what's the most difficult part of your Chinese learning?

[kelvinzhao]

Hi all,

I wonder how many foreign friends are active here, my job is working out couples of books to teach foreigner speak Chinese, so I hope I can get real foreign friends here and also I'd like to share my knowledge of Chinese self-learning with you. I don't wanna present any advertisement here, just pure communication with people here. so my first question and my first post here is :"what's the most difficult part of your Chinese learning?"

[gougou]

Why don't you have a look around the forums, there are plenty of problems being discussed everywhere! Once you've read a number of posts, I'm sure you'll have a good feeling of what the biggest problems are!

[kelvinzhao]

sorry, I think I just too eager to join you, I will look around the forum and Im sure I would learn lots here, thanks for your remind.

[HashiriKata]

"what's the most difficult part of your Chinese learning?"

Answer: to still keep it going after you've got tired of it.

[david1978]

what's the most difficult part of your Chinese learning?

The Chinese part.

[Horatio]

Being called a "foreign friend".

[Stefani]

Remembering what I have learned! I keep forgetting them

[lokki]

I think it is a valid question and not quite the same as plowing through all the other posts to see what is being discussed.

What is the most difficult? It is really hard to decide but if I really have to choose it has got to be the tones.

[DrZero]

What is hard for me is knowing what to do when I have several third tones in a row. I've had situations where as many as five of them come in a row. I don't know how to make a decision, in real time, about how to handle them all, and it trips me up.

[Shadowdh]

Time... finding the time to study Chinese properly... at the moment life is sooo hectic... but soon I will have more time for study... soon...

[Xiao Kui]

usage - knowing when to use which word, many times you can't translate literally from English

sentence structure - putting complex sentences together smoothly and correctly

[jonaspony]

Good on you Kelvin,

Thanks for taking an interest. I have so many thoughts about this - probably because I struggle with a lot.

I have trouble with transitive verbs (verbs linked to nouns). Do I 做，发，放 that thing？

And I know most foreign friends have trouble with prepositions (Should it be 为，对，向？）.

And then there are the measure words... When we first learn Chinese we are not really taught many but they are used frequently to replace the noun.

I would wait and see if anyone agrees with me. Other students might have ways (websites etc) which already help with these. But I think these are problems you could help with over the internet.

cheers buddy... Jonas

[simonlaing]

Am I the only one that thinks writing out the characters, and remembering every dian, is the most difficult.

Most time consuming, tiring, and most likely that you may forget them in 6 months if you don't use that particular character for purple or what have you.

Tones are tricky, but there are more than a few chinese are lazy with their tones too, but their characters for most people will be good.

What about a poll on this?

mmmmm

[ocpaul20]

confidence to speak out and try.... even if you get it wrong. This kind of thing cannot be learnt in a book unfortunately, you just have to get out there and do it.

Chinese find this aspect of learning English difficult too.

[kelvinzhao]

thanks all for you reply,

just like what ocpaul20 said, I think it's very important to speak out, just have a try, or how can you know what's wrong and what's correct. take me as an example, my English isn't good enough, but I always find chances to speak to foreigner, kindly most of them can tell me which part I should recorrect and when I shouldn't use slang. fortunately, I think I can make good communication here :D

Stefani: how do you learn Chinese ? self-learning ? or join a class ? I guess you must can not find many chance to use Chinese, if you can get a Chinese friend and talk to him often, it will be better, and I don't know whether the way Chinese learn English can do good to you, we always work hard to remember the "words", print them in our head. aha ,it's painful, but we have to.

Horatio: any problem ?? :)

DrZero: it's very hard to explain when the third tone should be changed, eg: 我很好，wo3 hen3 hao3, if you say it in very high speed, "hen3" may be "hen2". just like the "blending" in English, sometimes you have to find the feeling by speaking faster. it's just my opinion.

Shadowdh: you said you have no enough time to study, do you have any free time when you are having breakfast or after dinner ? even before you go to bed ? and I wonder what books you are learning now.

Xiao Kui: actually, Chinese don't use long sentence very often , so do u think it will be helpful if there is a book that can teach you the most usage sentence "pattern" ? can you find any book that teach it ?

jonaspony: thanks for your so many information, and it's does difficult to give you satisfied answer to solve your problem. but I will note them and try to work out a way to solve them. I think maybe you can practice more and try to speak it out with Chinese people.

THANKS ALL again, I will always keep my eyes here.

[Shadowdh]

Shadowdh: you said you have no enough time to study, do you have any free time when you are having breakfast or after dinner ? even before you go to bed ? and I wonder what books you are learning now.

I dont manage to get breakfast in usually... and due to the nature of whats keeping me busy at the moment I often have dinner late when my wife gets home when we usually chat about the day and what we have to do at the moment, but I do manage to do little bits of study its just not enough time though.. I like to sit down and do an hour or two solid then take a break... and due to the nature of my life at the moment its proving difficult to even get in an hour... When I am in China I find I have all the time I like to study as I dont have all the other responsibilities that ties up so much time... I use a few different books, those the University recommend, a couple of others to help with reading and grammar...

[rezaf]

I have been studynig for 4 months. At first pronunciation and hanzi were very difficult for me. I solved my problem in pronunciation by memorizing the dialogues the way they read them in cds and paying attention to where to pause in the sentence. Now hanzi is very easy for me and is my favorite part in learning chinese. The difficulty that I am facing right now is the usage of grammar. I know that the new methods say that grammar is not important for beginners but I think that without knowing the proper grammar rules I am lost in the language. None of our books has well planed grammar lessons and the grammar books that I have seen so far are all in chinese and not for the beginner level. as you might know the most difficult part for the beginner level is where to use 了 and different types of it and after that using verbs that have two parts(different types of it).

[joe ward]

Dear Abby,

I'm learning from Pimsleur MP3 lessons. When I try talking to my Chinese girlfriend (in Chinese) she tells me I sound like the girl in the lessons but that I have a cute Beijing accent. I've tried talking like Jack Palance but get a sore throat. Should I ditch my gf and just cross dress?

But the really really reallyhard part about learning Chinese is finding Chinese people to practice with. Chinese friends lose interest after ten minutes and really only want to talk English anyway. I've tried taking it to the streets but them there Chinamen are just plain unforgiving. One wrong tone and they go hysterical and lift their kids up to have a look, or smile embarassedly ( new English word there?).

Yeah, I also feel really self concious with them there tones. Like I'm singing.... and I've got a shocking voice to boot. It is seriously hard to over ride the natural intonations of speaking English

I love the way the first reply to your post told you to go root yourself but you ended up with good responses, this one excepted. Rock on dude. Totally boss.

[Stefani]

Stefani: how do you learn Chinese ? self-learning ? or join a class ? I guess you must can not find many chance to use Chinese, if you can get a Chinese friend and talk to him often, it will be better, and I don't know whether the way Chinese learn English can do good to you, we always work hard to remember the "words", print them in our head. aha ,it's painful, but we have to.

I was self-learning using Pimsleur, and then join a class (once a week 2 hours / session). I think it is just that there is this big gap (still) between my English and Chinese, and often time I need to talk like an adult instead of like a 2-year old (where I think my Chinese is). My current class is quite good that I usually just try to use as many Mandarin words I know. Broken Mandarin (except for the lessons taught in class) but it gets me to practice more. I still continue with Pimsleur and when I have time I check out Chinesepod.

I try to remember the pinyin with the tone at the moment, the characters are just too complicated at the moment. I will pick it up hopefully next year

[david1978]

Stefani, if you can manage to make a Chinese friend online (which shouldn't be very difficult), you can arrange to meet them on Skype and chat at your convenience. This is far better than taking a class. In fact, I think taking classes is a waste of time and money.