How do you say "General Tso, you may've been a ruthless warmonger but your chicken is delectable!"?
Insert Stereotypical Asian Riff and Gong Sound Here
During my last year at Holbrook Travel in Gainesville, my friend Julie, an Aussie who had lived in Taiwan for a while, helped me start learning Mandarin Chinese. Lately, I've had the urge to take it up again. I've been at it with Mandarin for several weeks now.
Learning Chinese is completely different from learning other Indo-European languages. With Spanish, French, Pork-u-guese, and Eyetalian, you have literally thousands of cognates that English shares with Romance languages. English speakers have a head start with Germanic tongues, because English is itself a Germanic language. You can even find cognates in the Slavic languages.
In Chinese, verbal concepts are completely different. Depending upon what you want to say, the rules of grammar can be simple or dumbfoundingly obtuse. There are very few loanwords. Words are mono- or bisyllabic, and in most cases, the meaning depends on the tone in which the word is spoken. For instance, the word "Ma" can mean five different things, depending upon how you say it. For instance, "Ma Ma Ma Ma" can mean "Did mother curse out the horse?" provided you get the tones right.
The tones can be flat, rising, rising then falling, falling, and neutral. In order to start learning it, you really have to hear it spoken.
I downloaded a couple of different courses for that purpose. I listen to 'em on the way to and from work. The best course I've found is one called Pimsleur. It makes you repeat phrases and words in different combinations until you get it right. The other ones (notably the Living Language series) are merely lists of phrases read out loud. These tend to be overly complicated and are really no good as a learning tool, unless you know what the components of the phrases mean.
Chinese for Dummies isn't bad at all, but the CD is not an audio course, it's just the spoken dialogues. They are spoken extremely clearly though.
When the opportunity presents itself, I attempt to speak to the employees at Chinese restaurants. Sometimes they aren't Chinese at all. Or they only speak Cantonese, which is for all practical purposes a different language. Often, a Cantonese speaker will say they speak Mandarin, but it comes out sounding completely different than what I'm learning. But when they do speak it, they are usually really happy to indulge you, and they open up, which they would not likely do otherwise. I can hold a very limited coversation now, whereas that was out of the question before I started hitting the Pimsleur course. I was rather proud of myself when I asked, in a complete sentence, "could you please bring me a pair of chopsticks?" The guy bowed, repeated, and was back in a flash with 'em.
"Yes" and "No" are "She" (pronounced "shuhh!") and "Bu she." Literally, these mean "is" and "no is." I crack up every single time I hear "bu she" because it sounds like "bullshit."
During my last year at Holbrook Travel in Gainesville, my friend Julie, an Aussie who had lived in Taiwan for a while, helped me start learning Mandarin Chinese. Lately, I've had the urge to take it up again. I've been at it with Mandarin for several weeks now.
Learning Chinese is completely different from learning other Indo-European languages. With Spanish, French, Pork-u-guese, and Eyetalian, you have literally thousands of cognates that English shares with Romance languages. English speakers have a head start with Germanic tongues, because English is itself a Germanic language. You can even find cognates in the Slavic languages.
In Chinese, verbal concepts are completely different. Depending upon what you want to say, the rules of grammar can be simple or dumbfoundingly obtuse. There are very few loanwords. Words are mono- or bisyllabic, and in most cases, the meaning depends on the tone in which the word is spoken. For instance, the word "Ma" can mean five different things, depending upon how you say it. For instance, "Ma Ma Ma Ma" can mean "Did mother curse out the horse?" provided you get the tones right.
The tones can be flat, rising, rising then falling, falling, and neutral. In order to start learning it, you really have to hear it spoken.
I downloaded a couple of different courses for that purpose. I listen to 'em on the way to and from work. The best course I've found is one called Pimsleur. It makes you repeat phrases and words in different combinations until you get it right. The other ones (notably the Living Language series) are merely lists of phrases read out loud. These tend to be overly complicated and are really no good as a learning tool, unless you know what the components of the phrases mean.
Chinese for Dummies isn't bad at all, but the CD is not an audio course, it's just the spoken dialogues. They are spoken extremely clearly though.
When the opportunity presents itself, I attempt to speak to the employees at Chinese restaurants. Sometimes they aren't Chinese at all. Or they only speak Cantonese, which is for all practical purposes a different language. Often, a Cantonese speaker will say they speak Mandarin, but it comes out sounding completely different than what I'm learning. But when they do speak it, they are usually really happy to indulge you, and they open up, which they would not likely do otherwise. I can hold a very limited coversation now, whereas that was out of the question before I started hitting the Pimsleur course. I was rather proud of myself when I asked, in a complete sentence, "could you please bring me a pair of chopsticks?" The guy bowed, repeated, and was back in a flash with 'em.
"Yes" and "No" are "She" (pronounced "shuhh!") and "Bu she." Literally, these mean "is" and "no is." I crack up every single time I hear "bu she" because it sounds like "bullshit."