Chinese : no prepositions , no tenses , no articles Also Chinese : every word has 5 different meanings and pronunciations
@samwang993
5 жыл бұрын
not every word,a word that has different pronunciations is very few
@CultureDTCTV
5 жыл бұрын
@@samwang993 It's a hyperbole but ok
@1969mmoldovan
5 жыл бұрын
@@samwang993 Not a word, but a syllable can or may be pronounced with a different tone of 5 and the meaning of the given syllable can or may vary significantly. :-)
@samwang993
5 жыл бұрын
@@1969mmoldovan That is right, in mandarin, a syllable can be pronounced with 4 tone, in cantonese, there are 9 tones, Im not Cantonese , my dialect has 8 tones. Complicate Chinese ,right ?😝🤣
@Ven_de_Thiel
5 жыл бұрын
You mean Japanese :-P
@JPMatty
5 жыл бұрын
As a native Chinese speaker, I think your explanation makes a lot of sense. Great job!
@smoaktree
5 жыл бұрын
I have a question. So you can't speak precisely in Chinese? Like in his example when he said "I will have been eating pizza for 5 minutes when you arrive" he said it's very precise future/past tense. Does that mean that you can't do this in Chinese? He also mentioned that in English we have plurals like Dog and Dogs. Does that mean that in Chinese you can't tell if it's 1 dog or multiple dogs?
@diyart816
4 жыл бұрын
Clarke Art In Chinese we use adverbs to express the tense. There’s no need to change the form of verbs and it’s very easy to understand.
@Kalakarboys7807
4 жыл бұрын
H
@yeww.3099
3 жыл бұрын
@@smoaktree these are two questions you got there, lol
@foongsteven
3 жыл бұрын
@@smoaktree We don't have "good", "better", "best" kind of stuff. We have "good", "more good", and "most good". So it's very literal. For tenses, we use separate adverbs instead of conjugating the verb. E.g., "I am eating" (E) --> "I presently eat" (C)..... "I ate" (E) ---> "I eat already" (C).....
@ZZZMMMZZZMMMWWW
5 жыл бұрын
I'm not sure if Chinese is the hardest to learn, but sure Chinese character is beautiful.
@hlanbarjar
5 жыл бұрын
Yeah .. I agree. But it's hardest to learn and memorize!!! Dx
@bandjslapland6715
5 жыл бұрын
No Arabic is the hardest language
@vikingmr.1229
5 жыл бұрын
Hungarians : Hold my beer.
@patataking9326
5 жыл бұрын
Not when I m writing tho lol
@tiredcatman7381
4 жыл бұрын
*Laughs in more than 10 Spanish dialects *
@yin3331
5 жыл бұрын
Chinese:火车 汽车 自行车 摩托车 English :Train car bicycle motorcycle
Thank you for posting this video. As a native Chinese speaker, I've always complained about the complexity of English when it comes to naming. One of the biggest challenges for me: it is almost impossible for me to understand 100% what my family doctor is trying to tell me, as I get lost in the complex terms used. Most of the illnesses or conditions have specific names and to me they are not descriptive. For example, diabetes, which is actually called "sugary-urine disease". Leukaemia, which is called "white-blood cell illness" in Chinese. I had so much hard time when just trying to fill in the in-take form when I first registered with a clinic. Another strange thing I can think of is in geometry/math. In english, there are "triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, ...", in Chinese, there are “three-sided shape, four-sided shape, five-sided shape, six-sided shape, seven-sided shape, ...". You get the idea. The same goes for "months" and "days in a week" (January as opposed to Month One, Monday as opposed to Week Day One). To me, the Chinese language system is more like a building block system: you learn the basic, and once familiarized, you can understand and create new elements easily as all you need is just the foundation (we have 3500 common characters and these are all you need for almost everything including in academic studies). English, even though it does have some "building blocks", to fully master it requires a way larger vocabulary. Also the sentence structure in English makes it very difficult for one to follow when it comes to describing complex ideas. Take most of the legal documents as examples (i.e. contracts). However, I can see why learning Chinese is hard for beginners, as all of the elements are very foreign for a Latin based language user. To associate a pronunciation with a character could present quite a bit challenge to start. English, on the other hand, how it spells is how it sounds (usually), creating a way smaller barrier for beginners.
@jaiyuzivert
4 жыл бұрын
I agree, I think English is especially hard because of the different figures of speech and all the slang used in conversations (mainly youth I find). My native tongue is Cantonese.
@pasik8884
4 жыл бұрын
Awesome analysis.❤️
@Krakaet
3 жыл бұрын
So, part of this is because English mixes a lot of terms from a lot of different languages. The terms you brought up, especially medical or geometric terms, have strong origins in the Greek language when you think about things like Leukemia (from the Greek word "Leukos" meaning "white, clear," and "Haima" meaining "blood"). Shapes, as well. . . . quadrilateral, pentagon, heptagon, hexagon, octagon are all logically consistent with the prefix denoting the number (penta is 5) and the suffix denoting the word angle (the Greek word "Gonia"). Though, you may ask, why is a triangle just triangle instead of trigon? i don't really know. However, they are ALL polygons, as "poly" just means "many". The same goes for the days of the week and the months of the year, except that the origin tends to be from Latin and the names of the months typically relate to the Latin God for which they are named, except for August which is named after the Emperor Augustus and September, October, November, and December which relate to the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month of the Roman calendar which began in March instead of January. In sum, Chinese has the benefit of being a very insular language really in its own family. English is comprised of terms from many different languages; there really aren't any outside influences on the Chinese language to muddle things up. So, that might be why things aren't as consistent in English as compared to Chinese.
@aakaak1712
2 жыл бұрын
Right, and there are only ~14 different strokes that makes up ~200 meaningful radicals that are then used to make up ~3500 common characters. Some ppl just tell foreigners that we have over 35000 characters as if they are completely random symbols. Not to mention 1/3 of the characters' pronunciations can actually be deduced from the character itself.
@silvervixen007
5 жыл бұрын
I studied French for a decade and also lived in France for 2 years and I still feel like my Chinese is better than my French after 3 years of studying
@pasik8884
4 жыл бұрын
Wow that is really ridiculous. 😁 Which nationality do you belong to? And did you live in China when you were learning Chinese?
@Sprinkling_waters
4 жыл бұрын
silvervixen007 I learned french in school for five years and a half and my French still sucks!! Not that I like french anyways!!
@stevenliu1377
5 жыл бұрын
It depends on what proficiency level you are talking about. Chinese is a fairly easy language to pick up if you just want to be able to communicate in your daily lives, certainly a lot easier than, say, Russian or Polish, either of which easily puts the Germanic and Romance languages to shame on difficulty. Mastering Chinese, on the other hand, is very difficult. The differences in the expressiveness of somebody proficient in Chinese and somebody highly proficient in Chinese are night and day, whether you are talking about casual conversations, written vernacular works, or just your garden variety League of Legend shoutcasts.
@quackykwulala5066
5 жыл бұрын
wait what does league have to do with chinese lol im just curious
@aguyontheinternet271
5 жыл бұрын
@@quackykwulala5066 Lots of people play League in China.
@quackykwulala5066
5 жыл бұрын
@@aguyontheinternet271 ah go IG!
@mapotofu1841
5 жыл бұрын
@@quackykwulala5066
@patrykdrzyzga-movieactor
2 жыл бұрын
I am polish guy WHO LEARNING MANDARIN ALMOST ONE YEAR AND MY FRIENDS FROM CHINA SAY THE POLISH IS VERY HARD AND ALMOST EVERYONE OF THEM SAY THAT THE GRAMMARY IS THE HARDEST IN THIS LANGUAGE :p
@sky_horangi
5 жыл бұрын
Thank you for the awesome video! From my experience - I am a native Serbian speaker, I've been learning English since the 3rd grade in elementary school, so I'm pretty much fluent in it, and I learned Russian in middle and high school. I am interested in Easter Asian cultures, especially in the traditional aspect, and about a year and a half ago, I decided to start learning the Korean language. Korean used Chinese characters in writing until 1446., and many things in Korean language take roots from Chinese. I've come to realize that it would be helpful to learn Chinese as well, because the meaning of the words in Korean is defined or explained well by 한자 or 汉字 - the Chinese characters. Not only Korean, but some other Asian languages are based on Chinese. Learning more about Eastern languages, now I see that they are much more logical and effective than the other languages that I speak. It's just that we're not familiar enough with the characters and that's why it seems so difficult, but actually it is very simple.
@blackhorse7553
5 жыл бұрын
You are correct. Chinese is easy and the language sounds so good. listening to chinese sound helps alot
@sky_horangi
5 жыл бұрын
@@blackhorse7553 I'm happy that you like Chinese. Good luck with your studying!
@huaxiagao
5 жыл бұрын
@@sky_horangi Korean used Chinese writing not until 1446 , it's until 1970. 韩国 1970年起以谚文逐渐取代汉字
@sky_horangi
5 жыл бұрын
@@huaxiagao Oh Really?? Hmm I wonder why did I found it's until 1446. 。 Anyway, thank you for the useful information. 谢谢你 ~
@Harry-jx2di
5 жыл бұрын
@@sky_horangi He is right, it is in the 1980s. Korean started to use less Chinese character in magazines, newspaper, books as the new generation didn't learn Chinese in 谚文世代.
@lowfans
5 жыл бұрын
Chinese haven't created a new word for a few hundreds years .but still keep up with the development of science and technology of the world ..no mater what is happening or discovering in the scientific field .Chinese characters can name it and express it .
@albumwhite7879
4 жыл бұрын
That’s right, when their is a new thing comes out, we just need to put two words together and make a new workda
@albumwhite7879
4 жыл бұрын
Word
@stevenaguilera9202
4 жыл бұрын
@@albumwhite7879 English does the exact same thing most of the time; we use tons of greek and latin prefixes and suffixes to create new words.
@sextuplemillionsellersfan7961
3 жыл бұрын
The most amazing things about Chinese for me is when translating foreign terms We don’t translate the sound like Japanese and Korean, we translate the entire words into meaningful Chinese terms (if you understand what I mean) Transformer for example, translated to Japanese and Korean are just English word pronounced in Korean and Japanese way. Whereas Chinese, the translation for Transformer is 变形金刚 (biàn xíng jīn gāng), it means king kong/steel that can transform, if you watch the movie you instantly understand how well done the translation is.
@Monalisabubebube
5 жыл бұрын
Is Mandarin Chinese the hardest language to learn? *Laughs in Cantonese*
@msl4797
5 жыл бұрын
TRUE
@fanofsiu82
5 жыл бұрын
Is Cantonese the hardest language to learn? Laughs in Teochew
@MrLangam
5 жыл бұрын
Don't forgot Shanghainese, Hakka, Minnanhua.. holy shit.. As much as I want to learn these languages, it's freaking hard without materials.
@lettuce8635
5 жыл бұрын
patrick chan, no really. Putonghua is like easy mode. Writing transitional Chinese and speaking Cantonese will cause you to break down in hives.
@fanofsiu82
5 жыл бұрын
@@lettuce8635 what about speaking Hokkien and writing ancient Chinese?
@knguyennguyen5559
5 жыл бұрын
I think this really comes down to how close your language is to Chinese. I, for example, am from Vietnam, my only mother tongue is Vietnamese and I’ve been learning English for roughly 10 years now and Chinese for more than 1 year. To me, English is definitely the harder one since its grammar and vocabulary are completely foreign, it took me like 5-6 years to be able to hold a normal conversation and to be able to listen and understand what others are speaking. On the hand, Chinese and Vietnam share deep roots: most of Vietnamese vocabulary came from Chinese, our language has 6 tones, our pronunciation bears similarities to Chinese dialects like Minnan and Cantonese and even Mandarin. Not only that, our grammar structures are basically the same and also idiom (成语) has some that are the same. Right now I can understand to a certain extant what a Chinese person is saying after just more than 1 years, a lot faster than my English learning experience
@Ethan-vj5mt
4 жыл бұрын
Laughs in Arabic
@ponta1162
3 жыл бұрын
Cantonese and Hokkien language are also languages, not "dialects"
@fenixglp
5 жыл бұрын
Chinese is more logical, for expressing the same meaning, it is the shortest in length. The hard part is mainly the reading and writing For daily speaking is not as difficult if you are not too bad at tones.
@Sprinkling_waters
4 жыл бұрын
FeniX Gu I agree!! Even though I already spoke Chinese it’s harder to read and write!! But Chinese is fun to learn I guess.....
@Sadius
5 жыл бұрын
I can agree so much with this video. The language itself makes so much sense, but yet the writing is so complex.
@mashang2684158
5 жыл бұрын
this is such a quality video from you. It covers lots of linguistic knowledge but easy to understand. Well done.
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Thank you
@Rykaas
3 жыл бұрын
as italian i can say: learning english was "ok" but a mess at the same time. The biggest obstacle was definitely the inconsistency, especially phonetically speaking. It sometimes felt as if every word had a rule of its own. Very frustrating. Now I'm learning chinese and i realize what it means to take the first steps in a language that has no roots in common with yours. i've always admired all those people who once arrived in europe learnt to speak our difficult languages so well, now i admire them even more Thanks for the video, very helpful
@Nightkill12345
5 жыл бұрын
I like your videos. I've never been to China, but I studied Chinese in the states for 2 years and then in Taiwan for 2 more years. I don't think Chinese is terribly difficult, but it does have a steep learning curve. In my opinion, the hardest thing about Chinese is writing (by hand) and reading. I learned traditional Chinese and at first it was hard, but after a while you just get used to it and it becomes second nature. The grammar is pretty easy especially when talking colloquially. Writing essays is a bit more complex as well as remembering 成語 and how to use them.
@Nightkill12345
5 жыл бұрын
I should add that I meant mandarin of course. I think Cantonese and Taiwanese are definitely more challenging Chinese languages because of the added tones.
@bruceb2265
5 жыл бұрын
I started learning Chinese 2 years ago as an adult student at my local university, For the first year I would have said Chinese is very hard to grasp but once you start to get your head around the grammar and how they construct words it does become a lot easier and more enjoyable. Will be travelling in China for 4 weeks starting next week and hopefully will continue to grow my skills while there. As always, great video.
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks for watching!
@mermanuha3606
5 жыл бұрын
come on !man^0^~
@Ig2011ify
5 жыл бұрын
I like your video. Actually I am learning Chinese currently. On my observation Chinese is really very logical and much simple. It is difficult to remember hieroglyphs, but once you did that, you can see how much simple is reading and speaking process comparing to English. First of all, when you read in Chinese the text takes much less space on paper than English does. So it takes much less time to perceive ideas. It is so comfortable and once you become able to read some basic sentences in Chinese, you can understand why China does not refuse hieroglyphs and does not change them by pinyin. It is ridicules in the eyes of any Chinese person. And the pleasure of reading in Chinese can become a motivation to continue learning.
@davidhardy4419
4 жыл бұрын
Dude. This is probably the best video I’ve ever seen about explaining Mandarin. I totally agree about the conjugation. It makes it so easy to understand. But what’s the hardest thing are the tones. If you don’t get the tones right It is a completely different word.
@Lupangdeyiji
5 жыл бұрын
Since I’m studying chinese myself for 2 years now, it’s really nice to see more footage spoken in Chinese. Please make more content spoken in Chinese
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks for watching
@eChineseLearning-school
5 жыл бұрын
If you want to learn faster or have any questions we would love to give you a Chinese trial lesson online to see what you think about our classes. Let me know if you are interested.
@lewessays
4 жыл бұрын
As a non-native advanced English speaker and beginner Chinese Speaker.... I had say both have their difficulties. English - Grammar Chinese - Tones
@Sprinkling_waters
4 жыл бұрын
Leul Mamo oh I see!!
@kyanwang8957
4 жыл бұрын
same for me when it comes to mandarin, i speak a dialect called szechuanese that drops tones a lot so i pronounce things wrong all the time
@nhatube69
4 жыл бұрын
Great perspective, thanks for such inspiring videos! I never considered that I could visit China to study Mandarin and explore but you've really opened my eyes to this possibility. I actually plan to visit and study in Chengdu next month! Wish me luck!
@jxjhe8656
5 жыл бұрын
Thank you for thinking outside the box in analysing the two languages!As a native Chinese speaker and an English learner,I can’t agree with you more,but I think writing skills is very hard in both the languages,especially writing a good essay🤣🤣
@AmayaYume
3 жыл бұрын
From: A native cn speaker who received 90% of my formal education in English (and tested in approximately the 97th percentile for English in hs) and translate a novel from cn>en English is difficult in its irregularity, but Chinese is difficult in its modularity (and writing system,,,, but anw) A massive aspect of Chinese that is difficult is also the language's intrinsic ties to history, and many people may struggle to understand even basic conversations without the historical basis built into everyday terms. Cn has a low curb, where it's easy to not be wrong, but it's up in the air if you can sound educated. English has many odd rules where mistakes may occur, but is thereby limited to a ceiling by said rules. Just a passing opinion o/
@_idiot
5 жыл бұрын
Kev, make more vids about chinese and your progress in chinese, like the one where you were selling fish on the street.
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks for the suggestion. Perrrrhaps I will!
@HoweDP
5 жыл бұрын
Can’t agree more with what you said in the video and actually it is nice to see the way you explained about learning the two languages from a different perspective. And I am really impressed with your spoken Chinese , very impressed.
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Yo thanks for the kind words
@alejandrorivera2712
5 жыл бұрын
This was a great video for a 7 minute break from class preparation. You just found a new subscriber! I've been living in Taiwan for one year and eight months and China for two years. Your Chinese is pretty good.
@codyod1
5 жыл бұрын
Fascinating.... and you're very engaging with your explanation. You'd make a great teacher. Now, I'm interested in the Chinese language
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks for watching
@eChineseLearning-school
5 жыл бұрын
We would love to give you a Chinese trial lesson online to see what you think about our lessons. Let me know if you are interested.
@chilliwashere
5 жыл бұрын
I agree with that girl who said Japanese... it's a combination of the complex characters of traditional chinese (plus two more alphabets) and the ridiculous grammar of english... :'(
@antoomasko5897
5 жыл бұрын
And don't forget the honorifics system. And believe it or not, it actually has hidden tones so if you want to sound like a native speaker you have to relearn all the words you learned or memorize the tones from the beginning.
@sloneczkaa
5 жыл бұрын
Japanese grammar literally could not be further from English's
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks for watching, and I had no idea about the complexity of Japanese. I asked the little girl why she thought Japanese was the hardest and she just said that she didn't know lol
@chilliwashere
5 жыл бұрын
@@sloneczkaa hahah true but I mean the level of 'why does this exist!!!!' is the same in both for me :P
@Mike-bt3ki
5 жыл бұрын
LOL this comment just feels like a weeb trying to justify his/her choice of learning Japanese which is actually one of the easiest languages on the planet to learn. Japanese and Italian are the 2 easiest languages you can learn relative to other languages on the planet, in saying that no language is easy to learn. However based on your comment you have a problem memorising the Japanese alphabet system, which actually shows that the problem is with you and not the language Lol you must be new to Japanese, or extremely untalented. It’s an alphabet there’s a finite list of characters.. Chinese has 10000 characters, the average Chinese person only know 1500-2000. I’m assuming you mean Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji (which is Chinese) Lol But I will agree Japanese grammar is difficult but not the hardest, no where near on par with Chinese. Native Japanese just talk a certain polite way but it is easy to grasp especially if you speak Chinese already Lol, I can speak Mandarin and Japanese fluently, my English isn’t the best though but it’s ok I’m Malaysian, I’m a languages teacher too, I tutor both Chinese and Japanese. Lived in Japan for 4 years, would love to live in China soon, once I’m done here in the UK 😂😂
@brysondan376
3 жыл бұрын
Thanks buddy, the video kind of changed my misconsumptions and opened my heart not HATE the Chinese language as before.
@xz1891
4 жыл бұрын
Spoken Chinese is simple, tough part is the reading one and the written one. Bcz what you hear is disconnected with what you see.
@rangerroe3739
5 жыл бұрын
I'm a non-native English speaker and have learned basic Chinese in a country where English is the second official language. For me, English was incredibly difficult at first, and vast majority non-native English speakers struggled hard with it. It took us around 8-9 years to be comfortable with writing English essays. Chinese was straightforward to learn at the get-go but things got complicated quick as we were introduced to more Chinese words and their pronunciations, it really tested my memory, and I did not get the chance to resume learning it beyond the basics. For me, perhaps both English and Chinese are equally complex and take 10 years of practice to be proficient.
@vliegendehollander
5 жыл бұрын
Nice video. Of course the answer to this question always starts with which language family is native to the learner? It's easier for a Portuguese speaker to learn another romance language like Italian compared to something like Russian, while a Serbian would have little challenge with Russian grammar because their word endings decline in a similar way. Generally, the farther back your respective language families diverge in the language tree, the more foreign you'll find the grammar, syntax and pronunciation.
@sousou6251
2 жыл бұрын
I have been learning chinese and japanese. Chinese is hard at the start but gets easier along the way. You develop methods to learn hanzi more efficiently, get a basic understanding of the language flow, pronunciation and the pinyin system Japanese however is easy at the start: easy pronunciation, the first sentence patterns are easy and straight forward, rōmaji is also easier than pinyin And then at some point you are going to get hit by the grammar and just like in chinese, you have to learn so many characters. Chinese pronunciation might be more difficult, but as soon as you get that right the different readings in japanese will make your life a lot harder.
@user-vw8ex6kn6b
5 жыл бұрын
One of the great advantages of Chinese is that you don't have to think through the language. As long as everyone knows Chinese characters, you can communicate literally
@tonycaleb8673
3 жыл бұрын
Fascinating. I've always noticed the irregularities in English. I didn't know any of this about Chinese. It may be hard to learn for a non-native but just from what you described it makes more sense than English.
@fabbejohannesson3275
5 жыл бұрын
I have been saying this all along - Chinese makes so much sense. Colloquial, as well as speaking Chinese in daily conversation is something that, at least in my opinion, can be taught, and learned fairly quickly. As long as you're exposed by the language quite often, for example by living in China. However, mastering Chinese is truly what makes it such a complex language, since there are endless of characters and different structures to literature, as in news articles, poems, novels etc. As well as being able to always apply the suitable word in all contexts which takes again; serious amount of skill.
@slamdunk406
5 жыл бұрын
Great video! I think you make a great point that difficulty of a language is all relative pending on where you are from. As one learning Mandarin, I find the grammar (lack of conjugations and tenses) to be much easier than English. Chinese is so much more logical. An easy example is how “plumber” is “水工” which literally translates into “water worker.” Chinese is full of logical translations like that.
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Great example there
@Nossody
4 жыл бұрын
I started learning mandarin on duolingo like 2 weeks ago and at first I was stressin, then I saw 是 and didnt have to remember 5 different forms of it and my heart was at ease.
@elliteequine3785
4 жыл бұрын
have you seen the famous shi shi poem about shi shi lol...
@Nossody
4 жыл бұрын
@@elliteequine3785 yeah its like 20 shi's long lol
@elliteequine3785
4 жыл бұрын
@@Nossody lol n im talking about when it is shi consistenty where its about shishi withhis 10 lions
@Nossody
4 жыл бұрын
@@elliteequine3785 yeah that's the one im thinking of (。・∀・)ノ
@ash0fr0sies
4 жыл бұрын
I've been learning English for 11 years (I'm 16 btw), and media influenced the whole learning process a lot, aside from particular courses, obviously. now I'm learning Japanese, it's been 6 months and I'm surprised by how logical it is. also I'm willing to learn Mandarin, basically I'm digging my own grave at this point. but the similarities in the writing system in both really helps me
@RetVersus
5 жыл бұрын
Your point about English pronunciation/spelling relation is true, especially the 'ough' nonsense. Your point about the tenses is wrong however, because abstract articulated time allows for synchronisation to a far greater extent, which allowed for GMT, timezone standardisation etc. Chinese is easier to learn grammatically but not pronunciation or contextually. The characters are like logic pieces which gives it an air of simplicity, but in actual usage theres a ton of ambiguity making using the language significantly more difficult in different circumstances imo.
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Excellent points you've made. Much respect, thanks for the comment
@李白-f5u
4 жыл бұрын
Pinyin is a Ladin alphabet system in 1958, while English spelling was used for centuries! English words pronunciation change during history!knife lost k, where lost h, who lost w, write lost w. The same happened in Mandarin! That is why there are so many homophones in Mandarin. So that we have to combine different characters into one word to distinguish homophones like 医生 医院 医疗. In acient Chinese 醫 represent everything like treat doctor hospital so on. It could be a verb or noun or you cannot figure out what is exactly are
@gcm4312
5 жыл бұрын
I've been learning Mandarin and Russian for about a month and a half. I've been finding Mandarin much easier than Russian, and much easier than English also. Mandarin has almost no grammar to learn, you need to basically learn the character and it's simple repetition. The pronunciation is hard, tho, because of the entonations... Listening not as hard as speaking because you can assume the words based on context (was it mà or má? you can assume based on the other words). Overall I think Russian is the hardest language I've had contact with (a combination of different alphabet and very complex grammar).
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks for watching, and for the info about Russian. I've never studied Russian so I have no idea
@GrowingUpWithoutBorders
3 жыл бұрын
This is a really interesting video. I never thought about the English language as being a hard one to learn. Just staring to dive into learning Mandarin!!
@elleem3951
5 жыл бұрын
Also i feel like chinese people sometimes might seem rude to foreigners when they try speak the language is because chinese is just so direct. When you translate something from chinese to english the meaning is so direct. LOL
@Sprinkling_waters
4 жыл бұрын
Elle Em oh really??!
@spacet1me
5 жыл бұрын
Fuckin great video man and watched it all the way through. Edited beautifully. Also why'd you have to roast English so hard. Gotta love HOMONYMS, HOMOPHONES, HOMOGRAPHS, and HETERONYMS . Lmao at the conjugation aspect and other things you pointed out, never thought of it before but yea. The precise timing of everything is very deeply ingrained in English.
@AlexLashko
5 жыл бұрын
Very interesting and informative stuff. Keep it up.
@tedcrowley6080
2 жыл бұрын
Excellent introduction to Chinese language, and a lot of good information. Just a few small mistakes. Japanese writing is harder (for us) -- it uses Chinese characters (with 2 to 5 pronunciations) for word roots. About 2/3 of China speaks a dialect of Mandarin. The other 1/3 speaks one of 8 other languages (as different as French, Spanish and English). Chinese writing (and pinyin) are just for Mandarin (putonghua, the "official" language), which is a "second language" for 1/3 of Chinese people. The other 8 use different words and grammar, not just different sounds.
@perfectstudents8361
5 жыл бұрын
I think Mandarin is easy to learn. I lived with a non- English speaking Chinese couple in the U.S. for 2 years. Every day I listened to their conversation. I became fluent after 2 years just by listening and then speaking. Chinese characters are combinations of radicals in different arrangements. The grammar is really simple. Unlike English, Chinese has no tenses, no conjugation, no plurals, no genders. Even the tones aren't difficult.
@mapotofu1841
5 жыл бұрын
but did you learn how to read and write?
@perfectstudents8361
5 жыл бұрын
@@mapotofu1841. Speaking and understanding Chinese are the easy parts. Reading and writing are harder but they have certain rules too, not random. I only spent 1 year learning to read and write, so it's like elementary school level only.
@JohanFitFoodie
3 жыл бұрын
Huge inspiration, will move to Beijing in the spring and will certainly watch through your content for tips. I'm between hkd lv 3 and 4, but aim at 5! ☀️😊
@Monkeyabroad
3 жыл бұрын
Keep it up man!
@bergmanjan9091
5 жыл бұрын
As Japanese Chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn. We can read and understand about 70-80 percent Chinese without learning. The most challenging part for Japanese is indeed pronunciation. Sometimes it sounds almost the same but sometimes completely different which makes it complex for us.
@jyashin
5 жыл бұрын
You would be correct in the case of a Japanese who spent time and learned their kanji. However, it's to my knowledge that most Japanese don't know their kanji particularly well, and hiragana is still the dominant written form. There is a method to read old Chinese documents, or to write out Japanese in pure Kanji, but that's a very advanced class that very few people bother to take.
@thorkarlsen4559
5 жыл бұрын
Actually, Uralic and Altaic languages are indeed easier for Japanese and Korean to learn and pronounce, because your languages shared agglutinative features with Uralic and Altaic languages, which is different from the Chinese grammar (Sino-Tibetan). So its expected to be difficult for a group of people whose learning a language from a totally different language family.
@iheartchina8160
4 жыл бұрын
Greeting from Dali, China!!!! I've never heard anyone talk about the language this way - but definitely agree with you on this!!! I hear Arabic is also a tough language to learn/.
@manul7024
5 жыл бұрын
As a german i need to say that they should try to learn german. I mean we have 6 different articles (der, die, das, ein, eine, einen) only in nominative which have nothing to do with the meaning of the word (so you simply need to memorise it) Finnish and Icelandic are even more difficult English is nothing compared to that^^
@makuszenda8874
5 жыл бұрын
Yep, german is killing me, those Dativ Akusativ thing.
@yuwong3739
5 жыл бұрын
cannot agree too much
@HamsterSenpai
2 жыл бұрын
Meanwhile Japanese:- Filled with verb conjunction Illegular pronountiaon of letters Complex writing system
@bloedekuh
5 жыл бұрын
IMO there are only two aspects of the Chinese language that are difficult, one is the writing, the other is those tones. However, nowadays you hardly need to write anything because of phones and laptops. But the tones are the real reason why Chinese is hard. Correct phonetics but wrong tones cause much more confusion than the other way round.
@tjkendo
5 жыл бұрын
Good to see you brought up the examples of verb tense and plural vs singular. Just one thing to add to the plural vs singular: there is no plural form in Chinese and that actually makes sense - when you say "there are two dogs on the lawn", the word "two" already tells people there are more than one dog, so why is the plural even necessary? Not to mention the inconsistency in English plural forms you talked about (fish, sheep, feet..., etc). Same for the verb tense - "I ate my lunch an hour ago"; you already said "an hour ago" so we know it was an event in the past so why do we need to change the verb? Verb tense is probably the most common grammatical error Chinese would make, for a good reason - we don't have that in our language. :-) p.s. cool T-shirt (悟空)
@maxsquared
5 жыл бұрын
Grammatically I think Chinese is very similar to English, far more in common than most people thinks.
@rediponto9588
5 жыл бұрын
在印欧语系里英语是最接近分析语的
@makuszenda8874
5 жыл бұрын
Are you a fan of Green Bay packers?
@hueq.3676
5 жыл бұрын
Putting ones self in the right conditions to learn Chinese helps a lot, all channels within an environment supporting your subject of learning, speeds up the process much faster. 📚✏️📖
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Absolutely. I don't think I could have learned Chinese unless I had the chance to practice every day when I leave the classroom. that's why living in china is essential
@hueq.3676
5 жыл бұрын
Yes Kevin, we have similarities there 😆 I came to America & had to learn English, though school, tv, music, people....... accelerated my learning 🤓 I’m in the US & you’re in China 🤣
@coldfusionmusical
5 жыл бұрын
To be fair, every language has certain things more difficult than others and some things easier than others. I grow up with both Chinese and English, for me English is easier to read and write but Chinese is simpler in concept, so I totally agree with you, Chinese sentence structures make a lot more sense, though at times I got too influenced by English and got mixed up and vice versa. In department of pronunciation, Mandarin Chinese comes more natural to me; English isn't that bad but I get entangled at times, that's when I try to speak with the proper pronunciation, all my life, I've been speaking an sinicized, reduced version of English. 😅 I don't think it's fair to say what language is more difficult or easier, there will always be biased. Our minds are wired differently. It's just like trying to compared a string instrument to a blown woodwind instrument.
@ValleyData
2 жыл бұрын
This is great content. Would love to travel and study like this.
@Mike-bt3ki
5 жыл бұрын
I’d say Slavic languages, like Russian.. And Chinese would be the hardest. Chinese because it is tonal, and if you produce an incorrect sound it could mean something else no one will understand you. Tones are very difficult, my tongue is too stiff haha
@matthewbitter532
5 жыл бұрын
believe it or not, I find the grammar (or lack thereof) to be the hardest part for me. not the characters or tones. however, I do find the pronunciation of the sylables difficult because they sound so similar to each other.
@luisferr2001
4 жыл бұрын
excellent video! thanks for sharing it! Am on my 5th month of learning Mandarin all by myself, and still very motivated to continue learning it until I become fluent. cheers!
@belizeguy
5 жыл бұрын
Here in Mexico, where we try to help those folks who want to learn English, we always hear folks complain about how unnecessarily hard English can be. It is true! For me, I have a double threat. I live in the Yucatan, and there are a lot of Mayans here some that only speak Mayan. I am constantly told that Mayan is much easier than Spanish. Please let me get Spanish down better before I attempt Mayan. Oh, BTW, if you visit neighboring Belize, English is everywhere, even the Mayans that live there speak English, no Spanish and even very little Mayan.
@ImmortalSaga
5 жыл бұрын
Very cool comparison! Wish you enjoy the process of learning Chinese and also the wonderful scenery in Yangshuo!
@enfieldli9296
5 жыл бұрын
Bearing in mind that class, classroom, classmate in English all have one thing in common, namely "class", but its Chinese equivalent 班、教室、同学 does not.
Dude, this was an extremely good explanation of Chinese vs English differences. I'm a native Spanish speaker and it was a real pain learning English about 20 years ago. Obviously, I'm 100% fluent now but I still mispronounce things because of those irregularities that you talked about. Its not my inability pronounce words that causes me problems but remembering those pronunciation nuances between words. I'm looking forward to learning Chinese!
@passenger1670
4 жыл бұрын
u will find a new mainland, just try it
@user-nh7my6gg5b
5 жыл бұрын
English is extremely irregular. Chinese is very straightforward. So I think English is harder. I have no idea how non-native speakers even learn this language.
@SuperT
5 жыл бұрын
English is pretty weird considering native speakers mess up half the time
@whimsy7503
5 жыл бұрын
plus English has words that came from other languages. Eg, faux, sew
@alinacalm
5 жыл бұрын
naah English's pretty easy to learn... and trust me my native language is Russian (which has COMPLETELY different grammar) So yeah you can basically become fluent in English in about 2 years I believe without visiting an English speaking country
@PagChomp190
5 жыл бұрын
I guess it really depends what your mothertongue is. As a german, english was pretty straight forward and easy to learn because of the similarities. I´m learning chinese right now and it´s pretty rough sometimes but it´s fun
@jamesrune1012
5 жыл бұрын
gdgsg ergsgs I’m a Russian heritage speaker. Russian has more complicates grammar rules but Russian is so much more logical than English, so English is harder to learn
Plain and simple! Im learning chinese right now.Thank you so much. As Sapnish spoken native I should say... Chinese people also find it difficult to deal with our "isuues" ;-)
@francoisprabu6312
5 жыл бұрын
That is so true haha.. measure..usually..
@eChineseLearning-school
5 жыл бұрын
We would love to give you a Chinese trial lesson online to see what you think about our lessons. Let me know if you are interested.
@lizlizzy2755
5 жыл бұрын
Hello from Rio dr Janeiro/Brazil. What a encouragment. You make it sound so easy. Wonderful explanation.
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Thanks for watching
@Shamil030
5 жыл бұрын
Hello from Russia duude! Nice to see foreigners learn Mandarin
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Hello from Yangshuo!
@MegalopsykhiaLIN
4 жыл бұрын
Well I’m currently learning Irish and Arabic, the most difficult part of Irish is that it doesn’t have a state-recognised standard spoken form like Mandarin Chinese, Parisien French, or received English pronunciation etc., so when I wanna remember the pronunciation of the vocabulary, I will get three possibilities, which one should I choose? So the result is that in one sentence I pronounce several words in Ulster style, then others in Munster style, the rest in Connacht style. Imagine mix three types of Chinese dialects together to form a sentence, will that be confusing?
@snarkyguy
5 жыл бұрын
I actually got a Chinese tutor a few months ago and my wife says she can actually understand “some” of my Mandarin. I suppose that’s an improvement, although I have a long way to go before I can eavesdrop on people on the metro.
@蓝心素质
5 жыл бұрын
加油
@spacet1me
5 жыл бұрын
Can you create another video roasting the English language please? Keep grinding!
@heydoeme
5 жыл бұрын
I‘ve been learning Chinese through an english speaking persoective, but I‘m from Switzerland. And it made me realize how unnecessarily difficult German actually is. I mean we have a gender for every single object! Tell me that‘s not harder to memorize than chinese characters 😂
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
In the USA people struggle with gender pronouns for people, but I can't imagine what it's like when objects are thrown into the mix too lol
@Eric-xg9bz
4 жыл бұрын
I'm a foreigner living in China. My Chinese is not as good as yours, but 差不多 I like watching your videos when you speak Chinese because I can understand most, but not all, and it's a good way for me to study.
@Monkeyabroad
4 жыл бұрын
Glad you enjoy the vids, man!
@OmarMohamed-lc2zj
5 жыл бұрын
ask a non-native who has learnt both. i tell you something english is harder than chinese in terms of speaking, the sentence order etc . i was able to carry a descent conversation within a year of learning chinese, that wasnt the case in english.
@peter5430
5 жыл бұрын
True speaking in English is so hard 😕
@lizyliz970
5 жыл бұрын
I grew up learning 3 languages at once including Chinese and English. Even though Chinese is my first language, to me it is still the hardest but also the most systematic language.
@angelotwodog4236
5 жыл бұрын
no,definitely not,Chinese grammar is like so easy,the hard parts are writing and spelling
@Monkeyabroad
5 жыл бұрын
Yup
@bmbm2sg1
5 жыл бұрын
spelling?
@angelotwodog4236
5 жыл бұрын
@@bmbm2sg1 pinyin
@bmbm2sg1
5 жыл бұрын
angelo twodog i always thought pinyin was generally super easy to get the hang of because pronunciation of the “letters” was always consistent you just had to match the tones, that and there’s a pretty limited amount of initials and finals. But we all learn differently i actually think chinese grammar is pretty difficult to get the hang of
@angelotwodog4236
5 жыл бұрын
@@bmbm2sg1 Chinese Grammar has no verb deformation, almost no temporal deformation, only when finished with the addition of 了, you can use Chinese characters for a very flexible combination,for me it is the easiest and most flexible grammar in the world.
@makuszenda8874
5 жыл бұрын
Native speaker here, have leant English, Deutsch and Japanese. I am also a master of Wu Language and Cantonese. Well to be honest, I think Japanese is a bit more difficult than Chinese, but if you have knowledge of Language Wu or Minnan, or Cantonese, Japanese will be a lot easier. Compared to English, German messed me up coz the structure of the sentence and all those changes are just troublesome. Someone told me Russian or Arabic is the most difficult language to learn coz Russian is more complex than German, for the Arabic they have OSV structure and a different writing system.
@ctleung168
5 жыл бұрын
For daily communication use it will be very easy.But for creating classical literature like poetry you probably need a master or doctor degree in classical literature.
@Reformatt
5 жыл бұрын
Great great video sir!!!
@pokelol97
5 жыл бұрын
from the 8 languages i know chinese was 1 of the easiest. the only hard part was the writing. the hardest language for me was korean or french
@cq7499
5 жыл бұрын
But writing parts of Chinese is the most important
@julie8522
5 жыл бұрын
From a French point of view, I think that English was pretty easy to learn, there are some similarities between French and English so it helped with the learning process. Some people consider French to be a hard language to learn because of all the grammar, so maybe that is why I find English easy because the grammar is much simpler.
@zara3016
5 жыл бұрын
Arabic is definitly one of the hardest, you can learn alphabets they're easy but the writing,the pronunciation has thousands of rules
@youisstupid2586
5 жыл бұрын
true, in dari we use a lot of Arabic words in our everyday conversations and i still struggle to understand a simple Arabic sentence...
@economicinfo823
4 жыл бұрын
This completely changed my perspective! 😳
@syovanson
5 жыл бұрын
Is this video made because of Omeida Chinese Academy? They should give you VIP card..unlimited! But it is a good video, though, as all others you've made so far. :)
@travissorenson9554
5 жыл бұрын
Appreciate this video man. I am learning Chinese now and will be in China for in a couple weeks.
@michellesmith4712
5 жыл бұрын
Chinese is generally more advanced than Englsh for four reasons as bellow: (1) Easier to express. In information times, new concepts are emerged in greater and greater numbers as time goes on. English creates new words to express these concepts, but most of these new words are just a collection of syllables, which cannot guess their meanings by relating them to existing concepts. As a consequence, the scale of vocabulary are becoming so enormous and unrelated that not only new hands in a field need to take too much time on learning its vocabulary but also experts in the same tiny field need to keep memorizing the updated vocabulary, while these time can be used in focusing on knowledge of these fields. Moreover, it causes that experts in different fields, however closely they are related, can hardly communicate with each other for the sake difficulty in governing each other's vocabulary. As to Chinese, it is totally different scenario, after high school, language is not a problems anymore, experts don't need to memorize lists of vocabulary and experts in different fields can easily understand each other's vocabularies. The reason lies in that Chinese uses two or several characters to express new concepts, each character has its own meaning which can relate new concepts to existing one and makes users easy to guess the possible meaning. This is a huge advantage compared with alphabetic language and the advantage will become more and more obvious as time goes on. With 26 letters, you can have millions of English words to express the world, but letters are meaningless, each word needs to be remembered separately. What an unbearable burden for human life? So with 7000 characters, which have their own pronunciation and meaning, what you can do in expressing this world? Their are unlimited combination of Chinese words and the meanings of them can easily guess. What a wonderful world for human to explore the world and create a new world? (2) Easier to read. As information are increasingly piled up, one can hardly keep on the step to understand related text information, especially when every word is a collection of syllables, it is more slow to get the point than graphic characters which give more hints. For Chinese, which is two-dimensional language, one common man can take several glances to a page of article and understand the main ideas, but for English, which a one-dimensional language, it is more difficult -- the words are joined up as ugly worms crawling all around the pagers. Moreover, for one person with college education can often meet new words in reading newspaper, which is a rare thing for Chinese which high-school education. A professor in English world needs to keep memorize vocabularies, but Chinese don't do such a thing after graduation from high school. (3) Easier to speak, hear and think. We use pronunciation to speak, hear and think, the efficiency relies on the simplicity and richness. Every Chinese character is a union of a syllable and a meaning and for English, several syllables are used to express a meaning, which makes Chinese fast in thinking. For instance, if you do counting or calculation in mind, Chinese is much easier and faster, for in Chinese, easy of the numbers are just one syllable. Moreover, Chinese are more rich in sound, they use more syllables and each syllable can have four tones. Almost in every cases, Chinese is more economical in text length and pronunciation time to express the same meaning, which means more efficient in speaking, hearing and thinking. (4)It is easier to learn. People may say, but Chinese is difficult to learn. Maybe it is for people who used to use alphabetic language. In fact, many Chinese children can speak Chinese at the age of around 1 and many with an age around 6 or older can memorize thousands of characters. For vocabulary, if you knon 5000 characters, it will be easy for you to govern millions of words - the bottleneck is knowledge not language. Characters are full of regular patterns and their original meanings are specific items in daily life, which makes it easy for children to memorize along with the pictures of the items. By the way, 3500 characters can make a literate person, 5000 can make an educated one, and 7000 are much enough for an professor to do advanced researches. For grammar, there is no grammar at least in the meaning of the western languages - there is no Tense, sex, number, lattice, deformation, never to say the combination of them.
@xxooxx69
5 жыл бұрын
wow
@mapotofu1841
5 жыл бұрын
I think one of the most beautiful parts of Chinese is how because it is a logographic language, when new words are created (eg phone, computer) Chinese can create a new word out of already existing words instead of having to create entirely new characters. For example, in Chinese, phone is "电话" which literally means "electricity-speech" and computer is "电脑" or "electricity-brain". This way, people seeing the word for the first time can guess at the meaning whereas if Chinese just used loanwords and made computer into "kong-pu-te-er" or something it'll be a lot harder to learn.
@justinpharand8454
4 жыл бұрын
German has the most logical and precise number/math language system I've ever come across.
@Charles-rn3ke
4 жыл бұрын
Actually there are tense verbs and plural nouns in Chinese, where people just simply add "了“ after verbs (similar to "ed") and ”们“ after nouns (similar to "s").
@phengov943
5 жыл бұрын
Mandarin is hard, the tones you need to make is so frustrating to try to replicate. The writing language is way to much to try to learn as well. I find Japanese and korean easier to pronuonce compared to Mandarin.
@markculshaw224
2 жыл бұрын
It's only in the last 20 years that most Chinese can now read, so previously, they would have very little chance of communicating with each other. I think this is why a dialect was chosen as the Lingua franca, and Beijing spoke a form of mandarin so it meant sense to chose this. Previously Cantonese was a Lingua franca for most of the south including Vietnam etc
@jasonliu6603
5 жыл бұрын
Every time I talk about "he", "she", I'm so nervous....
@nuaymoc5002
5 жыл бұрын
很真实了hhhh
@kiwiskinny4027
5 жыл бұрын
Why?
@nuaymoc5002
5 жыл бұрын
@@kiwiskinny4027 both she and he in Chinese is TA, no difference in pronunciation
I'm a Canadian Chinese citizen and I'm trying to relearn Chinese, I find it pretty easy since I already know how it works but the difficult part for me is memorizing the characters like the shapes, forms, meaning. Pronunciation is no problem but reading is fluently is. Anyway I'm learning my language because I hope to visit China Shanghai in the future often. Nice vid btw!
@jyashin
5 жыл бұрын
Something else to note for your future studies is that people write in cursive (?) instead of the printed format I assume you've been learning. Since penmanship is one of the 4 arts people write in cursive in order to be expressive. And then there's the artistic formats (ex. cao3 ti3) you see in calligraphy.
@eChineseLearning-school
5 жыл бұрын
We would love to give you a Chinese trial lesson online to see what you think about our lessons. Let me know if you are interested. Also, we have a lot of useful resources for memorizing characters easier.
@igormarcos687
5 жыл бұрын
So, basically: Yes, but actually no
@deda9829
5 жыл бұрын
Xhosa is the most complex in terms of sounds. Archi is the most complex in terms of verb forms. Chinese is the most complex in terms of writing information. Thai is the most complex in terms of spelling. Hindustani is the most complex in terms of nuance. English is the most complex in terms of consistency in grammar. Hebrew is the most complex in terms of reciting written text. Georgian is the most complex in terms of pronunciation.
@siguenciajulio
5 жыл бұрын
English is a phonetic nightmare especially in the ch pronounciation Take chandelier change chemical they are pronounced differently
@bloedekuh
5 жыл бұрын
They borrow too much from other languages. Chandelier derived from French so it's pronounced in a French way. A lot of stuff starts to make sense once you begin learning other similar languages.
@marionkehrbach7594
2 жыл бұрын
great infos... you took a lot of my fear and gave me a lot of interest in study mandarin
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