Anonymous A started this discussion 3 weeks ago#137,894
...it's honestly looking like we're heading into a new Chinese golden age. Should I start learning Mandarin? It seems like a massive pain in the ass to learn.
Mr. Bloody Lemonade !0JqexkOGBc double-posted this 3 weeks ago, 4 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,459,403
It’s actually not a huge pain in the ass to learn. It’s incredibly logical, it’s just the logic is different from English.
For example: 你好 means "hello" but it’s really just 你 + 好, 你 means you, 好 means good, except 好 is really just 女 + 子, 女 means woman and 子 means child, because a woman having a child is a good thing. There’s a logic to it the more characters you learn. The grammar is also very logical, for example, in English you’d say "What’s your name?" and "My name is X." So in English you change the order of the words around, but in Chinese "What’s your name?" is "你叫什么名字?" And "My name is X" is "我叫X。" So unlike in English the word order for questions and statements is the same.
(There’s also no grammatical gender or conjugating verbs)
Mr. Bloody Lemonade !0JqexkOGBc triple-posted this 3 weeks ago, 1 minute later, 2 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,459,404
You just phrase questions like statements and you have a filler word where the missing information should go, in the example, it’s literally, 你叫什么名字 = (literal translation: You called what name)
Mr. Bloody Lemonade !0JqexkOGBc quadruple-posted this 3 weeks ago, 2 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[^][v]#1,459,406
The fact that it’s tonal makes people think it’s harder, but because it’s tonal, it has more sounds than English so they don’t need words to be as many syllables long, so most words in Chinese are pretty short.