learning chinese....

Chinese isn’t a difficult language. It has only a rudimentary grammar and is whether declined or conjugated. Also the pronunciation is not an insurmountable cliff, but it is correct that it plays an important role because there is a multiplicity of homonyms. That is often demonstrated with the ma example: " Ma ma ma ma ma? " means as much as " Does the smallpox-scarred mother grumble the horse? " The different " ma’s" thereby are in each case differently stressed so that the horse is not the mother ;-)). One could build with " ma” many more merry sentences, because this word has twenty different meanings, among them " mammoth”, " toad”, “a kind of stone “,” ant” and “hemp”. The word " li” can select even more than one hundred different translations, among others " widow”, " pigsty”, " plough”, " a bride’s veil" or " eel".

As I can’t notice any stress rules I try to imitate the pronunciation of the natives, and that works very often amazingly well. If it does not fold, it is no tragedy. If my opposite is not too stupid, he will understand due to the context. In the Cantonese language - which is spoken in some areas of south China and in Hong Kong - there are nine tones, whereby it depends here also on the clay/tone length. “High-Chinese-speaking people” call this modification of Chinese " bird language”, because it is more twittered. By the way: High Chinese is called “Mandarin” only in some European languages. In high Chinese it is called " Putonghua”, normal or standard language, which is to a large extent identical to the dialect spoken in Beijing.

But it’s the characters, which make Chinese a difficult language. The Kangxi dictionary of 1716 registered exactly 46,964 indications, modern sources proceed even with approximately 80,000 indications. Generally, one would get along with only 3,500 indications, in order to read a newspaper. But even if I kept an indication per day, I needed approximately ten years, in order to store these 3,500 indications in my brain.

Many Chinese also know the fact that the character system is ineffectively and old fashioned. Therefore there were attempts in the last hundred years to abolish the indications and to replace it by a phonetic alphabet. It was " the revolutionary movement of may 4th" in 1919 and the famous writer Lu Xun, which explained: " If the indications are not abolished, China will die." The last, who tried, to replace the characters by an alphabet was Mao Zedong. But the big chairman failed because of a multiplicity of problems, which would bring a conversion. In order to implement a phonetic alphabet, one would have to agree first on a general pronunciation. But already the" Conference for the standardization of the pronunciation" 1913 in Beijing failed, because a representative of the north Chinese saw himself insulted. South Chinese had said rickshaw" in their Shanghai dialect, the north Chinese understood however " Turtle egg" - a bad insult, which they referred to themselves. Some Reformers realized that north and south Chinese would never agree on a uniform discussion. They suggested abolishing Chinese and replacing it by Esperanto. An excellent idea, which unfortunately nobody wanted to follow. However 1956 an obligatory phonetic transcription was nevertheless introduced for “high-chinese” based on Latin alphabet, so-called pinyin. Learning beginners, if it’s only useful to know how to pronounce someone’s name without offending him, also uses this…. A frequent surname for example is Zhao. This is approximately expressed as” Dschao”. Foreigners however Mr. Zhao complains, " pronounce my name as " Cao"." Cao however is the colloquial word for sexual intercourse, and so Mr. Zhao is called " Mr. Fuck". Sometimes it depends on minor differences….