Em.'s In & Outs

I've been learning putonghua (mandarin Chinese) for three weeks today. Before I started learning it, I thought languages were easy to speak, ok to read and hard to write. Now I changed my mind! Mandarin is hard to speak, read and write! But it surprised me to also see that it was not as eccletic as I thought.

One character in mandarin corresponds to one syllab. Its writing is structured with a finite amount of type of strikes, and works with three alphabets. One is conceptual (for example, a roof on top of a woman is used to mean ''peacefulness''), one is hieroglyph-like (what you see if what you get) and one that is based on system of keys that come back in each word of a given category (for example, all insects will have a certain key in front of the character).


The prononciation is the funniest part. For me who's learning with a book, it's very hard to know if I do it right. Fortunately, there is the pinyin, the phonetic alphabet that translates the pictograms into latin letters. Even then though, there are four types of intonations. One in which your voice stays still, one in which it goes down on a letter, one in which it goes up, and another one on which it goes down and then up on the same letter. And making mistakes can bring up funny stuff! For example, saying ''ni'' with the wrong tone can make people think one said ''fat'' instead of ''you'' !!! Ah, ah :)

For good tricks on learning chinese online, check out Stian's blog.