Current Events > Are you going to learn Mandarin?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Seems like it might be a good language to learn.

I took a course on it once and I found it very difficult

No. I'll be dead before it's required to speak in America

And it's way too much work. Mandarin is a super hard language. My mom tried to learn it so I used to hear language tapes in the car with her.

I'm not sure it will ever be a particularly useful language to learn outside east Asia

I took spanish because of Resident Evil 4

Wanna know why I havent learned Mandarin? Because China flawlessly takes care of their pandemics, even in vija

Nah. Mandarin is basically only spoken in China and globally English is like the most spoken language.

uwnim posted...

Nah. Mandarin is basically only spoken in China and globally English is like the most spoken language.

That wil change before the year 2100

Knee how

But really noone outside china speaks it. Youd be better off with spanish.

SauI_Goodman posted...

Knee how

But really noone outside china speaks it. Youd be better off with spanish.

People in Taiwan speak Mandarin

Already know it.

Zikten posted...

People in Taiwan speak Mandarin

Singapore and significant parts of Malaysia and Indonesia as well

I have some sort of mental block learning languages other than English. So no. I doubt it.

I took Spanish 1-4 in college and I can't read it or speak it. I tried taking Greek and washed out of it. I took Spanish in high school too. Didn't stick.

My brain can't get over the "immediacy" part. I always have to translate mentally into and out of English. I can't just "speak" or "read" a second language.

It's a similar issue I have with mathematics. I can't do math with "immediacy" either. I almost always have to think about the specific steps to an answer whereas my math friends just sorta "pop" out answers with high speed.

The irony is I've had a high command of English language since a young age. My strongest academic skills are in writing and reading and interpreting meanings in English. English is encoded in my brain to such a strong degree that it feels like it actively thwarts mental space for others.

Zikten posted...

That wil change before the year 2100

Unlikely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_the_number_of_countries_in_which_they_are_recognized_as_an_official_language
Only 3 countries in the world speak Mandarin as a native language.
China, Singapore, Taiwan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

While Mandarin is the 2nd most popular in total speakers, the # of countries that use it as their primary language is few.

There are 59 countries around the world that has English as their primary language.
This makes English the #1 language by # of countries that use the language as a primary language.

1) English @ 59 Countries
2) French @ 29 Countries
3) Arabic @ 22-25 Countries
4) Spanish @ 20-21 Countries
5) Portuguese @ 9-10 Countries
6) German @ 6 Countries
7) Russian @ 5-10 Countries
8) Swahili @ 5 Countries
9) Serbo-Croation @ 4-5 Countries.

There are a total of 1.348 billion English Speakers that have English as their Primary or Secondary language.
Mandarin has a total of 1.120 billion Speakers for both Primary & Secondary languages.

But Mandarin is limited to 3 countries as a primary language.

English has 59 Countries.

The same logic can apply to Hindi which is the #3 language in Total population that speak it as a Primary or Secondary language.
There are ~600 million Hindi speakers.

But there are only 3 countries that speak HindiUrdu. That makes them ranks #16 by total # of countries that use the language.

You can make your own decision based on where you plan on doing business, living, working, visiting as to what is a more efficient use of your time when it comes to learning a language.

BTW, I can speak both English & Mandarin.

Hell, yes.

If Jian Xena can do it, then we can too.

Which is still false numbers... That's total countries that speak English, not the total population percentile that speaks English. We as English speakers are 3rd or 4th, behind Spanish, whose about 100 million more, and Mandarin who is over 1 billion.

Ivany2008 posted...

Which is still false numbers... That's total countries that speak English, not the total population percentile that speaks English. We as English speakers are 3rd or 4th, behind Spanish, whose about 100 million more, and Mandarin who is over 1 billion.

Most of the speakers of English are not native speakers.

Ivany2008 posted...

Which is still false numbers... That's total countries that speak English, not the total population percentile that speaks English. We as English speakers are 3rd or 4th, behind Spanish, whose about 100 million more, and Mandarin who is over 1 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

TOTAL SPEAKERS = Primary + Secondary languages

And the majority of that 1 billion+ people who can speak mandarin, they're all stuck in China.

So if you intend on going to China and living amongst the populace, by all means, learn mandarin.

That's your free time.

Sure

I am the Mandarin!

Id rather learn spanish or some other relevant language instead. I guess what Im trying to say is; only if I was forced to

BilalPowell posted...

I am the Mandarin!

Ben Kingsly
Or
Ming the Merciless
?

I dont really like the mandalorian

KamenRiderBlade posted...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

TOTAL SPEAKERS = Primary + Secondary languages

And the majority of that 1 billion+ people who can speak mandarin, they're all stuck in China.

So if you intend on going to China and living amongst the populace, by all means, learn mandarin.

That's your free time.

There are some strange aspects to that list though. It says that the total number of second language speakers of Japanese is 121,500, but there are almost 3 million foreigners living in Japan, about 2.3% of the population. And I hang out with many of them where I live and we usually use Japanese to communicate. I find it strange only about 4% of the foreigners living here speak Japanese, as most people such as myself and my wife, work in Japanese language environments.

ssjevot posted...

There are some strange aspects to that list though. It says that the total number of second language speakers of Japanese is 121,500, but there are almost 3 million foreigners living in Japan, about 2.3% of the population. And I hang out with many of them where I live and we usually use Japanese to communicate. I find it strange only about 4% of the foreigners living here speak Japanese, as most people such as myself and my wife, work in Japanese language environments.

Then maybe you should talk to the article writer about that and submit evidence of 3 million foreigners who speak Japanese as a secondary language.

KamenRiderBlade posted...

Then maybe you should talk to the article writer about that and submit evidence of 3 million foreigners who speak Japanese as a secondary language.

https://www.jlpt.jp/e/statistics/archive.html

Just based on that alone over a million people a year are taking a proficiency test of Japanese for non-native speakers.

ssjevot posted...

https://www.jlpt.jp/e/statistics/archive.html

Just based on that alone over a million people a year are taking a proficiency test of Japanese for non-native speakers.

I'm not the one you should be complaining to.

The Wikipedia article has authors behind everything, you should be telling them that.

KamenRiderBlade posted...

I'm not the one you should be complaining to.

The Wikipedia article has authors behind everything, you should be telling them that.

I looked at the source they cited, it's pay-walled. Then I look at the Wikipedia article on Japanese language and the amount of native speakers increases by 2 million. Since that list says it is based on Ethnologue, and that source is pay-walled they likely have some criterion that we aren't aware of. My guess is the amont of Chinese second-language speakers is also underestimated, though I doubt English isn't still the most spoken language.

I am just saying that list clearly has issues.

Edit: The source of the data:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World (stylized as Ethnoloue) is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It was first issued in 1951, and is now published annually by SIL International, a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization. SIL's main purpose is to study, develop and document languages for religious purposes and to promote literacy.

ssjevot posted...

Edit: The source of the data:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnologue

Ethnologue: Languages of the World (stylized as Ethnoloue) is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It was first issued in 1951, and is now published annually by SIL International, a U.S.-based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization. SIL's main purpose is to study, develop and document languages for religious purposes and to promote literacy.

Now you know who to complain to!

Yes, right after I learn Japanese, since they were set to take over the world in the 80s.

1337toothbrush posted...

Yes, right after I learn Japanese, since they were set to take over the world in the 80s.

Xi isn't about to sign the Plaza Accords... (Though really the effect of that is greatly exaggerated, the asset bubble was real either way).

i live in the sf bay area. most chinese folk speak cantonese here. so ill probably try to learn that, if i can.

ssjevot posted...

Xi isn't about to sign the Plaza Accords... (Though really the effect of that is greatly exaggerated, the asset bubble was real either way).

True, but the US is still maneuvering. Whatever genius the CCP thinks it has won't stand a chance to blunt action by the US and it's obvious to everyone what they're trying to do.

1337toothbrush posted...

True, but the US is still maneuvering. Whatever genius the CCP thinks it has won't stand a chance to blunt action by the US and it's obvious to everyone what they're trying to do.

Curious what it is you think that blunt action will be.

ssjevot posted...

Curious what it is you think that blunt action will be.

It really came into force with China beating out the US in 5G. Since the US was late on that, they outright demanded people not use their equipment as a matter of "national security". There was an attempt to outmaneuver China with trade deals, but TPP was encumbered with corporate greed and of course ultimately sunk by Trump because his name wasn't on it. It's going to take a while, but the hints are strong for companies to find alternate suppliers. Right now the US is screaming about human rights. That'll escalate to economic sanctions, the US's favorite economic tool. US media is also screaming about China building up their military. Look forward to proxy wars all over the place.

I don't think it's nearly as hard as people make it sound. Learning the characters just takes time but it's not challenging.

Learning the tones isn't hard either. Once you've done it for a bit, your brain will earn some folds and you won't need to consciously think about how to use the right tones, the tones will just become part of the word. And the grammar isn't hard in chinese.

Wetterdew posted...

I don't think it's nearly as hard as people make it sound. Learning the characters just takes time but it's not challenging.

Learning the tones isn't hard either. Once you've done it for a bit, your brain will earn some folds and you won't need to consciously think about how to use the right tones, the tones will just become part of the word. And the grammar isn't hard in chinese.

Grammar is definitely very easy in Chinese. Probably easier than English and sentence order is largely the same as English. Verbs don't conjugate, particles are rare, for some reason it's become acceptable to just use to count everything. Compared to Japanese or Korean it's a walk in the park.

Characters are indeed not that bad since they usually only have one way to be read and if there is more than one way to read them it has some logic behind when to use what reading. Compared to Japanese it's night and day (Japanese readings are made up and the rules are mere suggestions that will be wrong at least half the time).

Tones I think are extremely hard to learn as a second language. I disagree on that part. I think that's the only aspect of Chinese that is harder than Japanese. Japanese is very easy to pronounce, Chinese is not. You are correct that you just learn them as part of the word, but I think it's very difficult for a second language speaker to actually master the tones. I often watch videos of these people showing off on YouTube and they still make mistakes (though you don't know that if you're in the target audience for white guy amazes natives with his Chinese videos).

I took two years of chinese in high school and three in college. My high school teacher didn't teach us tones so I was literally starting from scratch in college.

Tones are fuckin wild but yeah they do just kinda become part of the word. None of that "male/female" noun shit like in Spanish helps too.

And yeah grammar is easy. Sentence structure is really simple.

Learn Chinese with me

mattfrank posted...

Learn Chinese with me

I mean the target audience for traditional characters already knows all of that and isn't going to be offended.

No, fuck China.

Not yet, but maybe someday. Might pick up Japanese again, but definitely brushing up my French first

Anyways, I'll never learn written chinese because there are too many characters and at least on computer screens, they hurt my eyes to look at because of all the lines. For spoken Mandarin, I'll never learn because attempting to learn a tonal language sounds very hard. And then there's the part where it has like no value in my life because I have no intention of going to like China or Taiwan which are basically the only places it is something important to know.

Why would I learn a chicken dish?

isn't the alphabet just symbols symbolizing ideas / objects / actions and stuff? not phonetics? that takes a life time to learn and would be fucking just inefficient in general.

myzz7 posted...

isn't the alphabet just symbols symbolizing ideas / objects / actions and stuff? not phonetics? that takes a life time to learn and would be fucking just inefficient in general.

Actually the majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds. They have a semantic component or symbolizing what they mean (usually this is the radical or ) and a phonetic component or telling you how to say it (usually another separate character that is pronounced the same or similarly).

Sounds pretty cool right? Well everything I just said is only true for Classical Chinese, a long dead language we aren't even fully sure of the pronunciation of and Mandarin is using characters not for their meaning for a variety of functions not present in classical Chinese (such as and ) and the phonetic component is often barely or not even remotely connected to the Mandarin pronunciation. The phonetic component actually more often predicts the Chinese derived readings of characters () in modern Japanese than it does Mandarin.

So yes characters are pretty difficult to learn, but overall I prefer them to English spelling. And between Japanese and Chinese I just kind of prefer Chinese characters overall as a writing system. They convery information very efficiently.

ssjevot posted...

So yes characters are pretty difficult to learn, but overall I prefer them to English spelling. And between Japanese and Chinese I just kind of prefer Chinese characters overall as a writing system. They convery information very efficiently.

i heard in passing that a chinese person knowing english as second language was puzzled that reading was slower than his natural reading of chinese. in which he could glance at a paragraph in chinese script and get the gist of the meaning from the symbol recognition much quicker than reading english phonetic alphabet to come to meaning of the words. this accurate?

Nah, as a Spanish speaker putting some effort to learn Portuguese, Italian and French will be better in the long run.

How many do I need to eat before I know the language?

I already did back in high school. I'm extremely rusty tho