> -----Original Message----- > From: Gonzalo Diethelm [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > In general I've lived in and around > > Pittsburgh most of my life excluding two year I spent in Taiwan > > (I'm fluent in Mandarin as well). > > Wow! Going from common knowledge, I would have thought it was > impossible to learn any of the Chinese {languages,dialects} if > you were not born there. From you experience, was it really > hard to learn the language? Did you find it specially difficult > in terms of the pronunciation (accentuation) nuances? > > Just curious,
Well, it wasn't easy. Chinese grammar is not very difficult once you get the hang of it. So, for conversational skills, the real difficulty lies in the tones. For example the same sound "ma" can mean mother, horse, to scold, and other things depending on the tone it is given. This leads to tongue twister like sentences such as "ma(1) ma(5) ma(4) ma(3) ma(5)" where the numbers indicate the tone and the sentence means "Did mother scold the horse?" Personally I think the real difficulty in Chinese lies in literacy. Learning Chinese characters is mostly just a matter of brute memorization and it's a huge task. It's not like you can easily sound out an unfamiliar character. I spent two months in a training center before leaving to Taiwan. It was an intense period and gave me just enough of a foundation as to not get myself killed while I was over there. After that it was simply a matter of speaking it every day and learning as much as possible. After about six months I could hold a simple conversation and after about a year I was fairly fluent conversationally. Since returning to the US it's been difficult for me to maintain my language skills, but I do what I can. I definitely enjoy the language though. jaaron --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
