Learn Foreign Languages

Some language learners find it very useful to find the middle language for any language they learn. Once you understand the language structure revealed by a middle language, getting to the target language is much easier. It’s interesting to look for a middle language especially when you learn Chinese.

There’s no alphabet in Chinese. Each symbol or character has its independent meaning. You must learn each one of them. It is said that there are as many as eighty thousand symbols in Chinese. But there’s nothing to fear about. If you know a few hundred of them, you can communicate fairly well with people. With knowledge of one or two thousand characters, you can make speeches like an orator. Fewer than six thousand will enable you to read any Chinese newspaper.

However, there are still 214 basic elements that build almost every Chinese symbol. If you learn these radicals by family groups, you will move forward much quicker and simpler.

The problem that you will come across in your Chinese learning is that the pronunciation of each symbol is always and only one syllable. That means that one sound could represent various things. A slight touch of this can be found in English – a pier has nothing to do with a peer – but just think about it: how much duplication you would have if each word in the language was limited to one syllable only. The term for “chopsticks” [quai zi] is two separate symbols in Chinese and that for “bus” [gong gong qi che] is four! A Chinese textbook for Americans that makes no pretense of being complete lists seventy- five different meanings for the sound shih alone!

Chinese differentiates among the various possibilities of meaning by the use of tones. Each Chinese word is assigned a specific tone, like a musical note. Mandarin Chinese has four tones, Cantonese has nine.