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Guest putasmileon

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haha thanks for the links!! i seriously need some practice with Chinese...i've been going to Chinese school for as long as i remember (ok not exactly ALL my life lol =.='') but i can only say some words..like parts of sentences. -_- my reading and writing's crap..I can only read parts of what Tetra wrote

oh & I actually like Traditional better than Simple Chinese..ionno why =/

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^ No, I meant what does it mean when you call a person that.

hahah...you got insulted I suppose.

I don't know good chinese insults -_-

They don't teach them in chinese school :sweatingbullets:

I should ask the chinese clique.

haha thanks for the links!! i seriously need some practice with Chinese...i've been going to Chinese school for as long as i remember (ok not exactly ALL my life lol =.='') but i can only say some words..like parts of sentences. -_- my reading and writing's crap..I can only read parts of what Tetra wrote

oh & I actually like Traditional better than Simple Chinese..ionno why =/

你的學校用繁體還是簡體字?

大陸人比較喜歡用簡體 =/

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Guest *watcher

Interesting thread... Love your sarcasm, 'for help with the victims of learning Chinese.'

It's strange how I can read and translate but can't speak Chinese. Fluently anyway. I don't think this language is particularly hard compared to say, French. Some things giving people a hard time are probably different word order and the calligraphy.

Unlike the majority, I don't recommend reading but rather translating; it's what works for me anyhow. It's probably because when I translate I look up words in the dictionary and think on their relation to English, which helps me commit the characters to memory faster.

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Guest putasmileon

hahah...you got insulted I suppose.

I don't know good chinese insults -_-

They don't teach them in chinese school :sweatingbullets:

I should ask the chinese clique.

你的學校用繁體還是簡體字?

大陸人比較喜歡用簡體 =/

當然ㄚ.. 他們只用簡體字. 可能比較喜歡繁體字,可是大部分不會看吧.

繁體字叫繁體字因為寫法很繁ㄚ..哈哈

Interesting thread... Love your sarcasm, 'for help with the victims of learning Chinese.'

It's strange how I can read and translate but can't speak Chinese. Fluently anyway. I don't think this language is particularly hard compared to say, French. Some things giving people a hard time are probably different word order and the calligraphy.

Unlike the majority, I don't recommend reading but rather translating; it's what works for me anyhow. It's probably because when I translate I look up words in the dictionary and think on their relation to English, which helps me commit the characters to memory faster.

I think when you translate, you are linking the Chinese (or any other language) words to English words. It makes it hard to be completely fluent because you aren't speaking from your mind, your thought process translates the word. What about words that have no English counterpart (can't think of an example at this moment, but Japanese has tons of them like おかげさまで、よろしくお願いします)?

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I think when you translate, you are linking the Chinese (or any other language) words to English words. It makes it hard to be completely fluent because you aren't speaking from your mind, your thought process translates the word. What about words that have no English counterpart (can't think of an example at this moment, but Japanese has tons of them like おかげさまで、よろしくお願いします)?

Exactly. My thought process is in English, that's why I take longer pauses when speaking Chinese. Translating things in my mind doesn't come naturally to me and requires thinking. As for the words which have no translations, it would make sense to skip them if they're insignificant to the meaning of the whole. If any words do contain a main idea however, which I haven't come across very often, I usually check their relations to words before and after and smooth them over with a mutual translation for both.

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你的學校用繁體還是簡體字?

大陸人比較喜歡用簡體 =/

Mostly traditional I guess, but simplified is used by some teachers etc. :P am i seriously the only one who prefers Traditional ?? =.=

Oh, I also think Chinese is quite easy to learn...easier than french or german for example. :sweatingbullets:

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Guest xKiss the Sky

I've been waiting for someone to make a Chinese thread for so long! I'm gonna love this threaad and probably come here everyday lol. I wish I can type in Chinese though, my computer has some kind of defect so I can't type in Chinese. I've been taking Mandarin for about five months but I am Cantonese so I guess it helps a lot when I'm reading the characters. Before taking classes in school, I practice my Chinese by watching Taiwanese dramas and listening to songs! I think they really help a lot ^_^

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Guest putasmileon

Mostly traditional I guess, but simplified is used by some teachers etc. :P am i seriously the only one who prefers Traditional ?? =.=

Oh, I also think Chinese is quite easy to learn...easier than french or german for example. :sweatingbullets:

Well, I like traditional more also.. I can't write simplified.

It's interesting to see that you find French harder than Chinese.. maybe it's just me but I was able to pick up French much quicker due to its myriad of words that are in English. It depends on how you were brought up - speaking Chinese or not. If your family is Chinese and spoke Chinese to you and vice versa, chances are that your speaking skills were good with or without Chinese School. However, writing is the hardest for most overseas Chinese and therefore, reading. Comprehension of words isn't as hard because chances are that you've heard that word before. I don't know, just an opinion. :-D

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Interesting thread... Love your sarcasm, 'for help with the victims of learning Chinese.'

It's strange how I can read and translate but can't speak Chinese. Fluently anyway. I don't think this language is particularly hard compared to say, French. Some things giving people a hard time are probably different word order and the calligraphy.

Unlike the majority, I don't recommend reading but rather translating; it's what works for me anyhow. It's probably because when I translate I look up words in the dictionary and think on their relation to English, which helps me commit the characters to memory faster.

Perhaps, but only being able to understand it and not saying it or writing it...totally kills 1/2 of the reason why you're taking it in the first place.

When you learn a language, wouldn't you want to feel proud by being able to speak it, read it, write it, and translate it? Not just read and translate?

Basing everything on english works, but to me, it's pretty stupid cause then you're not really learning the language, but it's more like you're just learning various ways of looking at the word. To learn a language effectively is to disregard the whole translating concept and go

Like how 1 can be represented as Uno/Un/One/одно/ένας/ein/00110001/etc, except in this case {english word} would be the 1 and {everything else} would be Uno/Un/One/одно/ένας/ein/00110001/etc.

But it's your choice, and I won't go against your methods.

Chinese not much harder than french or whatever, however...it's actually a lot more complicated. There are some "rules" that just can't be used when translating. I'd give examples, but I can't think of any right now. I'll re-edit this post or something later on.

Exactly. My thought process is in English, that's why I take longer pauses when speaking Chinese. Translating things in my mind doesn't come naturally to me and requires thinking. As for the words which have no translations, it would make sense to skip them if they're insignificant to the meaning of the whole. If any words do contain a main idea however, which I haven't come across very often, I usually check their relations to words before and after and smooth them over with a mutual translation for both.

And when you don't have the need to translate and you can think in the other language, your proficiency will increase greatly. Now isn't that useful?

That way you can understand jokes without becoming so analytical.

Exactly. My thought process is in English, that's why I take longer pauses when speaking Chinese. Translating things in my mind doesn't come naturally to me and requires thinking. As for the words which have no translations, it would make sense to skip them if they're insignificant to the meaning of the whole. If any words do contain a main idea however, which I haven't come across very often, I usually check their relations to words before and after and smooth them over with a mutual translation for both.

Post in the tech support forum. They can probably give you a solution. Then you can type in chinese :o

當然ㄚ.. 他們只用簡體字. 可能比較喜歡繁體字,可是大部分不會看吧.

繁體字叫繁體字因為寫法很繁ㄚ..哈哈

...哈哈...

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Oh, I also think Chinese is quite easy to learn...easier than french or german for example

It's interesting you should bring that up, I went to a famous linguist's (Elenor Jorden) lecture on East Asian languages while studying at Cornell, and she claimed that if it wasn't for all the characters in Chinese that the language would be ranked around a Tier 2 language or even lower (Tier 3 has moderately-easy languages such as Spanish, Swedish etc, Tier 2 has moderately-difficult languages like German and French in it, Tier 1 has very difficult languages such as Korean, Japanese and Arabic). Why? Because Chinese word order (Subject-Verb-Object) is the same as English, and all Tier 1 languages are Subject-Object-Verb which is much harder for English speakers, and also because Chinese has basically no grammar or conjugations, whereas other Tier 1 languages have an assload of grammar, and it also has no politeness / honorific ways of speech that you find in Japanese and Korean (besides that 'ni' can switch to 'nin' and some other small thing). And as for tones, they're hard but I think people tend to over-exaggerate the difficulty alittle, the factor which puts Chinese in Tier 1 is the necessity to be able to read and write alot of characters.

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Guest *watcher

Perhaps, but only being able to understand it and not saying it or writing it...totally kills 1/2 of the reason why you're taking it in the first place.

When you learn a language, wouldn't you want to feel proud by being able to speak it, read it, write it, and translate it? Not just read and translate?

Basing everything on english works, but to me, it's pretty stupid cause then you're not really learning the language, but it's more like you're just learning various ways of looking at the word. To learn a language effectively is to disregard the whole translating concept and go

Like how 1 can be represented as Uno/Un/One/одно/ένας/ein/00110001/etc, except in this case {english word} would be the 1 and {everything else} would be Uno/Un/One/одно/ένας/ein/00110001/etc.

But it's your choice, and I won't go against your methods.

Chinese not much harder than french or whatever, however...it's actually a lot more complicated. There are some "rules" that just can't be used when translating. I'd give examples, but I can't think of any right now. I'll re-edit this post or something later on.

It's true that only writing and reading defeats one-half of the purpose of learning a language, but there is no point in practicing the pronounciations if I am not going to, for example, live in a Chinese-speaking country or become a diplomat. I learn what is convenient and useful, in this case being able to read, write, and translate Chinese effectively is good enough for the web as I rarely come into contanct with the language in real life.

Translating is a first step. Without some way to first get started with cracking the code of a language, there is no way to understand its deeper concepts fully. Translations gradually ease into thinking in the language and comprehending it not based on its relation to another.

It's interesting you should bring that up, I went to a famous linguist's (Elenor Jorden) lecture on East Asian languages while studying at Cornell, and she claimed that if it wasn't for all the characters in Chinese then the language would be ranked around a Tier 2 language or even lower (Tier 3 has moderately-easy languages such as Spanish, Swedish etc, Tier 2 has moderately-difficult languages like German and French in it, Tier 1 has very difficult languages such as Korean, Japanese and Arabic). Why? Because Chinese word order (Subject-Verb-Object) is the same as English, and all Tier 1 languages are Subject-Object-Verb which is much harder for English speakers, and also because Chinese has basically no grammar or conjugations, whereas other Tier 1 languages have an assload of grammar, and it also has no politeness / honorific ways of speech that you find in Japanese and Korean (besides that 'ni' can switch to 'nin' and some other small thing). And as for tones, they're hard but I think people tend to over-exaggerate the difficulty alittle, the factor which puts Chinese in Tier 1 is the necessity to be able to read and write alot of characters.

And also in comparison with the grammar for some of the other languages, in this case I'm thinking of Spanish, there are no stem-changing and conjugating the ending involved.

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^I remember there was an example where in english, there was a specific rule when turning a phrase into the negative, but in chinese, there is no such rule. Or maybe it was something involving "someone" and "anyone" + the word "none"...

blah, I don't know, I forgot >_____>

Mostly traditional I guess, but simplified is used by some teachers etc. :P am i seriously the only one who prefers Traditional ?? =.=

Oh, I also think Chinese is quite easy to learn...easier than french or german for example. :sweatingbullets:

I go to a traditional-based chinese school, so naturally it would attract cantonese speakers and taiwanese. It being traditional-style and all.

Chinese is in fact one of the more difficult languages to learn.

Why? Because there just is no set "alphabet". Look at the roman-based languages you mentioned - they are all simply a set of letters combined together to form words.

Sure, there are radicals, but it's not like you can learn the language from radicals alone.

Japanese seems to be half-and-half of both chinese and the whole "alphabet" system (hiragana and katana), and korean is essentially the system where you just put together various characters from the set of characters you have to form words. Sure there's pronounciation, but you can just read it.

With chinese, you can't "just read it". Even if you use pinyin or zhuyin fuhao, who knows what exactly you would be trying to say.

feng could be a whole bunch of words (風,峰,丰,封,縫,奉,逢, 灃, 僼, 崶, etc), but you wouldn't know what I was trying to say, unless of course it was painfully obvious if you looked at the words around it.

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Guest putasmileon

It's true that only writing and reading defeats one-half of the purpose of learning a language, but there is no point in practicing the pronounciations if I am not going to, for example, live in a Chinese-speaking country or become a diplomat. I learn what is convenient and useful, in this case being able to read, write, and translate Chinese effectively is good enough for the web as I rarely come into contanct with the language in real life.

Oh come on - no offense but do you think that's all Chinese is good for? More than 1/6 of the world's population is Chinese; Mandarin is the world's most spoken language; China is becoming one of the most powerful countries in the world and its economy is rising rapidly.. there are so many uses for Chinese outside of the Chinese world and becoming a diplomat..

Reading and writing isn't the most effective as 15% of people in China are illiterate.. psh haha bad reason. Ok well, still - you need to be able to speak. What is reading and writing good for without a penpal? Without blah blah blah.. yeah ok, well it's your loss for not being able to speak because you don't find it necessary (I am at a loss of reasons. I'm tired -_-)

Sure, there are radicals, but it's not like you can learn the language from radicals alone.

Radicals do help though - most of the time.

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hahaha im cantones and i need help.. i cant read.... speak... and write chinese at alll. hehe yeah im an abc =] bayarea love =]

Try the sites and post up questions.

外國人如果學國語然後也很難...

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看不懂,不會寫,不會講。

有差別嗎?

Is there a way to make the text appear clearer?

...without enlarging the window's font size...

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Guest putasmileon

看不懂,不會寫,不會講。

有差別嗎?

Is there a way to make the text appear clearer?

...without enlarging the window's font size...

lol good point.

about the font thing, unfortunately im no sure - i don't think so.. enlarging won't really matter though (just enlarge the chinese parts). :-?

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