Welcome again to everybody! Please sit down, stay awhile and enjoy our groups most honoured tradition, our weekly discussion thread! Oh and if you find the giant spoon, please let me know, I seem to have miss placed it when changing the thread over this week.
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Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory, try z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
Thank a lot, also I want to start learning mandarin, is it really as hard as some people make it out to be? For now I only know Italian and (broken) English
No not at all Comrade. it’s not that “hard” as some people say.
is it difficult ? Yes !
I started learning it since I was little, so. that is why is very easy for me to read and write it but I don’t know how to speak it.
The writing is hard but grammar is fairly simple compared to European languages.
Your written English is great.
Chinese is a fun language to learn. I could write out characters all day. There’s a real poetry and logic to the stroke order and ‘radicals’ (one of the building blocks of the characters). Each character contains a clue as to its meaning and it’s pronunciation.
The Communists simplified the characters and introduced ‘pinyin’ to improve literacy.
Some of the basic characters are a picture of their meaning. For example a ‘person’ is a stick man without arms. There’s a character with two of these, which means crowd/group. ‘Big’ is stickman with their arms outstretched.
The grammar is straightforward enough. And you can look forward to the day when you come across Mǎ kè sī and realise what it means.
You’ll be able to get to a decent level in 6 months to a couple of years, depending on how much you study each day. Afterwards, as you’ll know from learning English and growing up with Italian, that you can spend the rest of your life improving (and still want to learn more) but you will be able to enjoy Chinese texts, audio, movies, etc. So it will be an enjoyable process.
Give it a go!
Unfortunately, I had to put Chinese aside. I focused on Spanish instead, using the ‘listening-reading’ method (LR). The creator of LR claims that learning to listen to and speak Chinese with LR takes about the same time as it takes to learn any language with the method. The time-consuming bit is learning to read and write, but she claims that this is much faster once you already understand the spoken language (which takes 250+ hours of LR).
(If you search Lemmygrad for LR, Listening-Reading, Princeton, and maybe Sally Rooney or Ken Follett, you should see some my other comments explaining this method and listing some Chinese resources.)