Think about being able to speak a language that has been in lifestyle for 1000′s of years and will enable you to communicate with more than a billion people instantly. Imagine yourself as someone who can speak a language that requires a great leaving from your own. Studying Chinese is a very satisfying expertise simply because Chinese is not just one of the formal languages of the United Countries; it is a language that connects societies from the Vietnam to Japan.
Did you know that the Japanese and Korean creating systems are based on the Chinese composing system of characters? Chinese is basically a family of languages that comprises of several dialects, some of which are unintelligible to one another due to the phonetics and tones of Chinese. Nevertheless, today Chinese has achieved a form of standardization and most Chinese and foreigners use the Chinese dialect, Mandarin, to communicate successfully in all walks of life.
Aside from Mandarin, other ‘languages’ remain in well-known use today such as Cantonese which can often be heard in the Chinatowns across the world. Mandarin though, will serve you best in learning Chinese due to its prevalence and adoption as the standard form of Chinese. Today, Mandarin is spoken by about 850 million in China while the Wu dialect is spoken by nearly 90 million followed carefully by Cantonese.
Learning Chinese will confirm challenging for those who are studying it as a second language. The difficult task of speaking Chinese is that it takes quite a departure from the phonetics of Western languages. With Chinese the tone and inflection of syllables, vowels, and all manner of sounds can create whole new meanings for a word. Take your time learning Chinese. It is fun and always remembers that challenges are windows of opportunity.
But first, know that there are three factors of the Chinese language that you will need in order to be well on your way to perfecting the language. They are:
1. Tones
2. Characters
3. Sentence Order
Tones - Focus your time and power most on studying the tones of the Chinese language. Consider it or not the tones are the fundamental aspect of learning Chinese. Studying the tones can mean the difference between wanting to kiss somebody and asking them a question. The Chinese family of languages is distinguished by its “tonal” element. Remember that tones are super important. Why? Did you know that Mandarin speaking Chinese people is nearly unintelligible to Cantonese discussing people due to the variance in tones?
Character types – There are 1000′s of character for the Chinese language. Find out which ones are in use these days and focus on those. The older characters are best discovered as stepping stones to a complete understanding of Chinese. Nevertheless, your time will be most effective spent o learning the characters that are in use today.
Word order – Chinese is a pretty adaptable language. Yet, the order of sentence construction is still essential. One of the noticeable mistakes that learners make is putting numeric values such as time in the wrong order in their phrases. Keep in mind that Chinese is primarily spoken by native speakers so they are used to listening to a certain order within a sentence. Practice makes perfect.