There are so many foreigners and Chinese, we both know a little of different languages at least. how about you guys think about the two kinds of language? which one is more difficult?
There are so many foreigners and Chinese, we both know a little of different languages at least. how about you guys think about the two kinds of language? which one is more difficult?
As a native English speaker, I can assure you Chinese is much more difficult. :-)
As a teacher, in China, teaching a Western discipline in English, I can assure you my students would disagree.
Chinese is a 'high context' language while English is a 'low context' language. And this relationship to sound/meaning/character and context is what made Chinese difficult for me. Characters can have different sounds and/or meanings depending on context. Or, a single sound can have a multitude characters. Tones can be troublesome as well.
Here in Kunming, the普通话 you learn in the classroom may, depending on who is listening, fail you on the street. Or, you may have a 老师 who is a 昆明人 teach you pronunciation that will fail you in 北京。
I lived in 北京 for six years and even with my meager Chinese got along quite well. Of course my Chinese was a lot of 二话 but it worked fine with taxi drivers.
After a few years in 昆明 the 北京 taxi drivers no longer understood me even though my 普通话/昆明话was greatly improved.
@
I also lived in Beijing but the taxi drivers here understand perfectly what I say
The opinion of some linguists (including me), is that every language is just as hard or easy as any other. Where one is harder in one area, it is easier in another. An example: tonal languages seem hard for non-tonal speakers, but tonal languages have far fewer phonemes and morphemes than non-tonal languages, so it all evens out. That is my opinion.
I find that Chinese is harder because even if you know the characters and what they mean, when you put 2-4 together, the meaning can't really be guess even though you know all the characters individually. Then again, I'm not that bright.
what is er hua?
@Haali, it's what is often seen in Mandarin learning books and what they usually speak in the Beijing dialect, with the sound "er" at the end, like the first impression here:
Sometimes you can get general context from the characters and their radicals, but if they are among the thousands of characters that you haven't learnt yet, you have no way to work out how to pronounce. In English there are a general guidelines how to pronounce a new word, but in contrast to Chinese there is quite often not much clue from looking at it what it might mean.