Learning Mandarin with Greg

As with all languages, slang presents a challenge for understanding in Mandarin. When understanding writing in a language, there are several steps:

• Recognize which characters have been written
• Form the characters into words
• Form sentences from the words
• Try to work out what was really meant

A good example of the difficulty in the last step is a word like “sick” in English. When you are first learning English, it’s pretty clear that it means “ill”. But various generations of teens decided it could also mean “really good”. Think how confusing that is to a newcomer to the language.

2018-09-01

People who haven’t spent time learning about Chinese often presume that there is one core language, and perhaps a series of local variations, much the same way that this happens with English and, likely, all languages.

The challenge with Chinese is that when you refer to “the Chinese Language”, you are referring to a family of languages, not to a single language. There are many things that the Chinese dialects share in common (for example many can use most of the same written characters) but it’s important to understand how very different the dialects are.

2018-08-25

When anyone starts learning to read or write Chinese, there are two basic barriers:

• Understanding the writing and how it’s pronounced
• Understanding the meaning of what’s written

Now when people start to learn Chinese, it’s tough to tackle both at once, so the usual starting point is to use what’s called 拼音 (or Pīnyīn). Pīnyīn is a schema for Romanizing the characters, basically so they are familiar to people who use alphabets based on that, like English.

2018-08-18

In an earlier post, I discussed the difference between traditional Chinese characters and the simplified versions. What I didn’t address in that post, is who uses which, and (importantly) which is best to learn.

The answer to this question is changing over time.

Adherents to traditional characters point out how much richer many of the characters are. Ironically though, there are characters that started more simplified, but which became more complex over time, and the current simplified character is closer to the historical one.

2018-08-11

Last week, I discussed the meaning of simplified vs traditional Chinese characters. I had discussed the differences in them, and pointed out that in most sentences, there are only a few characters that are different between the character sets.

So, it would seem that the obvious question is why we can’t then just simply translate between the two character sets.

Ironically, it is the simplification process itself that has made this difficult.

2018-08-04

In a recent post, I talked about the benefits I’d gained by learning to read Chinese, or at least getting better at it.

A curious question that I get from people sometimes, is about “learning to read Mandarin”. I have to explain that Mandarin is a dialect (as is Cantonese) not a written language. I’ll write more about dialects another time.

One of the upsides of learning to read Chinese nowadays is that it doesn’t matter so much what dialect someone speaks, the written form is pretty much the same, well almost…

2018-07-28

I have a lot of Asian friends, and one thing that’s always surprised me is the number who can speak, but who cannot read or write. They are perfectly fluent speakers of their language, as they learned to speak from their parents and families, but they never learned to read and write.

So when I decided to learn to speak Mandarin Chinese, I was wondering if I should spend the extra effort to learn to read and write.

2018-07-13

Anyone that knows me well will have heard me talking at some time over the last few years, about learning Mandarin. At a SQL conference the other day, I had a few people asking me about it because they were interested in learning about it, and a couple wondering why I’d learn it in the first place.

The first reason for this is how prevalent the language already is and how much more prevalent it will be.

2018-07-06

It’s hard to believe that we’re back to Christmas time. I just wanted to take a moment to thank all those who’ve read my blog during the year and look forward to great interactions again next year.

It’s been a big year for us. I’ve moved to a new blog, moved to a new website, and moved to a new house. All have been “entertaining” but I’m happy with the outcome in each case.

2017-12-21

I had a former colleague ask me the other day if he should learn Cantonese or Mandarin. He was going to spend a few months in Hong Kong and southern China.

Here are my opinions. I’m sure there are many who might differ but this is how I see it today.

Hong Kong is a tricky one. A large number of people there can speak Mandarin given the difficult relationship between “mainland” China and Hong Kong, even locals who can speak it don’t treat you the same as if you speak Cantonese. Many just aren’t happy about aspects of how China now runs Hong Kong. But the way that I see it, is that resist as they might, they will be “integrated”.

2016-03-21