In France, the reputation of the Chinese language lives on. Who has not already told their interlocutor: “For me, it's Chinese!”?
Learning the Chinese language is too perceived as an arduous task that is discouraging in advance.
Philippe Laurent, creator of the MandarinMaster online Chinese learning method, takes stock and answers these questions:
Chinese is A family of languages.
Mandarin (I phone Põtōng Huà or common language) is one of these languages, along with Cantonese, Shanghainese, Pekinese and many other dialects.
It is the official language of so-called “mainland” China and Taiwan., which is taught and practiced all over China.
It is also The most spoken native language in the world, we doubt it.
“Chinese is not inaccessible, it's just a different language.”
We are used to alphabetic languages where each letter tells us the sound, regardless of the tone. On the other hand, Chinese is a language of characters which gives no guidance on how to pronounce them. In short, in front of a character you don't understand anything. It's really Chinese!
It is true that learning Chinese is not for everyone: you have to want to and give yourself the means, like any challenge after all!
To enable the Chinese themselves to better master their own language, A version of Chinese called “simplified” was created by the Chinese government (in the 1960s) as a new official language.
For Philippe, Learning Chinese characters is essential, because each character reveals an aspect of Chinese culture, a context, and even helps to fix in The memory the idea expressed.
On this point, the MandarinMaster method is designed precisely to help each learner to remember 2 to 3 characters per day, In a way progressive, from the point of view of writing and pronunciation.
For Philippe Laurent, learning each character reveals an aspect of Chinese culture and of the Chinese people's vision of the world.
“The secret to learning Chinese well certainly lies in the discipline, but also and above all in the curiosity of mind, engine of motivation to learn!”
For Philippe, “that's where we live the advantage of the Chinese language over the French language”. It is easy to understand that a Chinese character cannot change shape by conjugating.
A Chinese character that expresses a verb remains invariable in the infinitive, regardless of time, number, and gender.
If a Frenchman says “I wish you could come and have dinner at my house tonight”, a Chinese person will say “I want to come and have dinner at your house tonight”.
Philippe specifies: “Yes, there is a Chinese grammar, but it consists essentially of syntax, that is to say, in rules for positioning characters between them”.
This is great news for those who want to learn Chinese. A great challenge to the cliché about the difficulty of learning Chinese!
> Take advantage of 14 free days today (no CB info requested) to start learning Chinese with the MandarinMaster method.
