South Africa
When I first started learning Chinese, I saw a lot of things talking about how hard it was. And that surprised me because even with my memory challenges, it's really not that hard. It is, as you say, different but it isn't harder. Not having to deal with gender, conjugations or number (for the most part) removes some of the biggest challenges in learning a new language for me. The hardest part for me is reading without having spaces between words. But even that, I am slowly adjusting to. Also, the chance of hilarious homophone mistakes is a bonus feature of the language in my opinion. :)
I actually never thought about the reading without space between words being an issue but now that you say it, I realize why I struggled so much with the first book I picked. I was in a bus trying to read it and only once someone next to me was curious about the foreigner with a chinese book on her lap, I figured out that I felt it was super hard because it was full of idioms 😂 So I'd literally look up every word / character and still didn't get the context as I didn't know it wasn't meant to be understood literally lmao
i agree，but no changes makes it so difficult to learn！read and to understand correct。what does the sentence wants from me？even i know all of the characters in the sentence i have know idea what the sentence is (exactly) about!
Nope. The so many tones and the complicated writing of characters make it one of the hardest language to learn ever. It only seems easier once you study it for a long time. But isn't that normal, the more time you spend on something the easier it becomes.
@@Righteous1ist to *you* it's one of the hardest, but different people find different things challenging in different ways. for *me* it is not as hard as Hindi. Latin-derived languages to *me*, because English is my native language, are initially easier than Chinese. There are shared vocabulary, shared script, shared cultural and grammatical styles, etc. So of course that will seem easier than something that requires a new approach to writing and cultural norms. Since I'm learning Chinese primarily to allow me to enjoy Chinese media, the cultural aspect is built in to my learning process and doesn't feel onerous. Again, different people find different things challenging. For me the things that are challenging about Chinese are minimized by how much easier I find Chinese grammar than the European languages I've tried.
Yesss starting chinese is easy! "你好，我去買東西， 你的愛好是什麼，等等“ but when you are intermediate and you get official, academic texts you will notice having cases is a blessing. And although chinese doesn't have flection at all doesn't mean you have less grammar to learn. because of lacking flection you have to learn more syntactical patterns and if you don't learn it you can not just use your own words to say it, when you try you will notice you cannot finish the sentence the your dialogue partner doesn't understand you at all. Nonetheless one can all any language with enough patience, endurance and discipline. Furthermore, what a difficult language to learn is, depends on your native language, the languages you allready know and so on. For all non tonal language natives who like to torture themselves a bit 加油打氣！
You must have heard that Chinese is one of the most difficult languages. But do you know, it’s actually quite easy to get an intermediate level in Chinese? I made this videos for those who are intimidated to start learning Chinese because they think the tones, the Chinese characters and the Chinese grammar structure are impossible to learn. Things may be totally different than you think!
I agree to an extent. What made Chinese quite hard for me was the lack of morphology, the high tolerance of ambiguity/high demand for contextual inference and the lack of visible word boundaries in the script. I'm currently learning Japanese and one of the things that makes it feel easier is that the verbs and adjectives are inflected for aspect, which makes dealing with syntax so much easier, despite the many different kanji readings. (Of course, it doesn't hurt that i have 1000s of hours of dealing with Chinese characters under my belt.)
You are right. Differences that you described make it difficult for native Chinese speakers to learn the subtleties of any European language, as well as the other way around.
I absolutely NEED to write down words and sentences on paper in order to memorize them. Smartphones and PC are no help at all. This is one of the reasons why I have been on and off with learning Mandarin. I find it very difficult just to read the characters and Pin yin. Vocabulary won't stay in my brain this way. Not having an alphabet in a foreign language is new and very uncomfortable. Before, I have been learning languages and the first thing I did was learning how to write. When it comes to Chinese pronunciation, single words are not that difficult. But speaking long sentences with the four tones is another story, especially with regard to tone changes. However, I have started learning Mandarin again and I do hope that THIS time, I am going to succeed and to keep on learning (self study). Many greetings from Germany. Your channel is phantastic! Keep up the good work.
鞋鞋 Shuo, I was feeling so unmotivated to studying chinese, because of the grammar. I was feeling SOOOO lost about what to study. But I wake up, I opened the youtube to study chinese, and I saw your video. And YOU CAME AS AN ANGEL, THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH, Now I'm really more motivated to study chinese 鞋鞋
This is a good example of context helping btw. Never let errors dissuade you from progressing. The goal isn't to become perfect, but to become understood and be a bit better than you were before (The error for the unaware is she typed 鞋鞋 (xíe xíe - shoe shoe) instead of 谢谢 (xìe xìe - thank you) but as you can see we still understood 😊)
I thought your video was going to be bonkers, but after I sat through it, you not only make sense, you accurately describe my own experience. My problem is that after I got past the beginner stage, I got stuck at the intermediate stage. Could you maybe do a video with tips on how to progress after you leave the beginner stage, particularly if you don't have a lot of Chinese people to practice with? At the moment, my best option is to try and listen to one of the local Chinese TV channels for about half an hour every day.
I am learning Chinese currently and this video really inspired me to keep going even though I feel a bit overwhelmed now at around 400-500 characters. But I will keep going! ☺
Thank you, i finished hsk1 in 8 days but only pinyin, now i started again hsk1 but remembering and writing characters, im 80 characters in, 14 days, i keep remembering myself that is not a race but a marathon and take my own steps as i feel, by the end of 2024 i ll be proud.
I've been self-learning for around 4-5 months, I haven't made much progress (mostly due to my procrastination and lack of structure). I think starting tomorrow I will open my HSK book and start going through it, I might skip the sections requiring the CD... my goals for now include being able to hold a 2-3 minute conversation with a native speaker, pass HSK 1,2 and possibly 3, try Chinese cuisine and describe to my friends, be able to recite one verse or maybe one line from a song. As you said in the video, Chinese grammar isn't difficult but it's different. I think it's very simple because it feels like less words (but still maintains the same meaning). Thank you for this video!
I believe that much of the perceived difficulty in learning Mandarin Chinese stems from differing learning styles between individuals. For example, I have been learning arguably the hard way for the last two years and I’ve made great progress, whereas my mother who has been learning almost the same amount of time can barely string sentences together. Having approached the learning process in the exact same way, I can say that cramming materials into my head works for me in ways that it simply doesn’t for others.
I agree. I just complained this morning to my laoshi. I told her I learn and memorize best when I write down her lessons. I refuted her telling me I dont need to write to remember. Different folks, different strokes. Stick to what works best
Absolutely! I think for people who learn well through listening, chinese is probably one of the easiest languages to learn and you wouldn't need to learn any hanzi at all! But because I am having problems hearing and even only learned my own mothertongue properly after starting to read and doing speech therapy, I obviously am notdoing well without visuals. Like I have to learn the concept of the sounds of letters and tones through reading mostly which hinders my progress. So I had to focus on learning hanzi to access more materials to learn from! But it for sure slowed me down BY YEARS
each person have their goals and style of learning, so if you can find what works for you, you'll definitely advance faster and find it more enjoyable!
Hello! After 2 years of self studying Chinese language, I realize that Chinese is a highly contextual language, namely, the characters (the initial characters are pictogrammes, modern characters are mostly sematic-phonetic characters), the vocabulary and the Chinese grammar. You know, when I acquire Chinese grammar, I have to use my observation skill, as well as miming skill. For example, the structure 把, I use my hand to mime out the sentence. That's why, when I read Chinese books or documents, I will rely on the context or surrounding words to guess the meaning of the unknown words. If I check the dictionary, I just check the pronunciation. A commenter from Vietnam
Thanks. Good video. I am studying Chinese for about a year using the HelloChinese app, have just completed it twice: first with pinyin on, then with characters only. And I agree that the grammar is easy, characters are not that hard, and tones are not a problem. However, i can still say nothing and cannot understand anything. Looking for something else to practice with.
I think you would benefit from using Pimsleur. I'm using both Hello Chinese and Pimsleur. I feel this is a good combination. Pimsleur is a half hour audio lesson each day where you are constantly listening, thinking and speaking. It's designed to get you able to have conversations in Chinese. It's unlike any other app I've tried and I've tried quite a few. It also has some optional exercises to do after each audio lesson. For the Mandarin course, there are 5 levels and each level will take 30 days if you do a lesson each day like they recommend. So 5 months all up and you should be able to have conversations. I've also used it for Spanish and I'm amazed how much I learnt so quickly. It definitely hits the brain from a different angle. I highly recommend.
I agree. in fact the most difficult parts are solved not with hard work but with time. I started hearing tones by not stressing about them for 2 years and now i just hear them, mostly. Characters are the same, except a couple of tricky ones that are just too bland, the ones with interesting shape get remembered with no extra effort. What is left is just you working on structures and vocabulary and meanings. It's the best part in learning any language.
Hmm… I have to say that I slightly disagree when you mentioned that Chinese people wont be offended and think a foreigner isn’t rude when a mistake has been made when attempting to use mandarin. I have made many mistakes in my years of living here which has led to a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of arguments. So much so that now when I meet new Chinese people I tell them that they should always double check my meaning if they are unsure to avoid misunderstanding. I also want to add that in my personal experience unfortunately I am not always understood if I use the incorrect tones and often find that I need to explain myself before my meaning is understood followed by politely (or sometimes not so politely) being corrected.
Teacher, the hardest part on my Mandarin learning is not memorizing the characters, pinyin and grammar rules but guessing the right Chinese words of each Chinese words you will hear. If you are a bit deaf, you might misunderstood the speaker on the message he wants to convey. But in fairness, Chinese verb structures are easier than English. What makes Chinese really harder is memorizing characters and guessing the right Chinese words on the hearing part. In the end, Learning Chinese is not for faint hearted and the lazy to learn it. To those Mandarin quitters, they may try Vietnamese. at least the writing system is in alphabets but still it is a tonal language. it has 6 tones vs Mandarin 4 with a neutral tone.
I always want to tell my Mexican students that Chinese might be different (from Spanish), but not hard at all, and they ought to distinguish "different" from "difficult", because those are not the same
老师，你真厉害！Saludos desde Argentina, cuando quieras y puedas estoy disponible para ayudarte a practicar tu español, como autodidacta en idiomas se lo importante que es conseguir alguien dispuesto a ayudar, gracias por tus videos
being Chinese who grew up in another country and studying Mandarin for since i was a kid...i still feel it's hard to learn mandarin because...with just a bit of wrong pronunciation could turn out to have a different meaning😆 right pronunciation is a big role in learning mandarin
When I dove into learning Chinese at first, I would practice reading, speaking and writing. However, I burned out because I felt that the writing was too tedious. When I picked it up again, I just cut out the writing and have been really enjoying the study. Recently, I have been paying much more attention when listening, too 😊
each person have their goals and style of learning. I really believe that if you find what is fun and interesting for you, even if it might be sometimes challenging, you will enjoy and tick to it!
After six years I gave up learning Mandarin. Now I just use it! I still learn, but that is an accident, not work. Once you climb on to the log, falling off is easy!
about tones though - I heard that when you mess some syllable's tone up and the result doesn't match any actual word, people just can't recognize it. Like there should be a pattern, but there is none, and they just go blank. I tend to believe it, because my native language depends very much on which syllable you put the stress on, and when I hear some words that were borrowed into English for some reason, it usually takes me a lot of time to realize what word it used to be initially. but I agree on hanzi, it's quite easy to learn just to recognize them. if you need to master handwriting though, that's another story:)
Thanks for another encouraging video. I’m not the hardest working student and my brain isn’t young either. On my first visit to China recently, I got reminded how hard it is to understand Chinese when people speak. The range of accents and (I think) dialects is large. However people seemed to be able to understand my quite limited speaking abilities mostly ok. One thing though - you kept saying one million and the text said one hundred thousand which I think is what you mean. I can understand the problem. There is no million or hundred thousand in Chinese. You say one hundred ten thousands ! Or ten ten thousands. Hindi counting has a similar difference.
I think the most complicated thing about learning Mandarin is learning the counters for things like animals, flowers, shoes and etc... I still love it though!
Someone else on TH-cam who is also a native speaker suggests learning the tone as part of the word instead of thinking of it as something extra, the way many English speakers might. I get what he's saying... If you associate only the 3rd tone pronunciation with the MEANING, using the correct tone becomes a more automatic response.
I have a subvocalization problem when reading English text. Chinese pictographs can solve this issue for me. However, I later realized that I can only find around 50 pictograph characters. Basically, I want to read Chinese like a deaf people. I do not want to associate Chinese characters with their sound or any other factors that slow down my reading.
Hi, currently learning it for around 4 and a half months and i can say its tone and very logical language, the biggest problem i had was constructing sentences which is upside down compared to my native language or english so its hard for someone that did somethingnone way for more then 20 years to now start to do it the opoait way but you get used to it. Overall its not that hard to learn if you give time and dedication
Thank you teacher in this video it gives me courage again , It is really frustrating to learn specially now I need to level up from basic to Advanced learning it is really tough i always watching you videos thank you and please keep posting ❤
Grammar: I confirm, super easy in Chinese (and often very logical) compared to French! Characters: these are simplified characters, and they have only 1 reading... compared to Japanese where Kanjis have several readings, a nightmare to learn! Tones: they are actually easy to learn, to repeat. But the real difficulty is to remember them, and be able to say the word again when you are on your own. Repetition, listening to videos/TV can help, I guess, but I must admit this is the real difficult part. So that's great if you confirm this is no big deal if we are unsure of our tones, and that people will understand us. I found Chinese people are often veeeery patient with foreigners who speak their language, even poorly as I do 😅, and try to help.
I've been studying Japanese for almost a year and a Korean for a little less than that. Decided to start learning Mandarin 2 weeks ago and I already feel like I'm grasping things faster. About to make mandarin my primary study language lol
For me it's more like to memorize the words since too many have same pronunciation even tho some are different tone but still chinese have too many similar words that sounds the same which makes it hard for me at least. I feel it would be easier if the words were more different like English or even japanese since the words changes which makes it easier right away to remember. Recently I asked my girlfriend about the words slippery since we have alot of snow at the moment and she said: 滑Huá and right away I felt, really! more Hua words and its often when we talk she says a word that has the same sound and tone (not always same tone) I feel discouraged to continue learning chinese compared to other languages. Yesterday I asked about the word for bite and suprise again (咬 Yǎo)... I can't remember when too many words are the same sound.
I started learning only the characters and their meaning a few weeks ago. (Before I had started and stopped for years to try to learn chinese - it was just too difficult to read even easy sentences. Or to remember the translation of a word and the writing and the tones at the same time - there is no feeling of progress at the beginning. Because I forgot at least one of those with every word) But this time my goal is not even to be able to talk or learn the vocabulary. Just to be able to understand the characters in my own language. But suddenly I‘m picking up more and more Chinese by learning only the characters, even if I don’t try to. 😂 Sometimes I also try to just learn the tones separately. Without learning the words. Just to be able to hear the difference.
I have had very little exposure to Chinese outside of a Taiwanese coworker of mine helping me figure out some names for a book I'm writing with a Chinese-inspired culture. Yet the moment I heard you pronounce one of the two versions of you yong I correctly understood which one it was. I guess some of my limited research rubbed off on me.
Awww, you are so super sweet . It is a pleasure to listen to you, even if I know nothing. Beginner. Now here is my perspective, if it would mean anything for your video creations: I am using the book HSK A. In exams HSK 1 and 2 symbols are not required, just pin yin. For me not using symbols is way more difficult . Symbol is what gives me the meaning and trigers the sound of the world. So the book I am using is very good. It takes me tones of revision and if I skip one day I lose some of it. So what I find missing from the book is offering all possible words and sentences that can be mađe with symbols done, following the order given, without using unknowen symbols to that point. They do give just a few. So I would suggest this addition to your program : following symbol by symbol from that book to make the most of it. I try to do it myself ans then check on google translate. It can take me in unknowen teritories. So , if you would do that way for us slow slow kindergarden kind of learners . I am into chapter six now, after about 2 months, but other than revising symbols themselves , I don’t do much with it. And I believe that this level of learners are in millions. I hope I was not rude with my long comment. Best wishes. Your lessons sound so pleasant.
As far as I am concerned, there is a big difference in accent between the North (Beijing) and the South, and that standard Mandarin is used predominantly on TV (news, documentaries). Which accent is closer to Putong Hua? Which one should I lean towards as a beginner? There is a TV series called "Entrepreneurial age". May I ask where this series is from? Beijing?
I love Chinese because the grammar is sooooo easy even compared to the super easy English grammar. (I am not an English native speaker). I simply love a language where FINALLY I don't have to think about tenses endings, conjugation, cases etc.etc. good to hear that I can even be understood with wrong tones. I do have a problem with them. Characters... They are not so difficult. And I don't try to learn how to write them. We have computers and mobiles to do that for us, exactly.
Chinese grammar isn't THAT easy and if it was then native speakers wouldn't be regularly tested on grammar while growing up and Chinese proficiency exams wouldn't include a grammar section. But feel free to respond to this comment with a mini essay in Chinese to prove me wrong!
When i am learning chinese. I am facing with two difficulties. The first one the most difficult part is " *context* " when I write a simple sentence, most of people told me "this sentence sounds not naturally, you should put this or that" The second. The listining. When I hear HSK audio. I understand something. They speak clearly. When people says in the streets. I cannot understand almost anything. Some people say like this 我是中国人 Wô sì zōngguo rén. They dont pronounce sh zh sounds. Some pronouncit.
I am Brazilian, studying Chinese for 2 years, and although I known I'm not near to be good, I can recognize that Chinese grammar is sooooo much easier than Portuguese grammar!
Not frustrated yet but i need to see progress in another year at most and by that I mean speak, vocab and comprehension wise im at 7 languages , fluent speak im at 3
well, good news for us blinds who are also learning chinese. we don’t even have to learn characters. instead, we can write in chinese braille, which is just like pinyin.
For me the worst thing is the sheer amount of information to learn. This doesn't reveal itself if you just want basic communication to travel, but if you wanna watch dramas or read books you'll quickly see that characters are but a small part of that. Vocabulary is enormous with hundreds of chengyu on top of that. After some time this becomes alleviated if you know several thousand characters well with their meanings and words they are used, so you can guess a meaning of new words, but it is still a lot of information. About three times the amount needed to learn a European language.
I wanted to buy the HSK material from a bookstore here in Nanning. The problem is there was no audio with them from HSK 1 to HSK 3. The assistant said they could not get the audio.
I'm learning Chinese and I don't consider it is difficult. In my own language we have more grammar rules. If i can speak my language well, i will be able to speak any language
I think people confuse difficult with time consuming. If you're an English speaker learning a European language, you can go faster because vocabulary and syntax - and writing - have basic similarities. The differences between Mandarin and English mean that it takes longer to get comfortable, but it's not harder to do in a literal sense.
I think the biggest difficulty is listening (unless you're lucky enough to be able to immerse yourself fully). As for writing, I think it's really not necessary to worry about it. How much do we write in our own language? Barely anything. Most things are typed. I didn't bother learning any handwriting, since it would just make me bored and give up at the start, but now I'm a little better I sometimes choose to write a character a few times to help me remember the components. For speaking, try not to say individual words out of context. Mandarin has an incredibly small amount of possible sounds a word can make, so most people understand you based on context. So sometimes you have to describe the word. But I think there are genuine hurdles as well. Reading can be a pain, because we don't know the sound of something just by looking at it, Which makes it harder to just try to learn by reading manga/manhua etc. And if you're not learning the PRC standard of Mandarin , you have to be extra careful not to learn the wrong things. In fact, it's nigh impossible to find resources for traditional mandarin to start with.
Oh, I just remembered, don't underestimate music! I would never have thought I would be able to learn things via music, but songs like 《熱愛105度的你》or even that one that's like 我期待的不是學，而是有你的冬天 or 我們一起學貓叫 etc. Basically the viral 斗音 / TikTok style ones with repetitive refrains
It is good that u are trying to learn a language by reading. But in order to read for a beginner, u need to have a chinese-english dict by your side. And let's say you come across a word such as 树, u need to know the method of finding the word in the dict. After u found the word, u need to memorise the pronuciation and of course, meaning. That is how I learn English 30 years ago when reading those Enid Blyton stories.
@@chinchang5117 yeah that's what I'm doing nowadays mostly. I got a tablet specifically for for this, it's really easy to split screen Pleco (dictionary) and Tachiyomi (Manga app) or some news article. For things I don't know, I either use optical image recognition via an app called "universal copy", or I just manually handwrite the hanzi. Thankfully Google keyboard is quite good at guessing what I'm scribbling down :D
In my experience Chinese people will understand what you mean even when you are way off your tones. When I was just starting I talked to 2 Chinese girls from my university and they could understand me, although I had a lot of trouble understanding them. and about accents, when foreigners speak Russian (my native language)with a very strong accent, it's not always bad. For example I told my ex girlfriends to never get rid of her accent, because it's really cool and unique Edition: I learnt 1500 Chinese characters long before I learnt how to actually speak so I was able to read Chinese in Russian long before I learnt how to read Chinese in Chinese. Second edition: I have pocket booklets for grammar of different languages. For comparison German us 96 pages long and it's mostly tables without 2-3 sentences explanation. Chinese is mostly text, there are most common words and still it's only 64 pages long.
When I started learning I thought it was going to be much more difficult. The worst part are the characters, but im enjoy learning them. And yes, as a spaniard, chinese grammar is so much simpler, it doesn't need 20 verbal tenses 😂. PS. Tu español es muy bueno
Just think of it how chinese would look like with a much more harder grammar! No way, right?! There no space! The language is already difficult enough. But one condition，everything keeps the same of course!
The difficulty of learning the Chinese language comes primarily from the fact that there are thousands of homonyms and the fact that majority of Chinese words are very short (two characters usually). Tones are intended to address (partially) this problem, but for the people whose mother tongue is not a tonal language, it brings an additional challenge. Homonyms, short words and tones makes the Chinese difficult to understand, especially when people speak at 'normal' speed. I personally think the more emphasis should be put on listening skills and respectively I wish there were more videos on youtube targeted on the improvement of the listening skills.
It's not gonna cause me give up or anything but tones are incredibly frustrating when speaking. When I travelled to China, there were a lot of instances where people seemed to genuinely not understand what I was trying to say, even with very simple senteces where you'd think context would make the meaning obvious.
I think you may also have mispronounced the consonants without noticing. That makes it more difficult for natives to understand. We learners have difficulties spotting our own mistakes
@@ShuoshuoChinese Let me inform you ""why i think Chinese is not so good language", Although I am a student doing graduation for Chinese language. Firstly Tones,Take only 500 to 600 characters not 1000 how can someone Remember the positioning of tone of each character..Like you can remember for small or easy words or when starting Chinese,you can learn but gradually How can someone Remember the tone position with what kind of tone that is... Now Characters..You stated that nowadays You can chat by technology,you really don't have to remember the character..I think those who are leaving learning Chinese are students, think of their perspective,What to do in exams or when writing in copies. And for Grammer I agree that Chinese grammer is easy but is different..or i say 80-90% grammar rules are opposite of English grammar rules😊Like basic sentence structure. A Language work is to make job easier to communicate that Language is considered great but the one language that himself takes years or year only to learn how to communicate effectively. That language is bad in my opinion. ❤❤
@@ShuoshuoChinese Mam a bit extra.. Chinese is a bit monarchical Lang.also. Let me explain... We can't make a new word by ourselves. Let's Assume "Lithium" Is invented just tomorrow,in other languages you know how to write "lithium" but in Chinese first it goes to the government then The govt. designs the character and tones acc. to their convince then releases thw word market for people to Remember😉. A parent can't name their child something unique as how will he design his character.first they had to go to govt. for making a new character and tone for their child name. Means You are bounded around your Govt. What's the purpose of language when it can't be yours.
Tones are important, but when someone is learning, they are going to make mistakes, and it's not going to be perfect. It is understandable. There are many things in English that are important, but we don't worry about it when someone says something wrong.
I agree with you. Chinese is either the easiest or second easiest language I've tried learning. The other being Norwegian. If you know English, Norwegian I'm finding out is probably the easiest 2nd language. But Chinese is much more simple than people think, I see lists of hardest languages to learn and people say Chinese is at the top. Spanish is even harder than Chinese in my opinion growing up in America and hearing it semi-often and learning a little.
For sure, I think it has more in common with English than German and French, and the grammar is super similar, with a few tweaks that make sense.@@ShuoshuoChinese
Mostly agree, to me the hardest part of Chinese is understanding people speak. At my peak I could speak and read chinese at around hsk6 level, but the moment people start talking to me I understand next to nothing, not even HSK1 level. Maybe I was able to understand it at HSK1 level if they speak clear accent free Beijing dialect. Context makes things certainly a lot easier, but still.... At some point I started transcribing movies, but it on repeat write it down and confirm with the subtitles. That certainly helped, but it was hard boring work... so didn't keep up. With respect to the tones.... th-cam.com/video/sULte1b9wQo/w-d-xo.html
Only time i would not use mandarin is ordering dim sum. For dimsum use cantonese. Chinse is easy to speak. Writing is difficult english is easiest language to learn. English is a chinese language. Us cantonese are pushing more schools to teach cantonese. We are dying out. Even faster than koreans and japanese.
"The thing that you accidentally say something super rude and offending people won't happen in real life" Idk have you ever gone to a restaurant and said 內設 instead of 內用? Because I have.
I'm sorry, but no. Chinese would be at medium difficulty for a foreigner if it were written with an alphabet or sillabary. But the writing system makes it insanely difficult and it requires twice if not thrice the effort to learn.
I have to agree. I am a subscriber to this channel and feel that the header is a little click baity in this case. Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages if not the most difficult language to learn. I have lived in mainland China for over 8 years and still struggle despite my efforts to speak, read and write (type). It takes a tremendous amount of effort, energy, time and so on to absorb Mandarin Chinese. Not only is the written form (characters) a lot to deal with, the contextual side of this language makes a massive difference in effective communication. There is so much that can go wrong, get the tones wrong, get the context wrong, and one can find yourself in a very unpleasant situation (sometimes funny situations when amongst friends but still…).
I think objectively speaking, chinese is a difficult language for many reasons, and there's nothing wrong with that, it just makes the reward bigger IMO. Some spoken chinese in certain regions are specially challenging because they slurred the words or they don't use the standard variation of "shi", "zhi","chi",etc. i have heard speakers using standard mandarin to give lectures and it's so beautiful and clear i wished more people spoke like that. If you narrow the sounds from an already limited pool, it feels like you are trying to decipher a code. When people talk to me, my brain attempts to decipher this *code", and while its doing that, they have already started a new sentence. When you finally understood the message now its time to formulate your reply. And by that point people assume you dont speak any chinese because you take too much time to reply (totally understandable) but the fact is that my brain is not fast enough to have a smooth conversation. It can be a bit frustrating because people dont have that much patience (nor do I), that's why its important to have a teacher in the beginning stages.
Yeah super easy… 3k characters… 😂😂 I have been living in China 4 years .. still can’t speak Chinese…. Went to QC in Canada started learning French 2 months ago … can speak at simple at least
5:03 I mean a hundred thousand characters, not a million 😬
(So I don’t have a million subscribers? 😅)
50k？
An easy way to remember our numbers is that the zeros come in 3s. 1 000 is one thousand or 1k (kilo), 1 000 000 is one million or 1M (Mega). Going the other direction from the decimal point works the same too. 0.001 is one thousandth or 1m (milli). Then we have Greek symbols for smaller. But it follows the same pattern. We learn this by drawing a number line with a point at zero and the line extends infinitely both directions. We draw arrows to indicate that the line continues beyond whatever numbers we write on the line.
We also have scientific notation which works on the same principle. I'm not sure how to write an example with a keyboard though.
Then of course, there are some other special numbers which have names and symbols that are not part of this pattern. They are mostly irrelevant unless you work in specific occupations. An example of this would be centimetres (cm) as a unit of measurement instead of millimetres (mm), where centi (c) is 0.01or one hundredth.
I am 60+ and thanks to you, I have decided to learn a little Chinese every day from today xiéxie
I agree with you. Context does help, and you will notice this when you live in China or speak to Chinese people in real life. They explain when you talk to them. I once talked to a security guard and he asked me 南非的首都是什么? And I didn't know what does 首都 mean. So he then said 中国的首都是北京. And now I could understand he wanted to know the capital city of South Africa
Your example doesn't seem to be a Chinese specific thing, no? I think it could apply to any other language.. or maybe I'm misunderstanding 😅
When I first started learning Chinese, I saw a lot of things talking about how hard it was. And that surprised me because even with my memory challenges, it's really not that hard. It is, as you say, different but it isn't harder. Not having to deal with gender, conjugations or number (for the most part) removes some of the biggest challenges in learning a new language for me. The hardest part for me is reading without having spaces between words. But even that, I am slowly adjusting to. Also, the chance of hilarious homophone mistakes is a bonus feature of the language in my opinion. :)
I actually never thought about the reading without space between words being an issue but now that you say it, I realize why I struggled so much with the first book I picked. I was in a bus trying to read it and only once someone next to me was curious about the foreigner with a chinese book on her lap, I figured out that I felt it was super hard because it was full of idioms 😂 So I'd literally look up every word / character and still didn't get the context as I didn't know it wasn't meant to be understood literally lmao
I have exactly the same issue with Latin languages, I took to chinese so much quicker.
i agree，but no changes makes it so difficult to learn！read and to understand correct。what does the sentence wants from me？even i know all of the characters in the sentence i have know idea what the sentence is (exactly) about!
Nope. The so many tones and the complicated writing of characters make it one of the hardest language to learn ever. It only seems easier once you study it for a long time. But isn't that normal, the more time you spend on something the easier it becomes.
@@Righteous1ist to *you* it's one of the hardest, but different people find different things challenging in different ways. for *me* it is not as hard as Hindi. Latin-derived languages to *me*, because English is my native language, are initially easier than Chinese. There are shared vocabulary, shared script, shared cultural and grammatical styles, etc. So of course that will seem easier than something that requires a new approach to writing and cultural norms. Since I'm learning Chinese primarily to allow me to enjoy Chinese media, the cultural aspect is built in to my learning process and doesn't feel onerous. Again, different people find different things challenging. For me the things that are challenging about Chinese are minimized by how much easier I find Chinese grammar than the European languages I've tried.
我觉得中文很难。但是几个月以前我决定坚持学习。我认识越来越多汉字。虽然我还不太清楚汉语语法，经常写错了，但是我会读懂。我觉得写汉字很有意思。感谢你，你的视频让提高我的汉语。
Yesss starting chinese is easy! "你好，我去買東西， 你的愛好是什麼，等等“ but when you are intermediate and you get official, academic texts you will notice having cases is a blessing. And although chinese doesn't have flection at all doesn't mean you have less grammar to learn. because of lacking flection you have to learn more syntactical patterns and if you don't learn it you can not just use your own words to say it, when you try you will notice you cannot finish the sentence the your dialogue partner doesn't understand you at all. Nonetheless one can all any language with enough patience, endurance and discipline. Furthermore, what a difficult language to learn is, depends on your native language, the languages you allready know and so on. For all non tonal language natives who like to torture themselves a bit 加油打氣！
You must have heard that Chinese is one of the most difficult languages. But do you know, it’s actually quite easy to get an intermediate level in Chinese?
I made this videos for those who are intimidated to start learning Chinese because they think the tones, the Chinese characters and the Chinese grammar structure are impossible to learn. Things may be totally different than you think!
你的发型真合适
谢谢你！@@aries7999
I agree to an extent. What made Chinese quite hard for me was the lack of morphology, the high tolerance of ambiguity/high demand for contextual inference and the lack of visible word boundaries in the script. I'm currently learning Japanese and one of the things that makes it feel easier is that the verbs and adjectives are inflected for aspect, which makes dealing with syntax so much easier, despite the many different kanji readings. (Of course, it doesn't hurt that i have 1000s of hours of dealing with Chinese characters under my belt.)
You are right. Differences that you described make it difficult for native Chinese speakers to learn the subtleties of any European language, as well as the other way around.
I've been teaching myself Mandarin for 2 years, and am currently at a B1 level in the language
I tought myself to write simplified and traditional Characters, and pinyin and zhuyin
That video is very useful to me😊. Friendly greetings from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
I absolutely NEED to write down words and sentences on paper in order to memorize them. Smartphones and PC are no help at all. This is one of the reasons why I have been on and off with learning Mandarin. I find it very difficult just to read the characters and Pin yin. Vocabulary won't stay in my brain this way. Not having an alphabet in a foreign language is new and very uncomfortable. Before, I have been learning languages and the first thing I did was learning how to write. When it comes to Chinese pronunciation, single words are not that difficult. But speaking long sentences with the four tones is another story, especially with regard to tone changes. However, I have started learning Mandarin again and I do hope that THIS time, I am going to succeed and to keep on learning (self study). Many greetings from Germany. Your channel is phantastic! Keep up the good work.
Love the haircut!
It's still hard, but I perservere... and your haircut looks nice.
鞋鞋 Shuo, I was feeling so unmotivated to studying chinese, because of the grammar. I was feeling SOOOO lost about what to study.
But I wake up, I opened the youtube to study chinese, and I saw your video. And YOU CAME AS AN ANGEL, THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH,
Now I'm really more motivated to study chinese
鞋鞋
This is a good example of context helping btw. Never let errors dissuade you from progressing. The goal isn't to become perfect, but to become understood and be a bit better than you were before
(The error for the unaware is she typed 鞋鞋 (xíe xíe - shoe shoe) instead of 谢谢 (xìe xìe - thank you) but as you can see we still understood 😊)
I thought your video was going to be bonkers, but after I sat through it, you not only make sense, you accurately describe my own experience. My problem is that after I got past the beginner stage, I got stuck at the intermediate stage. Could you maybe do a video with tips on how to progress after you leave the beginner stage, particularly if you don't have a lot of Chinese people to practice with? At the moment, my best option is to try and listen to one of the local Chinese TV channels for about half an hour every day.
其实我觉得最好的方法是上课
I am learning Chinese currently and this video really inspired me to keep going even though I feel a bit overwhelmed now at around 400-500 characters. But I will keep going! ☺
Maybe if practice it everyday, persistently then it is possible to get to certain fluency in any language. Just matter of time
Anyone can become fluent in Chinese after about 10 thousand hours of practice.
The problem is no one wants to spend 10 thousand hours lol
Thank you, i finished hsk1 in 8 days but only pinyin, now i started again hsk1 but remembering and writing characters, im 80 characters in, 14 days, i keep remembering myself that is not a race but a marathon and take my own steps as i feel, by the end of 2024 i ll be proud.
I've been self-learning for around 4-5 months, I haven't made much progress (mostly due to my procrastination and lack of structure). I think starting tomorrow I will open my HSK book and start going through it, I might skip the sections requiring the CD... my goals for now include being able to hold a 2-3 minute conversation with a native speaker, pass HSK 1,2 and possibly 3, try Chinese cuisine and describe to my friends, be able to recite one verse or maybe one line from a song. As you said in the video, Chinese grammar isn't difficult but it's different. I think it's very simple because it feels like less words (but still maintains the same meaning). Thank you for this video!
How is it going now?
7:36 As an American L2 Spanish speaker, hearing a Chinese woman speak Spanglish has completed my life in ways I never knew I needed 😂😂😂
I believe that much of the perceived difficulty in learning Mandarin Chinese stems from differing learning styles between individuals. For example, I have been learning arguably the hard way for the last two years and I’ve made great progress, whereas my mother who has been learning almost the same amount of time can barely string sentences together. Having approached the learning process in the exact same way, I can say that cramming materials into my head works for me in ways that it simply doesn’t for others.
I agree. I just complained this morning to my laoshi. I told her I learn and memorize best when I write down her lessons. I refuted her telling me I dont need to write to remember. Different folks, different strokes. Stick to what works best
Absolutely! I think for people who learn well through listening, chinese is probably one of the easiest languages to learn and you wouldn't need to learn any hanzi at all!
But because I am having problems hearing and even only learned my own mothertongue properly after starting to read and doing speech therapy, I obviously am notdoing well without visuals. Like I have to learn the concept of the sounds of letters and tones through reading mostly which hinders my progress. So I had to focus on learning hanzi to access more materials to learn from! But it for sure slowed me down BY YEARS
@@JustLIkerapunzelmy listening skill is also my biggest issue besides other’s, but my mother tongue is one of the best in my country.
each person have their goals and style of learning, so if you can find what works for you, you'll definitely advance faster and find it more enjoyable!
Hello! After 2 years of self studying Chinese language, I realize that Chinese is a highly contextual language, namely, the characters (the initial characters are pictogrammes, modern characters are mostly sematic-phonetic characters), the vocabulary and the Chinese grammar. You know, when I acquire Chinese grammar, I have to use my observation skill, as well as miming skill. For example, the structure 把, I use my hand to mime out the sentence. That's why, when I read Chinese books or documents, I will rely on the context or surrounding words to guess the meaning of the unknown words. If I check the dictionary, I just check the pronunciation. A commenter from Vietnam
Thanks. Good video. I am studying Chinese for about a year using the HelloChinese app, have just completed it twice: first with pinyin on, then with characters only. And I agree that the grammar is easy, characters are not that hard, and tones are not a problem. However, i can still say nothing and cannot understand anything. Looking for something else to practice with.
I think you would benefit from using Pimsleur. I'm using both Hello Chinese and Pimsleur. I feel this is a good combination. Pimsleur is a half hour audio lesson each day where you are constantly listening, thinking and speaking. It's designed to get you able to have conversations in Chinese. It's unlike any other app I've tried and I've tried quite a few. It also has some optional exercises to do after each audio lesson. For the Mandarin course, there are 5 levels and each level will take 30 days if you do a lesson each day like they recommend. So 5 months all up and you should be able to have conversations. I've also used it for Spanish and I'm amazed how much I learnt so quickly. It definitely hits the brain from a different angle. I highly recommend.
I agree. in fact the most difficult parts are solved not with hard work but with time. I started hearing tones by not stressing about them for 2 years and now i just hear them, mostly. Characters are the same, except a couple of tricky ones that are just too bland, the ones with interesting shape get remembered with no extra effort. What is left is just you working on structures and vocabulary and meanings. It's the best part in learning any language.
That haircut looks so cute on you!!!
Hmm… I have to say that I slightly disagree when you mentioned that Chinese people wont be offended and think a foreigner isn’t rude when a mistake has been made when attempting to use mandarin. I have made many mistakes in my years of living here which has led to a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of arguments. So much so that now when I meet new Chinese people I tell them that they should always double check my meaning if they are unsure to avoid misunderstanding. I also want to add that in my personal experience unfortunately I am not always understood if I use the incorrect tones and often find that I need to explain myself before my meaning is understood followed by politely (or sometimes not so politely) being corrected.
Teacher, the hardest part on my Mandarin learning is not memorizing the characters, pinyin and grammar rules but guessing the right Chinese words of each Chinese words you will hear.
If you are a bit deaf, you might misunderstood the speaker on the message he wants to convey.
But in fairness, Chinese verb structures are easier than English.
What makes Chinese really harder is memorizing characters and guessing the right Chinese words on the hearing part.
In the end, Learning Chinese is not for faint hearted and the lazy to learn it.
To those Mandarin quitters, they may try Vietnamese. at least the writing system is in alphabets but still it is a tonal language. it has 6 tones vs Mandarin 4 with a neutral tone.
I always want to tell my Mexican students that Chinese might be different (from Spanish), but not hard at all, and they ought to distinguish "different" from "difficult", because those are not the same
老师，你真厉害！Saludos desde Argentina, cuando quieras y puedas estoy disponible para ayudarte a practicar tu español, como autodidacta en idiomas se lo importante que es conseguir alguien dispuesto a ayudar, gracias por tus videos
being Chinese who grew up in another country and studying Mandarin for since i was a kid...i still feel it's hard to learn mandarin because...with just a bit of wrong pronunciation could turn out to have a different meaning😆 right pronunciation is a big role in learning mandarin
When I dove into learning Chinese at first, I would practice reading, speaking and writing. However, I burned out because I felt that the writing was too tedious. When I picked it up again, I just cut out the writing and have been really enjoying the study. Recently, I have been paying much more attention when listening, too 😊
each person have their goals and style of learning. I really believe that if you find what is fun and interesting for you, even if it might be sometimes challenging, you will enjoy and tick to it!
After six years I gave up learning Mandarin. Now I just use it! I still learn, but that is an accident, not work. Once you climb on to the log, falling off is easy!
about tones though - I heard that when you mess some syllable's tone up and the result doesn't match any actual word, people just can't recognize it. Like there should be a pattern, but there is none, and they just go blank. I tend to believe it, because my native language depends very much on which syllable you put the stress on, and when I hear some words that were borrowed into English for some reason, it usually takes me a lot of time to realize what word it used to be initially.
but I agree on hanzi, it's quite easy to learn just to recognize them. if you need to master handwriting though, that's another story:)
Love your channel, where i can improve my Chinese and English at the same time ❤
Thank you for the video 👍😁🙏🤍
Thanks for another encouraging video. I’m not the hardest working student and my brain isn’t young either. On my first visit to China recently, I got reminded how hard it is to understand Chinese when people speak. The range of accents and (I think) dialects is large. However people seemed to be able to understand my quite limited speaking abilities mostly ok.
One thing though - you kept saying one million and the text said one hundred thousand which I think is what you mean. I can understand the problem. There is no million or hundred thousand in Chinese. You say one hundred ten thousands ! Or ten ten thousands. Hindi counting has a similar difference.
Ah yes, I’m so bad at big numbers 😅
I think the most complicated thing about learning Mandarin is learning the counters for things like animals, flowers, shoes and etc... I still love it though!
Someone else on TH-cam who is also a native speaker suggests learning the tone as part of the word instead of thinking of it as something extra, the way many English speakers might. I get what he's saying... If you associate only the 3rd tone pronunciation with the MEANING, using the correct tone becomes a more automatic response.
I have a subvocalization problem when reading English text. Chinese pictographs can solve this issue for me. However, I later realized that I can only find around 50 pictograph characters. Basically, I want to read Chinese like a deaf people. I do not want to associate Chinese characters with their sound or any other factors that slow down my reading.
Hi, currently learning it for around 4 and a half months and i can say its tone and very logical language, the biggest problem i had was constructing sentences which is upside down compared to my native language or english so its hard for someone that did somethingnone way for more then 20 years to now start to do it the opoait way but you get used to it. Overall its not that hard to learn if you give time and dedication
Thank you teacher in this video it gives me courage again , It is really frustrating to learn specially now I need to level up from basic to Advanced learning it is really tough i always watching you videos thank you and please keep posting ❤
Hi 说老师, thanks for this fun video.
Grammar: I confirm, super easy in Chinese (and often very logical) compared to French!
Characters: these are simplified characters, and they have only 1 reading... compared to Japanese where Kanjis have several readings, a nightmare to learn!
Tones: they are actually easy to learn, to repeat. But the real difficulty is to remember them, and be able to say the word again when you are on your own. Repetition, listening to videos/TV can help, I guess, but I must admit this is the real difficult part. So that's great if you confirm this is no big deal if we are unsure of our tones, and that people will understand us. I found Chinese people are often veeeery patient with foreigners who speak their language, even poorly as I do 😅, and try to help.
only one reading？the grammar is very hard for me and the examples she pivked were picked on purpose！
I've been studying Japanese for almost a year and a Korean for a little less than that.
Decided to start learning Mandarin 2 weeks ago and I already feel like I'm grasping things faster. About to make mandarin my primary study language lol
For me it's more like to memorize the words since too many have same pronunciation even tho some are different tone but still chinese have too many similar words that sounds the same which makes it hard for me at least.
I feel it would be easier if the words were more different like English or even japanese since the words changes which makes it easier right away to remember.
Recently I asked my girlfriend about the words slippery since we have alot of snow at the moment and she said: 滑Huá and right away I felt, really! more Hua words and its often when we talk she says a word that has the same sound and tone (not always same tone) I feel discouraged to continue learning chinese compared to other languages.
Yesterday I asked about the word for bite and suprise again (咬 Yǎo)... I can't remember when too many words are the same sound.
I started learning only the characters and their meaning a few weeks ago. (Before I had started and stopped for years to try to learn chinese - it was just too difficult to read even easy sentences. Or to remember the translation of a word and the writing and the tones at the same time - there is no feeling of progress at the beginning. Because I forgot at least one of those with every word)
But this time my goal is not even to be able to talk or learn the vocabulary. Just to be able to understand the characters in my own language.
But suddenly I‘m picking up more and more Chinese by learning only the characters, even if I don’t try to. 😂
Sometimes I also try to just learn the tones separately. Without learning the words. Just to be able to hear the difference.
I have had very little exposure to Chinese outside of a Taiwanese coworker of mine helping me figure out some names for a book I'm writing with a Chinese-inspired culture. Yet the moment I heard you pronounce one of the two versions of you yong I correctly understood which one it was. I guess some of my limited research rubbed off on me.
Awww, you are so super sweet . It is a pleasure to listen to you, even if I know nothing. Beginner. Now here is my perspective, if it would mean anything for your video creations: I am using the book HSK A. In exams HSK 1 and 2 symbols are not required, just pin yin. For me not using symbols is way more difficult . Symbol is what gives me the meaning and trigers the sound of the world. So the book I am using is very good. It takes me tones of revision and if I skip one day I lose some of it. So what I find missing from the book is offering all possible words and sentences that can be mađe with symbols done, following the order given, without using unknowen symbols to that point. They do give just a few. So I would suggest this addition to your program : following symbol by symbol from that book to make the most of it. I try to do it myself ans then check on google translate. It can take me in unknowen teritories. So , if you would do that way for us slow slow kindergarden kind of learners . I am into chapter six now, after about 2 months, but other than revising symbols themselves , I don’t do much with it. And I believe that this level of learners are in millions. I hope I was not rude with my long comment. Best wishes. Your lessons sound so pleasant.
Is there any online class enrollment available now? Tks!
Your Spanish accent sounds so cool!
As far as I am concerned, there is a big difference in accent between the North (Beijing) and the South, and that standard Mandarin is used predominantly on TV (news, documentaries). Which accent is closer to Putong Hua? Which one should I lean towards as a beginner? There is a TV series called "Entrepreneurial age". May I ask where this series is from? Beijing?
I love Chinese because the grammar is sooooo easy even compared to the super easy English grammar. (I am not an English native speaker). I simply love a language where FINALLY I don't have to think about tenses endings, conjugation, cases etc.etc. good to hear that I can even be understood with wrong tones. I do have a problem with them. Characters... They are not so difficult. And I don't try to learn how to write them. We have computers and mobiles to do that for us, exactly.
Chinese grammar isn't THAT easy and if it was then native speakers wouldn't be regularly tested on grammar while growing up and Chinese proficiency exams wouldn't include a grammar section. But feel free to respond to this comment with a mini essay in Chinese to prove me wrong!
When i am learning chinese. I am facing with two difficulties. The first one the most difficult part is " *context* " when I write a simple sentence, most of people told me "this sentence sounds not naturally, you should put this or that"
The second. The listining. When I hear HSK audio. I understand something. They speak clearly. When people says in the streets. I cannot understand almost anything. Some people say like this
我是中国人
Wô sì zōngguo rén.
They dont pronounce sh zh sounds. Some pronouncit.
Hiii I'm new subscriber❤❤
谢谢！ 我喜欢你的视频，它们总是有趣且信息丰富!
I am Brazilian, studying Chinese for 2 years, and although I known I'm not near to be good, I can recognize that Chinese grammar is sooooo much easier than Portuguese grammar!
Not frustrated yet but i need to see progress in another year at most and by that I mean speak, vocab and comprehension wise im at 7 languages , fluent speak im at 3
well, good news for us blinds who are also learning chinese. we don’t even have to learn characters. instead, we can write in chinese braille, which is just like pinyin.
I have college Biochemistry exam tomorrow yet here I am at 2 am watching how to learn chinese😅
For me the worst thing is the sheer amount of information to learn. This doesn't reveal itself if you just want basic communication to travel, but if you wanna watch dramas or read books you'll quickly see that characters are but a small part of that. Vocabulary is enormous with hundreds of chengyu on top of that. After some time this becomes alleviated if you know several thousand characters well with their meanings and words they are used, so you can guess a meaning of new words, but it is still a lot of information. About three times the amount needed to learn a European language.
I wanted to buy the HSK material from a bookstore here in Nanning. The problem is there was no audio with them from HSK 1 to HSK 3. The assistant said they could not get the audio.
我同意。虽然有时候学习中文很难、但是也有时候很容易😅
我超级喜欢学习中文。我千万不会放弃学习中文。
I feel the same way
I'm learning Chinese and I don't consider it is difficult. In my own language we have more grammar rules. If i can speak my language well, i will be able to speak any language
I think people confuse difficult with time consuming. If you're an English speaker learning a European language, you can go faster because vocabulary and syntax - and writing - have basic similarities. The differences between Mandarin and English mean that it takes longer to get comfortable, but it's not harder to do in a literal sense.
I am learning Chinese and I find it somewhat easy🫣 , but the difficulty lies in writing
also it is a synthetic language
I think the biggest difficulty is listening (unless you're lucky enough to be able to immerse yourself fully). As for writing, I think it's really not necessary to worry about it. How much do we write in our own language? Barely anything. Most things are typed. I didn't bother learning any handwriting, since it would just make me bored and give up at the start, but now I'm a little better I sometimes choose to write a character a few times to help me remember the components.
For speaking, try not to say individual words out of context. Mandarin has an incredibly small amount of possible sounds a word can make, so most people understand you based on context. So sometimes you have to describe the word.
But I think there are genuine hurdles as well. Reading can be a pain, because we don't know the sound of something just by looking at it, Which makes it harder to just try to learn by reading manga/manhua etc.
And if you're not learning the PRC standard of Mandarin , you have to be extra careful not to learn the wrong things. In fact, it's nigh impossible to find resources for traditional mandarin to start with.
Oh, I just remembered, don't underestimate music! I would never have thought I would be able to learn things via music, but songs like 《熱愛105度的你》or even that one that's like 我期待的不是學，而是有你的冬天 or 我們一起學貓叫 etc.
Basically the viral 斗音 / TikTok style ones with repetitive refrains
It is good that u are trying to learn a language by reading. But in order to read for a beginner, u need to have a chinese-english dict by your side. And let's say you come across a word such as 树, u need to know the method of finding the word in the dict. After u found the word, u need to memorise the pronuciation and of course, meaning.
That is how I learn English 30 years ago when reading those Enid Blyton stories.
@@chinchang5117 yeah that's what I'm doing nowadays mostly. I got a tablet specifically for for this, it's really easy to split screen Pleco (dictionary) and Tachiyomi (Manga app) or some news article. For things I don't know, I either use optical image recognition via an app called "universal copy", or I just manually handwrite the hanzi. Thankfully Google keyboard is quite good at guessing what I'm scribbling down :D
Is there a pdf or link to the most common Chinese characters?
I have tried online, but all i get are common words
In my experience Chinese people will understand what you mean even when you are way off your tones. When I was just starting I talked to 2 Chinese girls from my university and they could understand me, although I had a lot of trouble understanding them. and about accents, when foreigners speak Russian (my native language)with a very strong accent, it's not always bad. For example I told my ex girlfriends to never get rid of her accent, because it's really cool and unique
Edition: I learnt 1500 Chinese characters long before I learnt how to actually speak so I was able to read Chinese in Russian long before I learnt how to read Chinese in Chinese.
Second edition: I have pocket booklets for grammar of different languages. For comparison German us 96 pages long and it's mostly tables without 2-3 sentences explanation. Chinese is mostly text, there are most common words and still it's only 64 pages long.
When I started learning I thought it was going to be much more difficult. The worst part are the characters, but im enjoy learning them. And yes, as a spaniard, chinese grammar is so much simpler, it doesn't need 20 verbal tenses 😂.
PS. Tu español es muy bueno
Just think of it how chinese would look like with a much more harder grammar! No way, right?! There no space! The language is already difficult enough. But one condition，everything keeps the same of course!
Hola。我觉得大多数老师不会纠正你的声调。我认为在中文声调很重要。西班牙语动词很困难但是其余很简单。Saludos desde España.
The difficulty of learning the Chinese language comes primarily from the fact that there are thousands of homonyms and the fact that majority of Chinese words are very short (two characters usually). Tones are intended to address (partially) this problem, but for the people whose mother tongue is not a tonal language, it brings an additional challenge. Homonyms, short words and tones makes the Chinese difficult to understand, especially when people speak at 'normal' speed. I personally think the more emphasis should be put on listening skills and respectively I wish there were more videos on youtube targeted on the improvement of the listening skills.
老师很厉害！
谢谢您❤
It's not gonna cause me give up or anything but tones are incredibly frustrating when speaking. When I travelled to China, there were a lot of instances where people seemed to genuinely not understand what I was trying to say, even with very simple senteces where you'd think context would make the meaning obvious.
I think you may also have mispronounced the consonants without noticing. That makes it more difficult for natives to understand. We learners have difficulties spotting our own mistakes
It's so hard for me. I have switched to Korean for learning purposes, but I am now starting to hear similarities in many languages.
Could you tell me more specifically why it's hard?
@@ShuoshuoChinese Let me inform you ""why i think Chinese is not so good language", Although I am a student doing graduation for Chinese language.
Firstly Tones,Take only 500 to 600 characters not 1000 how can someone Remember the positioning of tone of each character..Like you can remember for small or easy words or when starting Chinese,you can learn but gradually How can someone Remember the tone position with what kind of tone that is...
Now Characters..You stated that nowadays You can chat by technology,you really don't have to remember the character..I think those who are leaving learning Chinese are students, think of their perspective,What to do in exams or when writing in copies.
And for Grammer I agree that Chinese grammer is easy but is different..or i say 80-90% grammar rules are opposite of English grammar rules😊Like basic sentence structure.
A Language work is to make job easier to communicate that Language is considered great but the one language that himself takes years or year only to learn how to communicate effectively.
That language is bad in my opinion.
❤❤
@@ShuoshuoChinese Mam a bit extra.. Chinese is a bit monarchical Lang.also.
Let me explain...
We can't make a new word by ourselves. Let's Assume "Lithium" Is invented just tomorrow,in other languages you know how to write "lithium" but in Chinese first it goes to the government then The govt. designs the character and tones acc. to their convince then releases thw word market for people to Remember😉.
A parent can't name their child something unique as how will he design his character.first they had to go to govt. for making a new character and tone for their child name.
Means You are bounded around your Govt.
What's the purpose of language when it can't be yours.
Tones are important, but when someone is learning, they are going to make mistakes, and it's not going to be perfect. It is understandable. There are many things in English that are important, but we don't worry about it when someone says something wrong.
I like your haircut! 👀
I agree with you. Chinese is either the easiest or second easiest language I've tried learning. The other being Norwegian. If you know English, Norwegian I'm finding out is probably the easiest 2nd language. But Chinese is much more simple than people think, I see lists of hardest languages to learn and people say Chinese is at the top. Spanish is even harder than Chinese in my opinion growing up in America and hearing it semi-often and learning a little.
Now I want to learn Norwegian😆
For sure, I think it has more in common with English than German and French, and the grammar is super similar, with a few tweaks that make sense.@@ShuoshuoChinese
Mostly agree, to me the hardest part of Chinese is understanding people speak. At my peak I could speak and read chinese at around hsk6 level, but the moment people start talking to me I understand next to nothing, not even HSK1 level. Maybe I was able to understand it at HSK1 level if they speak clear accent free Beijing dialect. Context makes things certainly a lot easier, but still.... At some point I started transcribing movies, but it on repeat write it down and confirm with the subtitles. That certainly helped, but it was hard boring work... so didn't keep up.
With respect to the tones.... th-cam.com/video/sULte1b9wQo/w-d-xo.html
hiyahhhhh.....
Why time marker so hard to see with ta you qian?!?
I'm so stupid, I make my ancestor cry 😢
We are in the appeared in the minute 3:37 lol
真的吗！太巧了！
老师搬家了对不对？I love to see laoshi's new home❤
If's easy because it is the first language to you?
Your second one, might drop to monggoalearin or Tibetan
I tried to learn German before... and found Chinese easier, and I don’t remember anything in German anymore
Only time i would not use mandarin is ordering dim sum. For dimsum use cantonese. Chinse is easy to speak. Writing is difficult english is easiest language to learn. English is a chinese language. Us cantonese are pushing more schools to teach cantonese. We are dying out. Even faster than koreans and japanese.
❤
I always say this to my friends and relatives but they don't believe me no matter what🥺😭...
"The thing that you accidentally say something super rude and offending people won't happen in real life" Idk have you ever gone to a restaurant and said 內設 instead of 內用? Because I have.
I'm sorry, but no. Chinese would be at medium difficulty for a foreigner if it were written with an alphabet or sillabary. But the writing system makes it insanely difficult and it requires twice if not thrice the effort to learn.
I have to agree. I am a subscriber to this channel and feel that the header is a little click baity in this case. Chinese is rated as one of the most difficult languages if not the most difficult language to learn. I have lived in mainland China for over 8 years and still struggle despite my efforts to speak, read and write (type). It takes a tremendous amount of effort, energy, time and so on to absorb Mandarin Chinese. Not only is the written form (characters) a lot to deal with, the contextual side of this language makes a massive difference in effective communication. There is so much that can go wrong, get the tones wrong, get the context wrong, and one can find yourself in a very unpleasant situation (sometimes funny situations when amongst friends but still…).
I think objectively speaking, chinese is a difficult language for many reasons, and there's nothing wrong with that, it just makes the reward bigger IMO.
Some spoken chinese in certain regions are specially challenging because they slurred the words or they don't use the standard variation of "shi", "zhi","chi",etc. i have heard speakers using standard mandarin to give lectures and it's so beautiful and clear i wished more people spoke like that.
If you narrow the sounds from an already limited pool, it feels like you are trying to decipher a code. When people talk to me, my brain attempts to decipher this *code", and while its doing that, they have already started a new sentence. When you finally understood the message now its time to formulate your reply. And by that point people assume you dont speak any chinese because you take too much time to reply (totally understandable) but the fact is that my brain is not fast enough to have a smooth conversation.
It can be a bit frustrating because people dont have that much patience (nor do I), that's why its important to have a teacher in the beginning stages.
of course Chinese grammar is easy but I always find myself stuck in REARRANGING SENTENCES 😭😭
Yeah super easy… 3k characters… 😂😂 I have been living in China 4 years .. still can’t speak Chinese…. Went to QC in Canada started learning French 2 months ago … can speak at simple at least
The easiest language is Indonesian language according to xiaomanyc a TH-camr who speaks at least 20 different languages.
Hm i gave up learning Chinese and now i am learning hacking. I mean web app hacking. It is easier and i can do more with it
Chinese is not easiest for me , though not yet learning korea yet a bit more easier than Chinese
As a Russian native I can say Mandarin has no grammar at all. Just a word order.
so many videos with this topic？watched them all？funny？not judge you？
Try to relax your upper lip when you speak English, it should help your pronunciation a lot. (I'm not a native speaker though)
They will judge you and make fun of you and have zero patience for it. There’s literally a word y’all have created for us called 歪果仁