Quote:
Originally Posted by Ramses
Well, there are 'only' 4 tones to master, and it's not THAT hard. Yes, learning the Hanzi can be a challenge, but it's also great fun when you get the hang of it. And yes, the vocab is totally different, but the grammar is just so straight-forward and at times easy, so that makes a lot better.
Depends on the languages. For example; French and Spanish. At the same time it'll confuse you. But for example Spanish and Turkish (like I do at the moment)? I think it's perfectly possible because the two languages are so completely different.
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It depends on the teacher and student; Some are taught 4 (like in Mainland China), while others are taught 5 (like in Taiwan). Where 5 tones is taught, they consider words like ma, and ba, and the end of questions and sentences (In other words, particles), to have a "dot" tone. Also, when a word is repeated twice it also has a "dot" tone.
Oh, and if you think Mandarin is hard because of tones, trying learning Cantonese. 6.
Grammar of Mandarin is actually relatively easy; relatively little conjugation compared to Indo-European languages, no cases, and very easy to modify words, making them adjectives, nouns, adverbs, etc. The hardest would probably be the writing system, which requires the memorization of every single character. Chinese is also slightly phonetic though. For more complex characters, there is the part called the "radical", which gives the basic idea or meaning. Then the other part can help with pronounciation.
For example, 铃. The left side is the "metal" radical, while the right side itself (令) would be pronounced "ling". This character is also pronounced the same way ("ling"), but it means "bell", as a bell is made out of metal.
There are also "top" radicals, like in the word 宇 (yu). The top is the "protect" radical (宀， it is not a radical by itself, but is derived from the word 保 [bao]). The bottom (于) is pronounced "yu". This word together is also pronounced in the same way, but together with 宙，it means universe. (宇宙)