The Way of Chinese Language
thevivekpandey.github.io
The Way of Chinese Language
1–10 of 86 posts
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#2In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok.
(Funny but inappropriate comment self-censored.)
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#3Hey this was pretty interesting - the most in-depth introduction to Chinese characters I've seen.
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#4"Perhaps you can spot an elephant in 象"
The animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File...
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#5This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated meaning to either. So for those of you who don’t know Mandarin, please read a lot of this with a grain of salt.
Regarding the simple grammar, I’ll say that tenses and plurals are easy for an English speaker to pick up. But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words. Once you move beyond the “simple” grammar, things get complex fast.
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#6In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult…
English doesn't have tones; it's what's known as a stress-timed language.
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#7Pretty good introduction! The one thing I found a little off was in the larger phrase constructions: the explanation of how larger "words" are formed from characters isn't quite right. For instance the example of "socialism", 社会主义, which he parses as "common production primary virtue", isn't really four words in a row, it's two "words" made of up two characters each: 社会 meaning society, 主义 typically used as an "-ism" suffix.
义 in isolation might mean "virtue", but most characters have a handful (or more) of meanings, and when it comes after 主, 义 takes on more of its "idea" meaning.
But all in all, pretty good!
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#8In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult…
I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#9In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult…
I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.
Somewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p...
(that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)
Re: The Way of Chinese Language
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.
Somewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p... (that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)
Punjabi is also classified as Indo-European language and it is also a very strong tonal language. The topic is also a subject of research as none of surrounding languages have such tonal variations.