My son’s senior high school lately announced it would offer evening courses of instruction for adult beginners, who desired to discover the Mandarin Oriental. My first reaction was, “That’s impossible! How could a local British speaker much like me, really be prepared to become familiar with a language as difficult as Chinese?”.
I would dismiss the concept, when you are curious as well as very thinking about China’s growing importance on the planet, I figured I ought to learn more.
And So I enquired and very soon later on, I enrolled in to the 12 week course. Now after nine training, I’ve discovered to my huge surprise that understanding how to speak Chinese Mandarin is really a great deal simpler than you may think…
You will find three big factors I’ve discovered, which make learning Mandarin a lot simpler than I imagined. They are alphabet, grammar and sentence construction.
1. Alphabet
When many people consider Chinese, they consider individuals intricate pictogram figures employed for writing china language. I certainly did. And my first reaction was which i just would be unable to get a handle on an alphabet which was so not the same as British. However , the pictograms give no indication regarding the way the Chinese words should seem.
Well, my breakthrough discovery was that it’s not necessary to discover the pictograms, should you mainly would like to speak Chinese in conversation. Rather, you should use the phonetic system known as “Pinyin”.
It was invented within the 1950’s through the Chinese themselves and also has been adopted like a standard. It is dependant on the Western a,b,c alphabet, much like British. This will make it much simpler to understand to talk Mandarin words. You can easily repeat the words because they are written phonetically in Pinyin – it’s not necessary to learn and browse the pictograms.
2. Grammar
Then there’s the grammar – this is much simpler than you may imagine. There aren’t any tenses to have a problem with. No past tense with no future tense, only the present tense!
Anybody that has battled having a European language like French or Italian, will understand immediately just how much this simplifies the training. To be able to make reference to occasions previously or even the future, in Mandarin you need to place a mention of the time in to the sentence, for instance “yesterday” or “in a few days”.
Also, spoken test is not masculine or feminine, so it’s not necessary to learn this complexity either.
3. Sentence Construction
Thirdly, there’s the sentence construction in Mandarin. This really is must simpler than British. Mandarin is nearly spoken in “keywords”.
It’s concise and to the stage, with very couple of words placed for “padding”. For instance, in British we may say, “Do you want something to consume?”. In Mandarin the same generally is, “You consume what?”.
Mandarin sentences are often very direct. Should you stated the same in British, it might frequently be looked at as very rude. However it sure makes Mandarin Chinese simpler to understand!
So to conclude, if you are looking at understanding how to speak Mandarin Chinese but they are hesitating, then I recommend you simply give it a try. You may be as surprised like me, because when fast you are able to get it.
Taking up conversational mandarin Singapore classes will help you learn the nuances of the language to the extent that you will be able to speak it fluently. You will be able to converse in Mandarin and understand what others are talking about.
