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Any opinions expressed are my own, and potentially unpopular with others. Should this be upsetting, maybe, read it again, insert smiley faces, rainbows, and glitter as needed.
Saddest part is this is the only language I've ever heard that I'm completely unable to get. Any other language I recognize the words or the intent or are able to understand relatively easily, sometimes very easily. But Chinese, it just doesn't even compute unless I'm reading it.
If I hear anyone speaking the language I just go blank and hear nothing but noise.
sigpic "In this world, the one who has the most fun is the winner!"C.B.
Any opinions expressed are my own, and potentially unpopular with others. Should this be upsetting, maybe, read it again, insert smiley faces, rainbows, and glitter as needed.
I know the feeling; even being able to have a basic conversation in Chinese now (my Chinese is still not as good as my Japanese was before I arrived in Japan), there are times where I can process what I'm hearing, but it still sounds far more otherworldy than Japanese ever did. Partially because of the hugely reduced number of loanwords; practially only brand names and the very rare tech term.
It gets even worse when you try branching out from Mandarin too; living in Taiwan, I've picked up a little bit of Hokkien, and it is just absolutely insane. More tones, more sounds, less standardization, very little in the way of good learning resources, native speakers who were never taught properly how to write it because they were taught to write Mandarin, not to mention that Mandarin going back and screwing up their "native" accent... It's an absolute nightmare. The one upside is that there's basically no written language to learn; if you can learn the spoken language, the written language is Mandarin, which you're assumed to already be familiar with. Of course, this makes it hard for those of us who have a large Sinic-vocabulary that otherwise would be a useful base to learn from, or who simply have an easier time learning with writing.
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