• Howdy! Welcome to our community of more than 130.000 members devoted to web hosting. This is a great place to get special offers from web hosts and post your own requests or ads. To start posting sign up here. Cheers! /Peo, FreeWebSpace.net
managed wordpress hosting

grammar help?

a gel or an gel? You see, sometimes it doesn't even have to begin with a vowel. In this case, the word has two different meanings depending on whether you say a or an.
Or, from an different gle you might just think I'm a cretin.
 
Originally posted by lucifer
mandarin chinese has very few word only a few thousand but they reuse them with different tones so they mean different things.
Click to expand...
Not quite correct. There are thousands of thousands of different words/characters in the Mandarin Chinese langauge, not "only a few thousand". It's the pronounciation thingy that only has a coupla rules and tones. China has this 5 thousand year history, the people there must've invented millions of words in that time! And there are still new words being created today, just like with English.

I read this Time report once about languages, I think it mentioned English or some other European language as the most difficult, and they listed some reasons that I forgot. But I know for sure it wasn't Japanese or Chinese.

IMO, though, I think Arabian is the hardest. Who da hell understands those squiggly lines? I still find it hard to believe that people can actually decipher their words... :eek:
 
LeX my handwritten english is pretty sqigly it's not just arabic. You may be right about the chinese All my info comes via my friend who lived out there a while, but he's on holiday so I can't be expected to remember all those facts ;)
 
Well in my native tongue every letter is significant.

So my language is the best. Very simple! Foreigners who visit my country learns it so quickly.
 
Pinoy is what we call ourselves. Like Americans called themselves "yanks"

It's not tagalog! I was referring to Cebuano.

No intonation! Words are pronounced by how they are spelled. No rules in spelling that I know of.
 
where you from??


back to chinese my friend who knows about these things has returned. he said that there are only 8 strokes in mandarin though you get these arty caligraphers who make up extra ones for aestetic appeal - so it should be well easy :D ;)
 
Originally posted by lucifer
back to chinese my friend who knows about these things has returned. he said that there are only 8 strokes in mandarin though you get these arty caligraphers who make up extra ones for aestetic appeal - so it should be well easy :D ;)
Click to expand...
That's just the phonetical stuff, you learn that when you're six years old. Real Chinese has like 20 strokes in each word. Some more advanced words have even more.
 
Coolin is partially correct. The 8 stroke thing is the basic and most commonly used lines in Chinese (words), but there are more than just 8 ways of slashing the brush. As Coolin puts it, there are "more advanced" strokes around. :p But it has nothing to do with phonetics.
 
no they only have 8

in english we have 26 letters which we combine to make words

they have 8 strokes that they combine to make the characters

they do also have traditional and modern (simpler versions that the cultural revolution introduced - this was a positive thing and is behind huge increases in literacy in the population since)
 
Go english language!

lol


Does your brain ever try to take words/sentences apart and then analyze them in every way possible? Darn high school for teaching us to analyze every thing until it's just a pile of mental mush :(
 
Ok, so the Chinese have an 8 letter alphabet. Try this, put each stroke in a unique position in 20 different places to from a word. And then you have to memorize it because there is no "sounding-out." Try having 20 letter words for every word there is in the English language, let's see how good you are at that. Now imagine that you can't sound out the word, is it getting harder? Now, you have to place the letters not size by side, by one on top of the other, some diagonal, some slightly higher than others, some directly below, some at a certain angle to another. If you call that simple, which you did, you have obviously mistaken Chinese as a language.

Chinese easy? I think not.
 
No, the Chinese language has 37 "alphabets", and each character/word is "assigned" to specific a combination of "alphabet(s)", which tells you how the word is read. I agree, it's really hard to learn, they teach at least 9 years of Chinese at school! It's a pain to memorize all the different characters/words - what each looks like and how it differs from others and how each one is pronounced in different situations. Yup, complicated.

And there are more than 8 strokes, believe me.
 
well I still go with my friend he lived out there and has a degree in the stuff

I know he can work out meanings of characters he doesn't know because it has sub characters like water or person in it but it's not easy to get exactly the meaning more a vauge sense of it

I do know that it's not easy

I love crazy scripts Thai is very good
 
Thanks for correcting me LeX, my knowledge of Chinese may be better than some others on these forums, but they are far from perfect. I always seem to have one mistake in each of my posts :(
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top