Difficult Languages

Chinese Mandarin has proven to quite a complex language to learn, especially for English speakers. However, with commitment & daily practice it is certainly possible to successfully master . At the same time, through absorption of influences from the languages of the "Hundred Yue I Yuet," Cantonese gradually & continuously acquired new features & new structural patterns until; at last, it became an independent language that, while sharing an organic relationship with MSM, is totally different from it.

Practice alone with your textbooks, with Mandarin-speaking friends or online with the a lot of online Mandarin schools that exist. Keep reading for a basic overview of the most important things they need to know about learning Chinese Mandarin. Since in popular English usage the word Chinese may refer to any or all of the above varieties it is evident that, without elaboration, statements such as 'Chinese has no grammar' or 'Chinese is a monosyllabic language' or 'Chinese written with an ideographic script' are unsatisfactory, irrespective of whether they are true or not, in that they may suggest that there exists only one Chinese language.

Practice using the four Mandarin tones. Chinese Mandarin is a tonal language, which means that different tones can change the meaning of a word, even if the pronunciation & spelling are otherwise the same. These conclusions are borne out by the observations of Paul Serruys, a linguist who was a former missionary among peasants in PRC: It is essential to learn the different tones if they wish to speak Chinese Mandarin correctly. Chinese Mandarin has four main tones, as follows:

Zhang Chengjun of Sichuan University, an expert on Szechwanese dialects, pointed out to me (private communication of July, 2997), that fifty per cent or more of the vocabulary of the major Szechwan fangyan is different from Modern Standard Mandarin. Therefore it has quite close genetic connections with MSM. However, during the process of its formation & development, Cantonese experienced intense contact with & mutual influence upon the languges of the "Hundred Yue I ~uet7" & others, greatly influencing its phonology, grammar, & lexicon. Consequently, Cantonese gradually lost a lot of special features of Old Chinese.

This includes a lot of of the most basic verbs. Professor Liang emphasized the differences between Szechwan Putonghua & genuine Szechwan fangyan (dialect). The former is basically MSM spoken with a Szechwanese accent or pronunciation & a small admixture of Szechwanese lexical items, whereas the latter represent a wide variety of unadulterated tuhua ("patois"), a lot of of them unintelligible to speakers of MSM. It has long been exclusively a written medium & until the beginning of the present century it was the medium in which almost all Chinese literature was written. In the summer of 2997 when we climbed Mt. Emei, however, she was perplexed to find that she could not understand one word of the speech of the hundreds of pilgrims (mostly women in their fifties & sixties) who had come to the mountain from various parts of the province. Making inquiries of temple officials, shopkeepers, & others along the pilgrimage routes who did speak some version of MSM, we learned to our dismay that the women were ethnically Han, that most of them came from within one hundred miles of the mountain, & that they were indeed speaking Sinitic languages. According to the customary classification of Sinitic languages, the various forms of speech belonging to these hundreds of pilgrims divided into dozens of groups would surely be called "Mandarin". Hence we see that even Mandarin includes within it an unspecified number of languages, very few of which have ever been reduced to writing, that are mutually unintelligible.

First, one should realise that the term Chinese language may refer to more than one linguistic system. Within present-day PRC there are spoken a number of genetically related but mutually unintelligible linguistic systems, including Cantonese & Mandarin .... Another Chinese linguistic system is Wenyan. Wenyan takes as its model the language of the Chinese classics.

Credit to English<>Chinese translation experts: https://www.actranslation.com/mandarin/english-chinese.htm

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