Posted on 01/29/2006 4:43:03 PM PST by Dick Bachert
I heard the speaking electronic dictionary. Most amazing.
Frankly, I think we'll better off having our kids learn Chinese as a second language than French and Spanish - two worthless languages in my opinion. French is too sissy and there is pretty much no literature of note in Spanish. Most people who speak Spanish are from cultures that never produced very much of intellectual worth. Most people who speak French, well, you probably wouldn't want to speak with them anyhow.
At least with German and Italian, you can appreciate some operas and literature. But even those languages are falling by the wayside.
I heard the quote as it was given. It was cold that day: the Hudson River was frozen, and nobody had yet heard of Global Warming or Algore.
Wow! How old are you?
Because I can't remember a time when the drumbeat of glacier melting doom wasn't the backbeat of all that is wrong with civilization.
Did that start during the Jurassic Period?
On the other hand, China has many different languages, most of them based more or less on the same phonemes as English, but with the addition of "tone" on each word (rather than on phrases as is the case with English). Underlying all the Chinese languages is a single written language which uses an elaborate set of ideographs instead of an alphabet or syllabary (like Cherokee and Korean).
Structurally English and Chinese are quite similar, and you don't need much instruction to begin to figure out how to read an older version of Chinese ideographs commonly found on Chinese restaurant menus ~ I call it "kitchen Chinese".
If you can get hold of a book on Sioux Indian sign language, take it with you to any exhibit or display of Shang Dynasty characters ~ those are the oldest Chinese characters. You will be able to translate those characters with your sign language as a guide.
A reasonably intelligent person should be able to learn to hear and speak some degree of Chinese in one of the standard versions (Mandarin, Cantonese or Shanghainaise) in a few months with the assistance of a native speaker. Depending on your inherent capabilities, you can probably start figuring out old fashioned characters (as noted above) right away. The more modern stuff will take much longer.
Tell you what, there's nothing more satisfying than figuring out what a line (or column) of Chinese characters is trying to say to you.
Mine speaks in Simplified, Traditional, English and German. It's very cool. It's also only as big as a bar of soap and opens to a mini QWERTY keyboard and has a credit card sized LCD screen. They sell for about $100 in Shanghai.
I've had trouble picking up the "sound" however, and really have a hard time telling the difference between MA and MA and MA and MA and MA. It's almost as bad as differentiating among PA, PA, PA, PA, and PA. OMA, I get!
Nor I. Chinese is very hard for English-speakers but is a mind-broadening experience. Can't hurt.
I think he's referring to PinYin.
I think this is good. Learning Chinese will simulate the minds of kids. Although there are many characters, the number of sounds in Mandarin Chinese is relatively constricted. Also the characters can be broken down into combinations of limited number of "radicals". I wish I had begun to learn Chinese in school instead of many years later.
I'll bet the alledged parents will be surprised to hear this.
Not for Europeans, because English has so many commonalities in words and grammar. But if you want to know how difficult it is to understand Chinese, read on.
According to the University of Michigan, the person with average lauguage abilities takes about 480 hours to become a level-2 proficiency in Swahili, Spanish or Dutch. It takes that same student about 720 hours for Farsi, Indonesian, Hebrew and Thai. However, it takes about 1,320 hours to to become level-2 proficienty in Chinese.
So the Chicagoan students are wasting their precious time on a language that is about useful to Westerners as pig-latin.
Sure, just speak English while moving your lips to other words.
Bummer.
The radicals make it far easier to read the characters. Radicals organize Chinese characters like a BTree index. By learning to see the radicals, you can an idea of what a character is even if you don't know the rest of the character, and you can learn faster.
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