What are the characteristics of the chinese language? What are the 5 tones? Is it true there’s no past tense?
How do they avoid ambiguity if there’s no past tense? give an example of one of the chinese ‘tones’? is it the same thing as a pitch? so if you say one thing in a high pitched voice it means something different if you said the same thing in a low pitched voice? what is Chinese word order, and grammar like? is it harder for an american to learn spoken chinese than for a chinese to Learn English? is it possible for an american to learn written chinese? how long does it take to become fluent?
do you place an adjective first like in english, or place it second like in spanish?
thanks
let me try my best to answer to your question.
example :他正在睡觉 (he is sleeping, he was sleeping)
these 4 characters chinese words simply tells the reader three things. he, sleeping, at that particular moment. it doesn’t give a specific timing of the event. if you want to know when the event takes place, you probably have to read on or read before.
昨晚，当我们在吃饭的时候，他正在睡觉。
last night, while we were eating, he was sleeping.
他现在在做什么？他正在睡觉。
what is he doing now? he is sleeping.
note that the words 现在 means now, which is the event time.
while reading, the event is usually mentioned in the beginning. if you missed the beginning of a paragraph/story, you probably will miss the event time.
tones are quite different from pitches. but this is more to the hearing sensation, not easy to describe. i shall try to explain in the english way. take for example the word: sunday. it consists of two syllabus SUN-DAY. when you pronounce the word SUN, you raised your tone, when you pronounce the word DAY, you dropped your tone. that’s what we mean by tone. SUN is very close to the first tone of chinese pronunciation, whereas DAY is just a bit different from the third tone of chinese pronunciation. different tone will end up different thing. it has got nothing to do with pitches. in fact generally, the china people speak in a higher pitch, but it’s still understood by the rest of the chinese-speaking people from the rest of the world.
the word order is similar to that of english (see my example above). it’s not difficult to learn speaking chinese, but writing would be very difficult. start with PINYIN (standard mandarin romanization), it will save you a lot of time.
writing is difficult, cos chinese is not a romanize language. for english all you need is to remember how to write 26 alphabets. but chinese is a symbol for a word. worst of all, most of the time you need more than a symbol to address something. example: sleep (睡觉). difficult right?
to speak fluent chinese, probably it’ll take you a year. to write fluent chinese? it might take forever.
for chinese, adjective comes before noun.
红旗，炒饭，大船
red flag, fried rice, big ship
English Grammar – Tenses – Present Simple
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