The bad news is that you sound terrible when you don't get the tones right, even when you are understood. I think this has to be considered a problem with learning Chinese.
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Replying to @GabrielCorsetti @Pinboard and
You’re right, of course — I tend to think of it more as a problem of the way Chinese is taught, but I’ve already derailed this thread enough.
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That may be, but the language itself has a lot to do with it too IMHO
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Replying to @GabrielCorsetti @Pinboard and
Yeah, but you could just as easily say that deficiencies on the part of some other languages (and tonal languages aren't that uncommon!) make it harder for their speakers to learn Chinese languages.
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Replying to @bokane @GabrielCorsetti and
It's not as if Chinese languages are going to change for our convenience, so we may as well just get on with it and find better ways of helping students get to where they need to be.
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I know a Catalan polyglot who has some level of fluency in over a dozen languages, including Farsi and Arabic. He told me that out of all the languages he's attempted, Chinese has given the least returns on time spent.
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Replying to @GabrielCorsetti @bokane and
My polyglot friend Douglas H. is fluent in French & Italian and has good German, Russian, Polish & some Swedish. Despite 25 yrs of intermittent Chinese study, and recent yrs. of dedicated study, he still finds it inexplicably hard to attain basic fluency.
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Replying to @david__moser @bokane and
Exactly. There's something about the language that's just really tough. It's the tones, the number of characters, but also something else I still can't put my finger on.
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Replying to @GabrielCorsetti @david__moser and
I really think it's just a case of having to memorize five thousand shapes in the middle of it all, an onerous activity completely unrelated to language learning.
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Replying to @Pinboard @david__moser and
I disagree. Personally I find learning characters the EASY part of Chinese. I read far better than I speak. It's expressing myself with ease (and good tones) in spoken conversation that I find most difficult.
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Speaking is always the hardest thing to do well. I don't think anyone argues it's hard to learn Chinese characters, it's just a huge time sink. It's a two thousand year old game of Go Fish that spun out of control.
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Replying to @Pinboard @GabrielCorsetti and
"It is difficult to get [an Imperial Chinese scribe] to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair
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