The Fascination of the Chinese Language
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The fascination of the Chinese language
A lot of free Chinese lessons online as well as offline start off with telling you that Chinese is one of the oldest, most fascinating languages in the World. At the same time, it’s one of the most widely spread languages, being spoken by over 1.3 billion people, most of which are situated in Southeastern Asia.
The Chinese language is actually composed of several slightly different dialects which share the same structure and rules as well as a good part of the same vocabulary. A comparison can be made between Chinese as a general language and the entirety of Romanic languages. Still, Chinese dialects are a lot more closer to one another than Romanic sub-languages, so whereas a French speaker for example couldn’t understand much of what an Italian is saying without proper study of the Italian language beforehand, a Chinese Wu speaker will have an easier time communicating with, say, a Mandarin speaker.
Speaking of dialects, Chinese has around 6-12 specific dialects, depending on how you count them (and if we count sub-dialects as well). The three most popular however, are undoubtedly Mandarin (which consists of around 800 million speakers), Wu (around 90 million speakers) and Cantonese (80-90 million speakers). Because Mandarin dominates the amount of Chinese speakers by such a large number it’s often the case that an equality sign is placed between the dialect and the language itself.
Learning Chinese…ouch!
For the Western World, learning Chinese is, let’s face it, a pain in the rib. Although there are small variations between Western languages, they share pretty much the same rules, phonology and sentence structure as well as the same alphabet. With Chinese, almost everything we know is blown up in the air and it’s quite hard for us to think any other way than what we’re used to. If you take up on courses to learn Chinese, the first step will be to accommodate yourself with all these differences before starting to memorize words, improve vocabulary or learn the alphabet.
Chinese learning methods
Most “learn Chinese” courses as well as almost all organized educational sources start teaching the language to Western students by translating the Chinese ideograms to the Romanic alphabet by using the Pinyin system. After this step has been mastered the learning process is taken from easy to hard, meaning that the first courses will contain the Chinese grammar rules (which are easier to understand and are less complex than some Western languages), go through pronunciation (which is a problem at first but can be mastered after a while), then a vocabulary improvement using texts to memorize words, vocabulary games, audio tapes and the likes and finalizing with a complete focus on Chinese characters and numerals, which are a headache for most students.
Lessen: Chinees - Engels
Articles about Chinese in other languages:
The Fascination of the Chinese Language (in English)
La fascinación de la lengua china (in Spanish)
Langue chinoise (in French)
Die Faszination der chinesischen Sprache (in German)
Lingua cinese (in Italian)
Chinese Taal (in Dutch)
О китайском языке (in Russian)
Língua chinesa (in Portuguese)
سحر اللغة الصينية (in Arabic)
Fascinatia limbii Chineze (in Romanian)