Monday, February 16, 2015

A Puzzle I Call The Chinese Language

The Chinese language is an interesting one. One that I find to be intriguing but at the same time so frustrating. It’s like a puzzle that I cannot quite solve yet. Here are just some of the many differences I have noticed with the language.
  1. No verb conjugation. AT ALL. This is by far my favorite part. You just add a word that shows the various tense, but the verb never changes.
  2. There are 10 different meanings for the same word. It all depends on the tone. You have to hear whether the tone is one constant pitch, is rising and then falling or what. A lot of times, you just know by the context of the conversation.
  3. There are so many dialects of Chinese that typically use the same written form but complete different spoken form. Sometimes, they can understand the ‘standard’ version of Chinese, and then reply back in their dialect which is just oh so helpful!
  4. They like to repeat things a lot. If they say ‘OK’, they will often say it three to ten times. I’m not quite sure why, but this happens so much.
  5. My favorite part of the language is hearing a phone call end. There is a lot of ‘mm’ ‘hao’ ‘bye’ and ‘xing’ sounds that happen and of course more than once. It takes a good minute to even two minutes just to confirm the phone call is ending in a serious of repeated noises by each caller.
  6. The written language itself is my favorite. The characters normally build off of each other. For example, if you see 电 it means electricity, so then 电脑 means electrical brain or computer. As for pronunciation, you pretty much need to know the character in order to try and pronounce it which is rather frustrating.

This all leads up to me saying that I have a love/hate relationship with Chinese. I have been trying to improve my skills each and every day, but I just feel as though I've been at this plateau.

With that being said, I would like to announce this new language learning opportunity that I have received! I will be going to Brazil and volunteering for the Olympics in 2016, and so now I will start learning Portuguese!