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Learning Chinese in China
Learning Chinese in China
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In the West, Chinese has an undeserved reputation for its difficulty. While it is very different from Western languages, a traveler may be surprised to learn that the basic grammar is pretty simple. Verbs are static regardless of whether they are referring to the past, present or future. Genders of nouns do not exist, and there is no separate form of nouns for plurals. The main difficulties are the existence of several consonants not present in European languages and using tones.
Mandarin, like Vietnamese and Thai, is a tonal language that uses a pitch in sounds to inflict different meanings. Ma could mean mother, horse, numb, blame, depending on tones. Homophones are also common. The same sound at the same pitch usually has dozens of meanings. Zhong1 (Zhong at the 1st tone) can mean China, loyalty, clock, chime, finish, a bowl, etc. All of them come with different Chinese characters, just the same sound at the same pitch. While homophones are unlikely a problem in most everyday conversations, it is very common for Chinese to ask how to write someone's name by telling the meaning of all characters one by one. "My name is Wang Fei (王菲). Wang is the Wang with three strokes, Fei is the fei in shifei(gossip), with a grass on top."
Written Chinese looks like a mysterious secret code to some, but if you can recognize so many commercial logos -- usually not logically related, you will be impressed with the brain capacity to memorize so many characters - most of them are logically related and formed based on certain rules.
There are, by theory, more than 50000 Chinese characters. The good news is that more than 85% have become obsolete, or are rarely used. Like native speakers of many languages, most Chinese couldn't tell you how many characters are required to read a book and never bother to count how many characters they know. One may argue that, junior students are supposed to learn at least 2000 character and graduates in university 5000 characters.
To bridge the gap between recognizing and reading out loud, pinyin was developed, which uses Latin script as an aid to teaching Chinese. Pronouncing pinyin is not intuitive for English speakers, as certain letters and consonant clusters are not pronounced as a westerner would expect. Nonetheless, learning it at even a basic level has enormous practical value for the traveler.
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China Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.