Language Review: Chinese
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- Опубліковано 19 тра 2024
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00:00 Video
03:57 Speakly
04:51 Video
Thank you to @MildlyLinguistic for assisting with the series.
Music by Bensound
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As a indian person who never heard of china or Chinese i can confirm that your Chinese is excellent.
Okay I'm here before this blow up
@IfYouSeeSomeoneDrowningLol nah ma man I just feel like it
@@Luna-jf1ee what a stereotype wth
HUH?
Blow up
Saying "我不說中文" (I don't speak Chinese) instead of "我不會說中文" (I can't/don't know how to speak Chinese) makes it sound like you're refusing to speak it (as in "I don't drink"), which honestly fits the gigachad energy way more.
Is the 中文 the best choice here? For some reason I thought it is for written language, while there is 漢語 for the spoken. Also by Chinese we usually mean a specific dialect putonghua. So for me it a bit hard to understand what 會説中文 actually means.
@@BestHolkin
(Sorry for the long post in advance. I really have a habit of rambling esp. when it comes to languages...)
TL;DR: Using 中文 in this way is pretty normal in everyday contexts, though the word is ambiguous and does not have a consistent usage.
From my experience, lay people use the term 中文 annoyingly ambiguously (imho lol), which could either mean the whole Chinese language family or Standard Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua). But I don't think the distinction between the spoken and written language is drawn in most everyday contexts. So saying "我會說中文" or "我不會說中文" is perfectly acceptable, again, in most contexts, barring some specific circumstances.
As for 漢語, it is somehow used just as ambiguously, and is treated as a synonym of 中文, but with a more formal connotation. You don't really hear the term in daily conversations.
Within the PRC, people call Standard Chinese 普通話 (Putonghua), but they also sometimes use it interchangeably with 中文. Outside of the PRC, the term Putonghua isn't really used. In Taiwan for example, it's common to call it 國語 (the national language), which is also used interchangeably with 中文 for some reason, despite it not being technically correct since the government now recognizes multiple national languages.
Chinese-speaking linguists, on the other hand, often refer to Standard Chinese as 華語 to distinguish it from other Chinese languages, which is what I stick with, as a pedant that I am, when I try to be clear.
However, lay people by and large have not caught on to this usage, and doing so normally just confuses the hell out of them. So, in conclusion... idk what word to use when referring to Standard Chinese and it's been bugging me for years
@@the_zsriverpanda thanks for the long response, now I have a bit more context
@@BestHolkin no problem, glad it helped :)
@@BestHolkin Here's the summary.
In daily life we seldom use those academic words such as 漢語, just like most people even never hear about "Mandarin" instead of "Chinese".
We simply say 講中文 (speak Chinese) or 寫中文 (write in Chinese).
As a Chinese, I’d like to add a funny fact , we have so many dialect that different place people pronounce the same word different, and some is extremely hard to understand even for Chinese (the extreme situation happens in 2 villages, distance between them is less than 20km , cannot understand each other’s accent) but once we see the characters, we can find even in the ancient time, in the same period, people write almost the same style. This is what we call “write with the same characters, Drive with the same trail.” From qin’s 1st emperor.
ingleesh 100%
for example, the 温州话seems like Japanese
Some ppl ask and kiss at same time😂
…right.
很好的科普
as a person who has been trying to learn Chinese for 6+ years,I can confirm that I'm dying inside
where are you from bro
😂
Do not give up! Just keep going!
One day you can understand how to control this strange language.
加油～你可以的！
@@user-cr5mb3uz3g 谢谢!🤣
Good job bro😂
As a native speaker of High Valyrian living on Mars, I can confirm that your Chinese accent is solid and is more than enough to shock natives and make them spontaneously combust
High Valyrian is an actual course on LuoDingo btw..
@@whohan779 the game of thrones language??
@@nobleondynamite5157 Yep. Though I cannot vouch for how good that course actually is, but it's almost pointless anyway as it's a lesser known and unrelated conlang (when compared with Esperanto at least).
Ha
High Valyrian is a dead language. No one speaks it anymore except law professors and clergy. Pick a spoken language like Asapori Valyrian or Yunkai Valyrian so you can actually communicate with the locals when you visit.
As a Chinese person, I'd say that its difficulty depends on your target. If you just want to know the basic and impress some random native speaker, you can do it in just a couple of days. But on the way to a higher level, you will discover so many tricky things that it makes it almost impossible to archive a near native level. The problem is the vocabulary, especially the compound words. To pick the right one in the right context is even a challenge for native speakers. Because since the grammar system is so simplified, you need a gigantic amount of vocabulary to be able to make a good expression. So you can make yourself understood in Chinese fairly easily, sure. But to make your expression truly right and even beautiful is a totally different thing.
The vocabulary issue can simply be solved by consuming a lot of Chinese dramas 😂ez way
I'm gonna have to spend 2 years to become fluent arent I?
@@sasino Yes😂 And that's the way to learn every language basically
@@Cloudkirb Not just i'm afraid. Depends on how you define "fluent". My German colleague, being a passionate language learner and having been living in China for more that four years, could definitely make himself understood in writing (although with tons of mistakes). But with speaking, you have to play a guessing game with him. It's a combination of using wrong words, questionable sentence structure (yes there is definitely grammar in Chinese as well, just not that systematic as the European languages) and tonal problems.
this is actually so accurate, compound words and phrase are genuinely the hardest parts especially when you want to describe something obscure
Remember that the Chinese language has a really unique writing system compared with the latin languages, knowing how to pronounce the chinese doesn’t mean knowing how to write it, and the chinese characters are actually more closely related to the culture.
Third tone mark was upside down 😁 As a learner of Chinese, I found this video very funny, mostly correct. It's an amazing language, sounds beautiful and it is often very logical.
If you want a real challenge and a good language for your language review, try my native, Czech 😂
As a Chinese person I can confirm this videos accuracy without even watching it
ikr +10 social credit
@@urberlinwall2816 indeed 没有共产党就没有新中国
@@Trolligi agreed
@Kepler 186-F hii
我也
With learning Chinese, at first it seems super hard, but then you actually dive into learning it and so many things seem so easy and straightforward, but then moving through the language there are unexpected bits that make the language harder, such as memorizing all the dozens of synonyms a word can have and homophones and words with MANY different meanings.
I agree that the varieties of chines sound beautiful, and I love the caterpillar diagrams you drew to represent the 5 tones!
Its a lifestyle of remembering words. So many syllabels.
Here is "shi"
是事试时市十师 and so on
Sup lingo lizard I'm subscribed
@@isnisse3896 石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。施氏时时适市视狮。十时，适十狮适市。是时，适施氏适市。施氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，施氏始试食是十狮尸。食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。试释是事。
It's a story called "Story of Stone Grotto Poet Eating Lions" written in classical chinese with only the phonemes "shi, shì, shí, shī, shǐ"
@@Syuvinya then theres that
As a Chinese, the most difficult part for the Westerners are the four and half tones, I have never met any foreigners that can manage the tones but the professor at UC Riverside, Perry Link(林培瑞). Go watch an interview of him and you will be shocked how good his Mandarin is. The second hardest part is the writing system. I have been living in he states for 10yrs and now there are a ton of words I don't even remember how to write/spell. The easiest part, like the vid mentions, is the grammar, probably the easiest grammar in the world. No gender words, no tense, no honorifics, no difference between subjects and objects, no BS.
This channel is like a time capsule from 2017 with this style of satire, with some level of actual truth, I love it
The coolest thing about Chinese is that it's a perfect language for fast reading. Chinese speakers are never afraid of subtitles in movies since you just take a glance at a sentence and you will get the whole idea without even thinking about it. That's the power of logogram.
That's true btw, idk if you're being sarcastic or not, but I've been studying Chinese for just 1 year and if subtitles are mostly made of characters that I already know, I can read them pretty fast
@@sasino Yep, can confirm. I committed treason to Kim Jong Un by watching a (what I assume is North) Korean Drama's Chinese dub and subtitles. Felt dirty, but was comprehensible.
And then I watched Alice in Borderland (1st season; 2nd out now) just with Chinese subtitles and even though I can read maybe 200 characters confidently max, I understood the Sushi language much better that way. I guess, practice makes the master.
@@whohan779As a native Chinese speaker, understanding the kanji in Japanese sometimes makes you understand the context and even the meaning of the entire sentence, really useful indeed.
@@EpiCrimson Yeah, there's many occasions where a character is exactly the same (apart from the fontset, since Japanese has its own). Several simple concepts get lost in translation anyways, but sometimes it helps with synonyms as many Japanese Kanji expressions are merely outdated/deprecated Chinese ones (obviously usually different pronunciation).
For this reason I think an intermediate or below may confuse a sentence in Kanji for being Ming Dynasty or prior Chinese or in some cases even modern.
The fact that Japanese Kanji don't strictly depict one syllable, enables very condensed written speech if certain Kana aren't used (useful for gaming speedruns).
Learning Chinese first, I still think it could use a few Kana-like grammar points.
Yes true
For your next video will you review the dialect of American known as "English"? It is a backwater dialect of American spoken in an island nation that is north of France - sort of the Japan of the West. But they don't speak Japanese; they speak a dialect of American - and instead of an emperor, they have a king. For unknown reasons these islanders spell the word "color" with an extraneous "u." They are disinclined to pronounce the letter "r." Also, they refer to cookies as "biscuits." Why do they debase the American language in this way?
They also seem to hate pronouncing the letter "t". Maybe they're too busy drinking it?
Do they even have a national language? It seems every other bus stop has a different way of speaking
@@jaylewis9876 I wish american had a national language. Im not a a native american speaker and it's very hard to pick a way to pronounce some things like: neither
That'd be too hard. Which accent do you want him to review? Because there are 1, 2, 3, 4...too many to count.
Cookies are cookies, biscuits are biscuits, here in the UK.
I teach ESL at my local church & a couple of my students are from Hong Kong. One night after class a fellow student had asked them how to say something in Chinese & when they told him I decided to give it a shot as well. I had watched a couple videos on Chinese consonants & tones & had managed to reach a tolerable level of pronunciation. They absolutely flipped & continued to barrage me with phrase after Chinese phrase and showed the most joy I have ever seen from a human being whenever I stumbled through one of them. To this day they’re still trying to teach me Chinese & shower me with smiles & compliments when I do even tolerably well. I know he exaggerates about the native shock factor, but I cannot stress enough how real it is.
Wow... the part at the end about not fitting into weeb or kpop so picking Chinese was me lol. I took Chinese classes in high school and recently started learning it again. It's scary at first, but it really (seriously) is not that hard once you get the basics down. Duolingo has an okay Chinese program. It's not super fleshed out but I like it :)
As a hyper polyglot giga chad white guy who speaks Chinese fluently. I was in a park in shanghai today talking to my friends and had 3 different locals come up to me and freak out over my Chinese.
I have taken the language to an extreme level where I now speak two dialects of Chinese (Shandongese and shanghainese) for additional shock factor
Why bother? I only use taser for additional shock factor.
Lol but for real though it's Chinese hard to learn? (I guess both Mandarin and Cantonese)
Kid named Shang finger:
@@ordinarryalien HAHAHAH I died when he said that with the Hillary picture 😂😂
@@ethanclark4116 all languages require effort to learn, so that shouldn't be a barrier. Just pick the languages most useful to you
As a Chinese person I can confirm that if you can hold a Chinese conversation, we will gift you gold and dimond while doing backward somersaults.
哈哈哈，你家金子钻石堆成山啊，见到会说中文的老外就给。🙂
@@zz-sg2jf 屁幽默感没有看什么视频？
哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈
哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈哈
In a 红包 of course
我是泰国人。我喜欢学习汉语，和您的UA-cam频道。我看了您说俄语。您真非常棒。
I always like your channel.
呵呵，我也是！
The fact I’m bilingual and easily understanding him speaking about how cool And “easy” the Chinese language is, full fills me with an immense proud feeling, but as soon as I get to have time enough on my daily, like in vacations, where I doesn’t need to spent/waist (interpret this slash as you feel like to) 9 hours of my life every day at school, making me getting back home at 18 pm, I surely will learn a third language, as Italian, besides the small number of speakers, gosh I luv this language, well, that’s it, thanks for the video, Language Simp!
Edit: Im Brazilian!
As a Finn, thanks for calling our language a gigachad language. I am currently learning and also hoping to become a hyperpolyglot gigachadette
As an André, I too think Finnish is a gigachadic language. You guys are really cool. Cheers from the Maldives, Brazil
Finnish is truly a gigachad language but very difficult to learn
Yall that the saying
"Ask a finnish person to teach you finnish and you have a friend for life.
Not because they appreaciate the sentiment but because it takes exactly that long for you to learn it"
The Hungarians have unlocked cheat codes tho.
I think Finnish is amazing, how it build up vocabs like Lego.
@@MMLL369 Yea as a native Finn i can confirm it's like building legos except the legos are made of thorns and tungsten
The hardest thing in learning Chinese in my opinion is that it's ambiguous all the time.
Take "wo我 hui會 chi吃" as an example, it can mean "I will eat" or "I know how to eat" or even "I would choose to eat", depending on the context.
if u think about it english is all about context as well. when i have to translate a word to my italian friends i always ask: yeah but in which context? because english has lots of words that change the whole sentence. it’s fun if you think about it :) try to consume lots of chinese media like cartoons so u get used to those weird combinations
Go and try Korean grammar and you'll appreciate how straight forward Chinese is lol
As a Chinese, I think the "ambiguity" you said is instead a way of simplicity and concision😂 When we learn other languages, we always get so confused why there exists verb conjugation!😵💫😵💫
You've discovered the difference between analytic languages and synthetic languages. 😉The problem? How to resolve ambiguity. The solution? For analytic languages, usually auxiliary words and word order. For synthetic languages, usually word conjugation and tenses. Chinese and English are analytic languages. Spanish and Finnish are synthetic languages.
@@yuqinggus2701 english is dumb but in other languages you can write the sentence in any order and its the conjugation and inflections that make that possible. time for my racist bit - the reason china never produced great science and philosophy is because the language is too loose. languages like german are much better at constructing a complicated system of thought.
Como um brasileiro que fala brasileiro, eu posso confirmar que o seu chinês é perfeito.
@@davisemgoliaschinês ksksksks
Türk ksksksksk
Como brasileiro que hablamos portuñol, I disagree
Você é a primeira pessoa que eu já vi que fala brasileiro kkk
You're really inspiring me to unlock Chinese DLCs! Thanks from Spain!
(my default language includes Equiatorial Guinea's DLC 😏🤑😎)
please do german next, it’s the third language I’m studying and I’d love to hear your take on the language!
Will ich auch. Übrigens, auch als ein Deutschlerner, möchte ich wissen wie gut du im Deutschen bist.
@@zigsynx5364 Ich bin gay
Here's my take: Dogwater tier sentence structuring.
@@sumenetamusic8445 Digga, was meinst du damit
@@MrKoalaburger why that ? It uses a convinient case system that tells you the function of a noun in a sentence which allows for a more flexible word order.
As a heritage Chinese speaker I can confirm he absolutely shocked me with his opening monologue in super fluent Mandarin.
though his pinyin was slightly… off, it’s excusable
Meh, it's just okay
@@zacharytang3840 Its sarcasm.
@@ianknightley938 Sarcasm?
its deffffiiiinitely super gigachad fluent, of course of course
even King Jong Un would come clap
3:54 Clearer than a sunny day in Beijing xD
This video was so fun and interesting because i'm mexican and also i'm learning chinesse. The part at the variations of the verbs got me, nice videos btw
“Clearer than a sunny day in Beijing” that was clever. I pray to you for this good joke oh god of language learning and ancient albanian sign language
看老外讲学习中文的过程真的很有趣 突然发现我们习以为常的语言里居然有这么多看起来不可理喻的东西
You said Bing Chilling?
@@zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz13142 我吃
@@zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz13142 he did, for sure
@@fractal_gate UA-cam mobile has google translate installed but I’m not sure if I trust it
@@fractal_gate 他经常说反话的。 但是总之你把自己想象成一个正在学中文的老外。 中文也会有很多让你头疼的地方的
cn is really easy, so many people say its hard but it really isn't. imo the hardest part is memorizing the characters and "measure"
words. i took 2 years of cn in hs and I caught it pretty quickly, but it was easier to me because I am part Chinese, but don't speak mandarin. its grammar patterns are very similar to english, with few differences. one major factor about applying it to irl is, like many other asian languages, trying to understand what people are saying because of how fast they talk, or the regional dialect they are speaking, such as beijingers who like to say er (儿) a lot after certain words.
You nailed the reason why i did started to learn Chinese.
As a Chinese person myself, I found this video hilarious. Especially the part you talked about the characters looking like pictures.
same
characters _come_ from pictures
I started learning mandarin Chinese last year because my grandfather was Chinese and then realized 6 months later that he spoke an entirely different dialect of Chinese. Maybe it's not that different idk
chinese dialects arent technically dialects cuz dialect means its a derived language but the "dialects" are actually what chinese is derived from. so yeah theyre similar but different
Well if it was Cantonese, the written language of chinese for both are the same so if you were to write him he would understand, but if it is spoken then you may need to start over :/
Yes it's not that different, it's literally the same language.
@@WilliamParkerer Some are different languages. Related like how Italian is related to French
@@flutterwind7686The difference is not that great, even between Cantonese and Mandarin. The texts are the same.
Used to major in Mandarin before I quit to study fashion.
I think it can be quite easy to pick up the basics if you put a little bit of work into it and the tones are actually much easier than what they look like (I remember being immensely scared to mess them up just for my oral language practice teacher to say I had a fairly good accent). To me, the characters are what makes it so interesting however I’d like to learn more about dialects (mostly about Cantonese) but it seems kinda out of touch.
Also, what you said at the end of the vid is real, it’s pretty much the third way if you don’t wanna study Japanese or Korean. At least it was the case in my class at uni, even though almost every single person was a kpop stan.
VERY NICE VIDEO!!! One of the best of ads I've seen for learning Chinese. Btw, only Mandarin has no articles, Cantonese uses articles (but the speakers don't realize it)
6:49 1000000000++ social credits
Haha, nice. When you started, you sounded a bit like "小马在纽约" xiaomanyc, only that you didn't claim to speak "PERFECT Mandarin to show xyz on the streets". Same level of pronunciation.
Love your comedy about the people who SHOCK Chinese by speaking their language. And it really works. I come into a round of Chinese, they ask me "你会说中文吗？" and I answer a simple "会" (really, not more than just repeating one of the words they just asked me) and they nearly fall off their chairs and compete to praise my perfect Mandarin skills. I wondered many times if it would be worth to give up my self-respect and honor and just make money with such videos as xiaomanyc. It's just too easy to impress Chinese.
Bad thing about that is that you'll rarely get valid feedback from Chinese. They are all like "哇，中文通。", "your Chinese is perfect, I can't distinguish it from a native Chinese speaker" and so on. Even if you say "泥号，卧角小马", they'll praise you and tell you that you've already exceeded any living Chinese person in your language. In the beginning, it's motivating, later, it's frustrating because you are on your own to improve or get into this delusional world of thinking that you are really awesome while in reality, your language skills suck.
I pride myself in speaking pretty descent Mandarin with good pronunciation but if I record myself speaking longer and more complex sentences, I can still hear that I'm a foreigner. But Chinese always tell me how they wouldn't be able to distinguish me from a Chinese if they hadn't seen that I'm a 2m tall white guy who doesn't have any Chinese features. Maybe on the phone and maybe if I limit myself to shorter sentences but not for a longer conversation. Or they'll think I'm from another province and just accept the one or two tone mistakes.
Mandarin is really easy for my kids. My 3yr old could read simple sentences very easily because it's like in her picture book. One image = one word. But later, it becomes much worse because there are so many similar characters and homophones. The limitation of "syllables" makes it easy to get the pronunciation right (if you have a talent for tonal languages) if you invest enough time because as soon as you got all those right, you can basically say any new word. (ok, tones will vary if the words are spoken in a sentence but if you also got that right, nothing can stop you) I totally gave up on handwriting but can type and read more or less everything I can speak, read books, watch subtitled movies, etc.
Big shout out to you from Uzbekistan my friend, love your videos
8:00 as a mexican I can confirm this is true, we do remember a lot of tenses
Well, as a native Chinese, it's not as easy as foreigners or beginners think. To reach a level where you can carry a conversation in Chinese is not too hard, but there are two more things I would like to dress. Idioms 成語 and ancient Chinese 文言文.
Idioms are quite unique, and require a lot of learning, and they don't always mean what they directly translate to. For example, 臥薪嘗膽 means lying down and licking a bitter object. However what it actually means in a sentence is to work hard and improve. Also, the ancient Chinese is like another language on its own. Many idioms derive from these stories, and to learn the language to a high proficiency, it is necessary. One word has an extreme amount of meanings in passages, so it isn't as easy as what it is said in the video.
With this, I'd just like to share my opinions on Chinese, and how a local perceives the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese.
Every language is like that. Reaching an intermediate level is easy, but reaching an advanced level, or a native-like level is very difficult.
相较于古英文和现代英文的区别，文言文算是很好理解的了。
@@wuwoww 對，故英文我們完全看不懂。
@@wuwoww 或许是我认识较狭窄，但其实只是看你强项，所以我也挺理解的。还有，很多的教学制度也是先学文言文，所以相对就会较难。
成语和文言文之前还有量词，这个和拉丁系语言的阴阳性有一拼。
Bro, I love your videos. You finally me convinced to learn Chinese. I already know 3000ish Japanese kanji, so I have a headstart but I was pretty confused. Thank you
you actually count?
@@defectivepikachu4582 Yeah, I got my flashcards
Altho most kanji mean the same thing as hanzi their pronunciation is wayyy different
@@lorenz859 i mean idk how much i can say but counting and hard memorising just makes it worse for me. cuz chinese speakers dont really keep a tally on how many words they know its just a natural thing. also there is a logic to the words so id say for a good amount of them you dont even have to memorise it
@@defectivepikachu4582 I did RTK, that's how I know how many I know and reviewing them with my flashcards helps me store them in my memory. I agree on the fact that memorizing character compounds (actual words) is way more efficient to learn vocabulary but knowing each character in detail helps you tell apart the ones that are very similar and (assuming that you are a nerd like me and might find it useful in the long run) trains you to be able to write them down from memory.
I'm suprised that you are so young but so talented.😮❤🎉
"Clearer than a sunny day in Beijing"
How not to feel embarrassed when speaking Chinese? I usually nail accents and pronunciation with no issues. However, Mandarin Chinese makes it a bit more challenging because, well, it is trickier and the fact I cringe (at myself) somewhat creates a mental blockade. Any suggestions, please?
Don’t cringe at yourself you’re a foreigner speaking the language of course you’re nervous. My last video touched on that
No worries！Just calm down and try to employ your vocabulary to speak. The more you use them, the more you get familiar and confident. Imagine you’re singing when dealing with the tones🤣As Chinese, I feel really surprised when I hear people from other countries speak Mandarin😊加油🎉
remember how funny you sound. now you have no reason to be nervous
I had a similar experience with Vietnamese in the past. I began learning Vietnamese a while ago (stopped after some time), and while practicing the tones, even though I was all alone in my house, reproducing the tones made me cringe. A way I combat this is thinking that what I'm doing is not cringe, but really cool instead. It's like I forcefully switch the way I see it, from cringe to cool, and try to convince me of that. I hope that helps!
Chinese is hard and not as universal as English, so Chinese people will be impressed even if you just babble a few words, also at least me and the people around me are definitely guys that are willing to help if you have problems with it.
Thank you. Chinese is clearly very simple. I don't know why I thought it may be difficult to learn
Maybe in traditional sense, which involves handwriting, yes, it is very diffucult. But I agree that to learn to read, speak and write digitally with pinyin, it's rather easy.
you have to understand that handwriting those radicals and tones are not that common in all countries. like we have way too many characters, some even useless tbh and they all have different combinations and are hard to remember for foreigners. it’s not like chinese people don’t struggle with other languages, especially losing their accent
Classical Chinese is another level. Should not skip it, because Chinese people, especially highly educated ones, use them often. Knowledge of Chinese history is quite crucial when discussing high level topics.
As a person who can speak mandarin I can confirm your chinese has an accent
7:33 As a Chinese, I was troubled by these sentence patterns when I was learning English, because there are no such words in Chinese
I like how he goes over a super in-depth and well thought-out explanation of what the language has to offer along with a stance on why you should or shouldn't learn the language, and then ranks it on a completely arbitrary scale that has nothing to do with the rest of the video.
As someone who has learned mandarin for years (i'm fluent) i can say that the writing and tones do make the language very difficult but the main difficulty is actually the fact that one word (single syllable words) can have DOZENS, yes DOZENS of different meanings. Like take "shi" for example, not only it has 4 tones with 4 different meanings, EACH TONE HAS LIKE 20 DIFFERENT MEANINGS! Seriously! So not even tones are enough to tell the words apart, you just gotta guess it from the context. And "shi" isn't an exception, almost all Chinese words have like dozens of different meanings attributed to the same EXACT sound with the same tone. This is nuts, because in most other languages, you can only find 4-5 words like that whereas in Chinese its the ENTIRE LANGUAGE. And the fact that grammar is insanely easy and simple, does not make it easier, it makes it HARDER! because simple grammar means no clue to whether a word is a noun, adjective, verb or conjunction word. Take English for ex, any word that ends with "-tion" is a noun, or at least 99% of the time. When you hear "-ing" at the end of a word, you can safely assume its a verb. But in Chinese, you don't have any of those clues! So understanding a conversation thoroughly is very difficult. In fact, Chinese might be the only language I can think of where listening is harder than speaking. Pretty much any other language in the world, you'd start understanding before you can speak, but with simple grammar, starting to form sentences in Chinese actually takes much less time than properly understanding what is being told to you. Also, thanks for the great content and I'd love to watch if you review my native language; Turkish!
How many meanings does "wo" have?
@@tyunpeters3170 I just checked it on Pleco dictionary and came up with 25 meanings in 3 different tones..
Its very interesting for me as a Chinese cuz I never got the chance to stand at your point of view. thanks for sharing your experience, I never thought that grammar could be the difficult part 🙃
@@cottonbomb8272 grammar itself is easy. It's the simplicity of the grammar that makes the other aspects of Chinese harder. But I'm glad you appreciated my comment.
@@tyunpeters3170 我(I, me)窝(nest, curl)喔(wow)握(handle)卧(lay down)沃(fertile)倭(short)涡(vortex)莴(lettuce), etc... and the list just goes on if you type it in the Chinese input system😂
as a Chinese person I can confirm that the tonal markers are caterpillars. I would also recommend Cantonese over Mandarin, glory to Canton, as there are 7 tones so it's less obviously when u mess up.
That was the best madarin with american intonation introduction I´ve seem so far.
As a native Mandarin speaker, I went crazy when my Brazilian friend could speak better Mandarin than my half Chinese friend
is ur half chinese friend, half northerner?
lol
no but jokes aside they really do have a phonetic alphabet that was used before pinyin was introduced.
it was called zhuyin aka bopomofo and it's still used in taiwan,, if you want to learn mandarin it helps to try it
In my opinion, Pinyin is much better lol
@@sasino zhuyin is better if you dont wanna mix it up with english. example: x
zhengma is supreme
@@stevenaguilera9202 thats an input method not an alphabet lol
@@sasino im literally chinese but when i learnt pinyin my spoken manderin got so much worse because all of a sudden i was relating it to english when the phonetics are actually completely different. i still use pinyin to type tho
Some Chinese tourists lent me an umbrella on a rainy day. I said the only word I could say in Chinese “thank you” and it was like it was me who helped them.
As for my job I contact people from China regulary.
Some of them (engineers and managers from Chinese factories) have troubles speaking english with me. Their phrasing just makes no sense.
We barely understood each other until I figured out the way to how to understand them.
If I translated their phrase to my native language word by word - it turned out to be a perfectly fine phrase, that I could hear from a factory worker in my country.
So I think it wouldn't be that hard to learn Chinese phrasing, as it's similar to my native language.
However I have absolutely no idea, where should I start.
Memorizing an alphabet of 50 000 symbols?
Learning how to speak without writing anything?
Learning Pinyin?
That's why I never started learning Chinese, yet I really want to do it...
first learn pinyin and learn pinyin to chinese charaters
I was just about to take a sip of water but hadn't quite made it when you called Mandarin Chinese "TikTok Language". I'm so grateful for the timing because just a few seconds later and I would have done a spit take all over my keyboard! 🤣
@☞ོ☜ོ 66 years ago 🤐
@☞ོ☜ོ 66 years ago Covid language, you mean the language we are using now?
As you pointed out in the end Mandarin Chinese is simple, the issue is just memorizing everything. I have a musical background and have an easy time picking up accents and tones, and I also have good pictoral memory so I haven't struggled a ton with the characters, but it still takes so much time.
if u have problems with writing and memorizing characters, do look up flashcards and apps that help you with that! if u notice most radicals (the simples ones in particular) are shaped like the meaning they carry: so a tree looks like a tree, fire looks like a burning fire and so on. the more you write it, read it, and use it the more it will be cemented in your memory. also do learn a word in context, so like a phrase instead of the word alone and write it down and repeat it 7 times
If you are good at pictorial memory, as a Chinese person I have an idea for you. Maybe when you encounter one specific character that is hard to memory or easy to be confused, you can search for how it changed exactly from the ancient oracle bone script to the modern Chinese character since the ancient shape are mostly related to a specific graph describing this character. If this character is separable, you can check the meaning and the evolution route of each part and think about why it is composed of these parts. Just a humble suggestion. Since Chinese character has been developed for thousands of years, a lot of characters seems very different to the ancient shape of it, but the ancient shape is very easy to understand since it is just shape of things it is describing.🤔 For example the character 女 and 母 seems quite different in modern Chinese, but in the ancient script, 母 are only 女 with tits, that might make it easier to memory in my opinion.🤔
@@tongyangwu966 That's exactly what I did. There's a fantastic book called The Empire of Signs written by a famous Swedish sinologist, and it presents Chinese history through the development of characters. It really made things click for me back in high school.
@@Arat1t1 Thank you for your recommendation about the book! And if you have specific questions about Chinese and want to know how native speakers see it, please feel free to ask here.
Chinese characters are highly independent in ancient Chinese and there are so many characters that have same pronunciations, so it makes traditional Chinese poems extremely rhyming, that's the thing that I love the most about Chinese.
For me learning Chinese was quite easy at first, but when you come to the point where you have to read longer sentences and all the characters are just next to each other without any spaces it becomes a nightmare :D.
as a native Chinese, sometimes i feel the same way too.
I’d really like you to do Spanish next. Such a popular language across so many countries, and I’d love to see a review!
Mexican**
@@JM-vu2tt Cuban**, right next to Korean, Vietnamese, and the covered Soviet. Also hoping for Ice language soon.
De acuerdo!!
Chileno***
@@xXxSkyViperxXx el LanguageSimp Asi lo llama, mexican, pero sí el chileno es otro idioma totalmente 😏
As a Mexican native speaker it can tell that your chinesse accent is that good that i made do a backflip and i almost broke mi neck, it's simply amazing
Speaking and being fluent in modern day Mandarin will take a few years but honestly, it’s not that hard. The hardest part is when you’re passed fluent level and have to understand at the native Chinese level which includes lots of classical Chinese such as idioms, couplets, ancient literary references, poems, opera etc.
Among every languages/dialects under the Chinese category/cluster, Mandarin is definitely the easier one. Lots of Chinese speakers usually speak up to 2 or even 4 languages in their daily lives, depending on their location and family history. My point is that if you want to learn Chinese for merely daily purpose, the stakes are pretty low; if you want to learn something more than that, such as literature or multiple languages, the stakes can be extremely high, and it usually requires lifelong dedication.
I’m Russian who is learning hindi, chinese and english. I can say that Russian is the hardest of them 😂😂😂
Let's take a russian grammar and combine it with chinese writing system. We'll have a super giga-chad language
Russian is so easy dude, it's a properly standardized language that has tons of content to learn from. Try learning something harder like Polish, Czech or even Slovenian. Multiple types of conjugations and declensions for each gender, without any pattern behind it, single plural AND Dual conjugation.
Namaste ! love from India
Я согласен, Я американец кто изучается русский через две года и ещё постоянно делаю ошибки, очевидно.
@@ethanclark4116 Братан, правильнее будет написать: Я согласен, я американец, который изучает русский уже два года и ещё постоянно делает ошибки.
I'd love to see a video on Japanese, specifically part touching on it's learning difficulty vs Chinese for a native English speaker.
nice vid youre cool af dude thanks for the info!
看在你很努力的份上，给你个赞啦😆
As a chinese person i can confirm i will definitely give someone diamond armor if a foreigner speak chinese
As a fluent Mandarin speaker, I can confirm this video is 100% correct.
I can also confirm that Italian is the best language in the world and you should start learning it next.
Why Italian?
After all, it's the country where the American alphabet was invented
Well, the difficulty of learning any language will be exponential when you dig deeper, however, I will say the Chinese language is extreme. To learn to the level to keep you survive in China is ridiculously easy, coz we don't have tense, case, etc, the grammar is pretty much linear and logic at that level. However, when you go higher level, then it's exponentially getting difficult, the tune gets more strict since you need to be accurate in expressing long information, vocabulary gets huge to express subtle meaning, let alone the 4 characters idioms that's not only extremely simplified syllable output, yet expresses loads of meaning by just 4 syllabes combined, which is not only convenient, but also required. Then different combinations of words, orders, emphasis, tunes to show subtle differentiation of logic, let alone that's when the logic of grammar gets irregular
Chinese being placed at mid tier is definitely accurate. Trying to reach a near native level of fluency in adulthood is the equivalent of trying to get to the Olympics in a sport you have never played. Even with all of your best efforts, you'll realistically never be better than rec league level. It takes a certain level of A*ti*m to keep learning Chinese to get to a level that your skills are objectively impressive. Xiao Ma, everyone's favorite 'foreigner speaking Chinese' clickbait, has been learning Mandarin for over 10 years and his speaking skills are on the same level of what most English speakers could accomplish through seriously studying French or Spanish for 2 years
Even though the Chinese tones confuse me, especially Mandarin tones (Cantonese tones feel more distinguishable to me, and that's coming from a native Mexican speaker), I feel like the words, the grammar and the logic is on point. And yeah, 漢字 is quite complex, but once I remember a character, I never forget it, I can read stuff in Chinese, Japanese and understand it pretty easily just by looking at the characters, whereas Korean, which has an alphabetic writing system, isn't that intuitive, as you actually have to learn the words. It's a very special language for me, so it's nice that my favorite alpha male is talking about it.
A new Language Simp video always inspires me to learn languages!
As a Brazilian, I don't learn Chinese because it sounds like a cute couple in love talking to each other all the time, so I can't take it seriously so much
你真的年轻有为，后生可畏。加油⛽⛽⛽
6:22 😂😂😂 he's a man of tradition
I would like you to review German next.. i have been learning it for a few months
Yeah man, i would like that also
Sorry, I'm just really alone
as a German I would be interested in that too lol
Yes, I am learning german as well
@@globusyep5603 A2? A1?
Most Chinese don’t know about the fifth tone. I am impressed that you know!
"no case, no article, no plural..."
Me, someone who's used to synthetic lang: "The bloody frak you mean easy mate?"
I wonder if knowing Vietnamese would give you a little leg up in learning Chinese? (our language is tonal and we import a decent amount of Chinese vocab)
BTW: Language Simp, pls review the Vietnamese language. And don't worry, we don't hate Americans :))
it would. some words actually sound very similar.
Yes, same if you speak Korean or Japanese, you could occasionally confuse some words' meaning due to them changing meaning in different ways in these languages but overall it would be helpful.
I think Chinese should be easy for Vietnamese speakers. After all, Chinese grammar is easy and the difficulty for English speakers lies mainly with the tones, lack of similar words to English and writing system. As a Viet speaker, the first point is trivial and the second point is somewhat reduced because Vietnamese has Chinese loanwords.
btw vitenamese has simplified to phonetic orthodology which equals to pinyin in Chinese, and it is very different from Chinese characters
Yes. The tones are much easier than in Vietnamese.
As an aspiring Chinese learn, I found this video great
It might not be morphological changes, but verb complements definitely fill in neatly for declension shenanigans in other languages. It's like learning an additional preposition to use with very specific phrases, and you got lots of nuanced synonyms as you'd expect... so not necessarily that simple
1:50 You forgot Spain, we have shops managed by Chinese people which we call "los chinos" or "the Chinese ones"
in vladivostok, far east of russia, many folks study chinese (even in schools as a second foreign language), and it’s not a big deal, kind of common thing to learn. my own cousin sister studied it and used to live and work in china for 7 years. i studied japanese, and everyone asked me “why not chinese” when they find out about that (that’s how common chinese to learn). korean is the most popular of course.
@@user-kh6mr5up4j i heard that take too - “korean is easiest among asian languages”. did you studied korean?
作為華人，我認為您的中文非常好，語音語調都很到位👏👍
你确定？
@@shootforthestars7116 对于外国人来说他的语音语调已经很标准了。
哈哈哈哈“我不說中文！”
@@shootforthestars7116 他在畫餅
一般般
Chinese is only one language in which I couldn't determine any sound. There was some chinese students in my university and their conversation seemed to me like a noise of wind in the trees😅
@@FriendlyandKindI don’t think so,Japanese is different
small correction:
in the video, you said the third tone was ^, which is really down up, couldn't find the symbol
Señor Language Simp, sería posible una "review" sobre la lengua Italiana?
wait .. my brain.. 👁️👄👁️
@Derpy4you why was it in spanish
@@tunistick8044 It's mexican you ignorant
@@widepootis my bad 😔😔
@@tunistick8044 I thought we all here were language learners so I just spoke in my language
A video on Icelandic would be cool! Ég er að læra þetta tungumál og mér finnst íslenska frábært!
Is islenska Icelandic for Iceland? I find it important when you learn a new language to learn what the language speakers call their native countries and themselves. Like for English the launage is called English , the land is called England and a person from England is called English.
I talk to Chinese people all the time, and the most typical reaction is, “Oh, you can speak Chinese”, or “You speak Chinese pretty well”. The reason they “shocked” in those videos is because of how they purposefully set it up by speaking English first and then randomly switching.
Chinese could still be confusing at times, cuz there could be several meaning and several pronunciations to one character, eg. the classic joke pharse "我一把把把把住了"
I think you should review a conlang. My favorite one is Dutch. Can you do a language review for Dutch please?
Niederlandisch ist ein Gräuel. Do German instead
Hahahahah, I am Chinese and I almost dropped dead from laughing..You are just too funny.. haha
i used to learn chinese at school, and even though i wasnt rly into it and knew barely a few phrases, when i met a chinese woman in the airport she was so excited about me learning it. she took a photo with me and gave me a big amount of some spicy chinese food. i was fkin amazed by it in my 13
It is actually very easy to learn how to speak Chinese but it is totally different level if you want to speak it. grammarly speaking, Chinese is one of the easiest.
Yes the start is indeed not thaaat hard.
But if you dig deeper you will encounter things like the importance of Measure Words, these are used in many languages for certain things, i.e. a bottle of beer or a bouquet of flowers. But you can also simply say a beer, in Chinese you cannot. You have to use the correct measure word (at least if you want to shock locals, using the overall working 个 (ge) exposes you as beta).
Despite measure words not being the same as articles, they work in a similar way and you have to connect each noun to its correct category of measure words (for example pants and spaghetti fall in the same because both are long and movable)
Things like these (yes there are more) made me slow down and eventually quit learning Chinese, the progress was just too slow for me. Especially my local chinese restaurant owner I tried to talk to used a southern dialect and I couldn't understand a single word. Very frustrating.
It was fun and mindblowing overall to learn chinese, it made me think in new ways and has broadened my understanding of language as a whole.
What I think it does lack is variety in words. All words are made out of only ~430 or so syllables. The words are hard to distinguish, at least for europeans.
Maybe I'll give it another try when I reach Kaufman age.
tldr: I agree with mid tier
europeans language are also hard for asia language speaker
Can you do Cantonese also? Live your content !
Low level Chinese is easy, however, if you want to learn it well, it's pretty hard, Chinese comes with lots of historical and cultural references that is still pretty widely used today, which can go over your head if you don't understand it. It's still pretty hard imo.
I cannot overstate the irony of the ads playing during this video