quisiera presentar...

Maria · #1 May 21, 2006, 11:16 PM

!Hola todos! Me llamo Maria, soy de rusia, ahora vivo en china, trabajo en una tasca espanola/latina, mucho deseo estudiar el espanol, pero aun hablo mui mal..

In fact i major in chinese language, cuz I have to, but I've always been adoring Spanish, I took some additional courses when I was in high school, but for very short time cuz of lack of time. And now, beeing completely sick and tired of chinnese after a year of practising it in a local universuty, i decided to start getting more into spanish, so i use some book for self-teaching, internet resources and chat with my spanish speaking friends in latin bar/restaurant la Habana where I sing and manage guest relations. Already found out quite a lot surfing thru this forums and hope to get more using your help! Muchas gracias!

EnglishStudent · #2 May 24, 2006, 04:25 PM

Hola Maria

Bienvenida a este sitio. Soy un estudiante de inglés y vivo en México(soy mexicano); me pongo a tus ordenes para alguna duda que tengas con el español. Entonces ¿hablas ruso, chino, inglés y estás aprendiendo español?

Maria · #3 May 24, 2006, 08:34 PM

¡Hola student! I wish I could reply to you in spanish, but mine is still very bad, it's now for me like kinda hobby which I always wanted but always had not enough time for it; as for russian, it doesn't count cuz it's my native language

; as for english, well, the whole world is using it; as for chinese, then yeah, that's a true challenge and I don't know how many more years it'll take to be perfect, cuz it's completely different from anything and totally outta logic!

***Tomisimo*** · #4 May 25, 2006, 09:37 AM

I've never studied Chinese, but I was told that it's pretty simple in some aspects, such as there are no verb conjugations at all, no different tenses etc, but the hard part is tone, you can say the same sounds with a different tone and it means something totally different. I can't remember the example exactly but it was something like

ma

with a rising tone, falling tone, and a curved tone, all mean something different like mom, horse etc.

is this right?

Eric · #5 May 25, 2006, 09:49 AM

You're right. Chinese is a language heavily based on tones. I studied it for a while too before I started Spanish. I thought the most difficult part of Chinese was the tones and their way of putting words together. Also, learning to write the characters is difficult. The word "ma" can mean "horse, mother, to scold etc..." based on which tone you apply to it. It however is a very pretty language in my opinion.

Maria · #6 May 26, 2006, 10:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tomisimo

...
is this right?

Right! And there were quite a few times when I nearly got in trouble because of that wrong tone thing. Also in the south of china people have a lot of bad accents and speech deffects, e.g. they make no difference between the sounds "s" and "sh", so once i was supposed to have an appointment at 10 p.m. ("shi"), as I was said, but i was really really late for it, cause in fact it was at 4 p.m. ("si"). I also know a guy who came to a shop and said that he wants milk, but because of the wrong tone it came out like he wants woman's breast

Writing the characters is pretty hard, it's like a kinda art. The logic of the language is also something completely different from any other language, sometimes it's just freaking you out! And by the way, "ma" can also mean marijuana, and also to curse or to say rude swear words to smb.