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BraveHome -> RE: Does WITP increase player's knowledge (2/26/2005 5:33:33 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: AmiralLaurent
Do you really find English more difficult than Chinese ?
In Chinese (and many languages of the area, Thai and Vietnamese for example), most words are very short and have up to 5 to 7 meanings.
Example: "Han" may mean "house" (low tone), "dog" (middle tone), "to sleep" (high tone), "red curry rice with chicken" (rising tone), "f..k" (falling tone) or "fat" (rising then falling tone).
In every country I went I learned during the first days the basic words of everyday life (Hello, Thanks you, How do you do, Good bye, How much and so on) and it made life a lot easier (and people I met a lot friendlier) except in SE Asia, where I was never able to say anything correctly.
As for English, most non-native English speakers (me include) don't know and use grammar rules and pronunciations vary widly in the world. I travelled a lot and used English to communicate in Europe, N America, Asia and S America (and French in Africa) and had always to wait 1-2 days in every country before hearing correctly what people said when they spoke English.
I was not saying I found English more difficult (being a native speaker helps, sometimes [:D]). I was referring to what my language professors were saying about teaching English to non-native speakers. And I should have been more specific about the Chinese, too -- I was referring to Mandarin (with its four basic and one neutral tone), not Cantonese (with its nine tones, nearly impossible for non-natives to speak well). Once you get used to the idea of the tone having as intimate a part of a word's meaning as consonants and syllables, it's not hard to progress in Mandarin. The reason it's considered 'easier' to learn to speak is there are few if any rules for grammar. No conjugations, no declensions, no 'tenses', no changes to words for being a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, etc.
The only difficulty occurs when you're in Taiwan in 1973 (during its martial law period), with a Chinese textbook printed in Mainland China. Then you have to do some pretty fast talking (in any language you can muster!) to avoid being thrown in jail by the local DA....[8|]
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