questionare aobut Chinese learning

[sunnysummer]

Hello

I am a college student who is taking the course of teaching Chinese as a foreign language

it is perfect to find this website ,really. i got an assignment recently and i hope some of you may help me with it

my teacher wants us to figure out what's the main problem are when people learn Chinese as a foreign language.

as a native speaker, I do not know much about the feeling of learning Chinese in the same way that I learn English, what's the main problem you encouter when learning Chinese?

I will appreciate it if anyone can help

PS: My English is a kind of poor.hope that you can understand it

[renzhe]

I don't know how detailed your information needs to be, you could write theses about it.

But I think that most people will answer: characters, tones, listening comprehension.

For people studying outside of China, it is also difficult to find intermediate/advanced courses outside of a university. For such people, lack of everyday exposure is also a problem, which leads to the problems with tones and listening comprehension.

[Hofmann]

In my opinion, the main problems that many students have are their presumptions about the language(s).

[yersi]

The amount of vocabulary. Characters aren't all that hard to learn but there are way too many words... I praise the lord almighty that he has given us SRS, lest we be lost in a sea of idioms, lol

[sunnysummer]

thanks a lot for all your help.I have now finished my assignment.

I think there are problems that we share in learning a foreign language.

and i hope i can help in your Chinese learning when you need it.

[Lugubert]

I don't know how detailed your information needs to be' date=' you could write theses about it.

But I think that most people will answer: characters, tones, listening comprehension.

For people studying outside of China, it is also difficult to find intermediate/advanced courses outside of a university. For such people, lack of everyday exposure is also a problem, which leads to the problems with tones and listening comprehension.

Too true. For me, I think I'm learning languages to get at other writing systems, so I regard characters not as a problem but a goal, however difficult to attain. I blame my sometimes very anoying tinnitus for at least a part of my problems with hearing tones. Why, we Swedes have two tones, so we're at least aware of the principle, compared to most other non-East Asians.

Personally, my listening comprehension suffers from the aforementioned tinnitus but probably even more from the likewise mentioned lack of everyday exposure. The Chinese I can find in my home town will normally be Cantonese people working in restaurants. I plan to try podcasts for training, and try to build up enough confidence to go to e.g. Chengdu to find a very patient and forgiving tutor who will support me during a sufficient number of months.

[skillphiliac]

If I had to choose, and I don't really would like to, it would not be characters, tones or listening. It would be the sheer amount of words, many meaning the same or carrying very fine, but yet distinguishable nuances. Learning Hanzi and remembering the corresponding tones? No problem at all. Unusual, maybe, but not really difficult. Listening? It takes some getting used to as well, yet it is managable after a while. But the different words are what makes mixing up things an so awfully easy thing to do. Yeah, I'd go with that.

[sunnysummer]

maybe there are problems we share in lauguange learning, actually i have similiar problems in learning English and Janpanese as well.

but specially i have to say that chinese characters are complex. i know most learners may be confused about them.

still they are meaningful. in contract with letters, chinese characters have its origins ,so there are rules in character-making.maybe to learn their meaning will help you memorize. e.g. characters have 贝 in it always have something to do with money.like 货 贸 购 赚

and for Lugubert , if you have choices, i recommend you to study in chinese in nothern part of china,like Beijing, Tianjin,for people in southern part of china always use their dialects and may mislead you in pronounciations. it's my suggestion.

for skillphiliac, i think you are really talented in language learning . and for words ,i think reading will always help . for some words' using have no reason ,actually. when you read a certain amount of chinese books , you will gradually get to know when to use which and have a kind of 'feeling ' about their differences.

it's my opinion, hope it will help

[Scoobyqueen]

Why, we Swedes have two tones, so we're at least aware of the principle, compared to most other non-East Asians.

Have I understood this correctly, that Swedish uses two tones? If so, I never knew that. I learnt Swedish the passive way mainly through listening when I was little but have never been formally taught.

[Lugubert]

Sunnysummer, yes, I know about the southern zongguo for zhonggou etc.

Have I understood this correctly, that Swedish uses two tones? If so, I never knew that. I learnt Swedish the passive way mainly through listening when I was little but have never been formally taught.

We sure have. I created some rather stupid pairs when I taught Swedish to immigrants to make my pupils aware of the fact. They ALL had immense problems with this distinction. We Swedes normally understand you even if you use the wrong tone, but those mistakes quickly give foreigners away, even if they've mastered our two other almost unique features, the sh- and -u- sounds.

One example: "Han såg tomten på tomten." 'He caught sight of the farm gnome [This dwarfish, grayclad, easily annoyed person, taking good care of farm animals if and only if he gets his Xmas porridge with a generous amount of butter, should NOT be confused with the recently imported USAmerican fatty in his red clothes, also named "tomten"] on the piece of land.' The two "tomten" sound very different to a Swedish ear.

[chrix]

but please be aware that Swedish is a pitch-accent language, not a tonal language. A bit like Japanese, which also has pitch accent.

Very roughly speaking, you can distinguish three types of languages:

A dynamic-accent languages such as English and German: one specific location in a given word is pronounced more forcefully than others. Compare the verb import vs. the noun import, with different stress locations.

B pitch-accent languages such as Swedish and Japanese. one specific location in a given word has a marked in terms of frequency (pitch). In Swedish there are two different types of contours that can occur (the standard example in phonology textbooks is ande-n vs. and-en, one meaning "duck" and the other "spirit", here's a sound file), while in Japanese the pitch location is marked in the way, that after it the tone falls. ame "rain" has a pitch accent on the first syllable, which means that the first syllable is high, and then the pitch drops to low.

C tonal languages: you can further classify them

C1. register tone: many African languages have this, they have tones that differ in in frequency, i.e. high, low, mid. Burmese could also be grouped into this, it has high, low, creaky-voiced and checked (with a glottal stop at the end)

C2. contour tone: Mandarin the prime example, with tone contours such as rising and falling etc.

C3. mixed: other Sinitic languages such as Cantonese, Southern Min, and also a non-related languages such as Vietnamese can be said to be combination of C1. and C2. They have contours on different registers.

The fundamental difference is that in type C languages each syllable has a tone regardless of how many syllables the word has.

In A and B type languages each word only has one accent location, thus it is justified to call it a "pitch accent". Now to make matters even more complicated, there is intonation:

- in type A languages intonation manipulates the frequency: for instance, if you take the German word "da" which means there you could get:

- da? (with rising intonation, aka 2nd tone): asking if it's there.

- da! (with falling intonation, aka 4th tone): forcefully pointing out location to someone

- da..! (with an intonation akin to the 3rd tone): being annoyed at the interlocutor's ignorance, reiteriating where something is.

Now the difference between German and Mandarin is that in Mandarin these would be different words, while in German it's one word used in different speech situations.

However, intonation plays a role with type B and C languages as well. As far as pitch-accent languages go, only the stress location itself is predetermined by the lexical accent, so that's obvious, but studies of Chinese intonation have shown, that while each syllable in speech might still have its lexical tone, over all intonation still plays a role! In other words, in a question in Mandarin, intonation is rising globally, despite the individual tones. I find that quite intriguing.

[Scoobyqueen]

One example: "Han såg tomten på tomten." 'He caught sight of the farm gnome [This dwarfish, grayclad, easily annoyed person, taking good care of farm animals if and only if he gets his Xmas porridge with a generous amount of butter, should NOT be confused with the recently imported USAmerican fatty in his red clothes, also named "tomten"] on the piece of land.' The two "tomten" sound very different to a Swedish ear.

Thanks for the explanation. I never knew that but then again I was not taught it formally. I had an opportunity to try it out last week in Sweden. Indeed it provided for an interesting talking point. The dinner would have been much more boring without it!