Putin Says His 'Young Family Members' Speak Chinese

Newsweek ^ | 9/3/2024 | Ryan Chan

[marcusmaximus]

Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed on Monday that his "young family members" are fluent Mandarin Chinese speakers.

"Some of my family members, the little ones, speak Chinese too—they speak it fluently," Putin told students at a secondary school in Kyzyl, the capital of the Republic of Tuva, about 2,800 miles east of Moscow. The school offers instruction in both Russian and Tuvan languages, according to the Kremlin.

-snip-

Putin did not specify which of his family members speak Mandarin Chinese, the world's second most widely spoken language with 1.1 billion speakers. He mentioned the importance of learning this language from a Russian economic perspective amid growing ties with its quasi-ally China.

"Now we have a growing interest in the Chinese language. Why? Because there are a lot of contacts! Business is developing, a lot of partners are appearing between Russia and China. We already have a trade turnover of $230 billion, and the volume is increasing," he said to students.

[Teacher317]

Side question compared to learning to speak mandarin, how difficult is it to learn to write it?

Learning to speak is only slightly more challenging than other languages, because we share far less with that language than say Spanish or German or any Romance language... getting the "tones" correct is the biggest bugaboo for me. Flat, rising (as we do for asking a question), falling, falling-then-rising, and neutral (which is different from flat, LOL).

The famous line is "ma-ma-ma-ma-ma"... said correctly, those are 5 very different words... mother, horse, hemp, to scold, and the word that essentially replaces our question mark. (I THINK those were the 5 definitions... I could be wrong on the middle two, lol. It's been a while for me.)

As for writing, again to do it the right way, not only are their symbols really strange to our eyes, but the ORDER that you make the individual lines literally matters. It's weird, but it is what it is.

But in the end, just like anything else, as you spend time doing it, and reinforcing it through effort, it'll come to you. Chinese children learn it, your old brain can do it too... just not as fast. :)

At my best, I was up to 1200 spoken words, and reading about 800. My main test was newspaper articles and kids textbooks. I eventually went from highlighting the words that I knew, all the way to highlighting the words that I didn't know yet. Took less than 15 months. "Fluency" is typically described as 2000 words, so another 15 months, and I would've been there. But Life took me down yet another different path. Oh well!