Learning Chinese
I'm only about 20 hours into it, but I like Chinese. It has really useful words, like "or" and "and". Unlike Japanese. And the grammar is easy - "I go home", "You want water", "have/not have money". I've studied Japanese for 6 years now and I'm still not sure of the right way to talk about wanting something.
Chinese also has (and uses!) useful words like "you" "me" "he". They're not unstated, as in Japanese, and there's no implication that someone is your girlfriend if you refer to her as "she".
Tones are a little rough. And I still have my habit (picked up from japanese) of speaking monotonically. Because in japanese you're not supposed stretch out syllables. Chinese is a lot more like English that way.
Best of all is the lack of politeness distinctions. You can go into a store and they'll be like "you want what" and you can just say "I want ~". None of the robotic memorized super polite greetings of Japanese.
Chinese also has (and uses!) useful words like "you" "me" "he". They're not unstated, as in Japanese, and there's no implication that someone is your girlfriend if you refer to her as "she".
Tones are a little rough. And I still have my habit (picked up from japanese) of speaking monotonically. Because in japanese you're not supposed stretch out syllables. Chinese is a lot more like English that way.
Best of all is the lack of politeness distinctions. You can go into a store and they'll be like "you want what" and you can just say "I want ~". None of the robotic memorized super polite greetings of Japanese.
posted by ernie at
5/15/2004 11:37:00 PM
