Learning Chinese is HARD pt 1.
Posted by admin on January 24th, 2010 filed in MatthewI’m not sure how many of these rants/whines I’m going to make while I’m here. I’ll apologise now in advance if you feel that I complain too much 
I’ve been studying Chinese for a couple of hours a day now for the past two weeks, and I find it incredibly frustrating. Although I never really studied Korean in any formal way, I did memorise some vocabulary and pick some stuff up along the way. Korean was childs play compared to Chinese.
Learning Chinese is like learning 3 languages at the same time. Firstly I have to memorise the new “word/sound” and find a way of linking it in my mind to whatever the equivalent English word is. If this was all I had to do, it would be a walk in the park, unfortunately, as well as just the sound itself, I also have to memorise a tone.
For those not familiar with Chinese, the same sound pronounced in subtly different ways can have totally different meanings. For example, the word “na” pronounced one way means “buy”, the same word “na”, pronounced differently, means “sell”. 
So on top of making a mental link for the word, I also have to remember the tone used to pronounce it – not to mention actually pronouncing the tones in the right way!! Something my tone-deaf-aussie-accent doesn’t handle so well.
Finally, everyone should be at least a little bit aware of the Chinese “alphabet”
The number of Chinese characters contained in the Kangxi dictionary is approximately 47,035
Again… …I don’t even know if I have that many words in my English vocabulary. Apparently you can read a newspaper if you know the first common 1,000->2,000.
At this point I’ve pretty much decided to give up on the alphabet. Trying to fit all three things into my brain at once isn’t working. I think I need to build a foundation of the vocabulary and tones, once those are firmly fixed in my brain, then I can link them to the pictures…..
…At least I hope that’ll work…
January 25th, 2010 at 08:59
Yes, forget characters at first (you’ll pick up the essentials anyway like “Exit” and “Man” and “Woman” for the toilet. I’d suggest that you concentrate on Pinyin as it is already Roman alphabetised and will be SOOO much easier for you to remember works.
As such, I think the word you’re referring to is is “mai,” not “na”
In Pinyin, to “buy” is “mǎi” – the tone goes down and then up.
The word for “sell” is “mài” – the tone only goes down.
I.e.:
Nǐ xiǎng mǎi shén me?
You want buy what?
January 25th, 2010 at 09:56
Yeah I agreed, don’t worry about the character too much. Just learn the basic conversation first, using Pinyin, but remember, the local Chinese doesn’t learn Chinese from Pinyin, so if you write Pinyin on the paper and try to communicate, it won’t work.
Beside, think of the bright side, you are learning Mandrian which has 4 tones, wait until you learn Cantonese, there are 9 tones!!! Hahaha
January 26th, 2010 at 13:18
Just been showing my Chinese cleaners the above. I’m teaching them advanced English as they want to be permanent residents here. They agree with Chris about “mai”. They said that they learnt Chinese (in China) using Pinyin, but old people over 60 might not know Pinyin. (As I will be 65 next month I thumped the husband!) Anyway, they told me to tell you that an easier way is to learn to pronounce the letters and the combination of letters like “ao”. I guess that would be a little bit like Greg Brien and his English pronunciation cards at TESOL.
January 27th, 2010 at 11:31
I knew I should have checked that word before I posted it….
February 12th, 2010 at 15:19
[...] the suggestion of others after my last post on studying Chinese, I’ve given up on learning Chinese Characters for the moment. After I can speak and [...]