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Very good MF. Very good. Now, why didn't you want me to hit you again? Hm???

:mad:

That was sooo underhanded. *Glares*
 
*respects mf*

*eats respect*

oh, and Derny, I'm just randomly wondering, how's the Chinese coming along?
(I keep tags on everyone I know of that is learning/thinking of learning Chinese/anything related to China/Asia... I'm just wierd that way. :eek:)
 
Tones. hehe. Be glad that you're not learning Cantonese. :D I don't know why, but people always find Mandarin tones easier to learn than Cantonese tones...

Sorry, ranting. *slips out of thread*
 
Dernhelm said:
We have many languages as a result of sin, but that does not mean that they are in and of themselves bad. ;)

As for Chinese, I'm studying it w/ Rosetta Stone software, and I'll be learning it in a class the normal way starting in August. I think its difficulty depends on how you learn--what you find hard. It's unrelated to any Romance languages, obviously, so you don't have those similarities to help you. On the other hand, you don't have to deal with declensions! It's all in the words and word order. But I don't know that much about it yet. ;)
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Declensions are easy. It's the conjugations that are hard...

Lossëndil said:
We're patient? Is that sarcasm?

oh, wait. I've got American genes too. Wonder which genes I should blame for this fault?
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The blue ones.
 
Lossëndil said:
Tones. hehe. Be glad that you're not learning Cantonese. :D I don't know why, but people always find Mandarin tones easier to learn than Cantonese tones...

Sorry, ranting. *slips out of thread*
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Do they have more/different ones? I find the tones themselves fairly easy, but remembering which one goes on which word is a little harder.
 
*ignores Oly*
Dernhelm said:
Do they have more/different ones? I find the tones themselves fairly easy, but remembering which one goes on which word is a little harder.
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Mandarin ones are more distinct. Though almost a native speaker of Cantonese, I still have trouble telling the tones apart. The difference between tones can be very small. (and yet it sounds so much more... sing-songish than Mandarin!)

Also, there are more tones. Though I'm not sure how many there actually are. Standard Cantonese dictionaries say that there are nine tones, but three of those tones are repeated, only with a glottal stop. So technically there are only six tones. However, two of these tomes sound exactly the same to me, so do they count as one, or two tones? My father says that there are six tones (not counting the glottal stops), but he also says that one of those tones is very rarely used in Hong Kong. I recognized the tone, and words that go with it. But that one tones is not in the dictionary, it is only used in spoken Cantonese. If he says there are six tones, including the unique one, then there should only be five tones (not including glottal stops) in the dictionary. Yet there are six.

Have I succeeded in confusing you yet? (I've been haunted by the problem for two years already...)
 
Interesting. I can see that people might have trouble learning it, if even native speakers are unsure! I have to say, I've gathered that perhaps the . . . accent? of Mandarin is not the nicest sounding--exaggerated R's, etc., but I'm glad that it is more learnable. ;)
 
I think you imagined it.

And the accent! I'm a Southerner, so we never exagerate our "r". :rolleyes: And we always mix up our "s" and"sh" and"c" and "ch" and so on.
 
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