No wonder you find it is so hard to speak like a Chinese, Perry Link, professor of Chinese at Princeton University finds it is hard too. Not only you have to lean at least 3,000 Chinese characters to get somewhere, and many of these characters are not as simple as water-“three vertical strokes, waterflow like”, but need willpower, patience and time to memorize.For westerners to learn Chinese, more evil thing would be the tones, we Chinese have such problems too-you ask about my mom, I think the question is about my horse.
According to Professor Link, while “Chinese toddlers absorb tones without noticing that they are doing so”, for “western learners ….only after two or three years do the habits begin to become natural”.
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1 comment:
Chinese is a very difficult language to learn and is classified as a "super difficult" language. If the 3,000 characters one must learn to be remotely literate aren't enough, there are the tones. For the tone deaf and musically challenged this is almost impossible. Guess I'll stick with romance languages.
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