Chinese Is Easy TedX

Chinese is easy
Introduction
I want you all to think about the hardest language in the world to learn.
A couple of you maybe thought of Arabic or even Japanese. But I bet if not the
majority, at least a big part of you instantly remembered Chinese. Well… What would
you say if I told you that Chinese is actually easy. At least much easier than you most
likely think it is. Believe me, I am talking out of my own experience right now. I
started learning Chinese approximately 1.5 years ago just out of love for languages
and my huge interest in the Middle Kingdom, that’s how the Chinese call their
country by the way, the middle kingdom. And let me you since then I have been
astonished by the extent to which the language, because of lack of information and
many stereotypes, is being misunderstood by most of non-chinese speakers.
So I hope with this brief overview of the Chinese grammar, writing and language
structure you will get a new perspective of the language.
Characters
First let’s start with these (Show a picture of a bunch of random Chinese characters)
yes, let’s start with characters by far the most feared part of the language. And if you
look at them like that, like a bunch of random lines and squiggles you will get
intimidated. In reality the characters are not that random, they are actually made of
smaller unites which we call radicals, and even though there are thousands upon
thousands of characters all of them are made of 214 such radicals. As a result of this
the expectations regarding the difficulty of the learning process we usually have only
really applies to the first 100-200 characters you learn and from that point it only
gets easier with each character you learn, with each radical you familiarize yourself
with. For example when I started learning I would write out the same character for
about three pages to remember it. and now I usually just write 3-5 lines (on a
notebook page), I think you would agree that that’s quite a big contrast, and actually
not that inconvenient if you take into account that while writing out the characters
you are also remembering the word itself that they stand for better too.
Example of a Radical
But now… what are these radicals that make this seemingly hard process so much
easier you ask. Well let me give you an example. Here we have the radical 木 (mù)
which by itself stands for a tree and if you look at it closely also resembles a tree with
its shape. Now two trees put together mean “woods” quite logical isn’t it? And what
do you think three trees stacked upon each other like this will mean? It means a
forest. So you see? How much easier it was for you to get acquinted with two new
characters just by having the background knowledge of 木 (mù)? And that’s how it
works with each character you learn you become familiar with more and more
shapes and meanings which in turn make learning other characters containing the
same radical and structure that much easier.
Chinese Word Formation

Now let’s move onto the actual words and vocabulary of the language,
where I have even more good news for you, and that is, Chinese words
are usually quite short. Mostly consisting of only up to 3 syllables. But
their simplicity does not lie in their shortness but rather how they are
made up. Here I have some examples of the composition of two Chinese
words. 电 means electricity and 话 means speech, what do you think 电
话 (electric speech) means? Well it means a phone call.  Now let’s
continue. 火 means fire and 山 stands for a mountain can you guess
what 火山 (Fire Mountain) means? Yes you are right it means volcano.
Grammar in general
And the simplicity of Chinese grammar does not stop with word
formation but rather it applies to the entire system. I am sure if you’ve
learned an Indo-European language, which you most likely have, since
English is also one of them you would be familiar with these… Endless
grammatical tables with many different verb forms teaching you with
which tense and with which pronouns it is correct to use each of the
many verbs forms and rules you have to memorize. But Chinese you have
none of that, in Chinese there are no verb tenses, there are no
declinations, no articles. But what am I even talking about the language
barely even has plural forms.
But how does it function?

And now you are surely asking yourself how on earth this language even
functions. Well long story short, the answer lies in grammatical particles.
Particles are these teeny-tiny one syllable long words which enable us to
create different types of sentences. To demonstrate the concept’s
general simplicity I’ve gathered up 4 simple sentences both in Chinese
and English, and have highlighted the same word, the same color in both
languages and left everything grammatical in black, so that you can see
how much more grammatical knowledge you need to have to make sense
of the English sentences than the Chinese ones. (Here I go through the
four sentances)
Tones and ending
I think you would definitely have noticed by now and you would most
likely have heard about Chinese being a tonal language. Many say tones
present a difficulty to the speakers of European and Middle Eastern
languages because of their lack of tones. But are you really sure you don’t
use tones everyday? Don’t keep yourself asking what? I can assure you
that you do in fact use tones on daily basis. Now if you did not see what I
was doing there, I will tell you. I used three of the 4 so much feared
Chinese tones in English, and completely naturally. So saying you don’t
have tones in English is wrong. It’s just that in Chinse every word has one
of the four tones. Now what are these tones? The first tone as you can
see on the graph is a flat ton so what that means is that ma would here
be pronounced as mā, as in for example the phrase “are really sure”? or
in “maybe”. The second tone is the rising tone má, in English this happens
when asking a question for example “What?” The fourth tone is the
falling tone mà, in English when saying “No!” “Now!” or “yes!” and I
missed the fourth tone intentionally because that’s the only one I could
not think of being used in English, it’s a falling and rising tone “mǎ“，my
voice goes down and then comes up again. Using these is definitely not
easy when you are starting out but as I said they are not completely alien
to you either and with time you will get used to it. When I first began to
speak, I used shake my head like crazy along with the tones to keep up
with the beat, back then me speaking looked approximately like this. 感
谢诸位的时间。(Speak weirdly) but now I can just say 感谢诸位的时间
(speak legit Chinese). phrase by the way means something along the lines
of “Thank you for your attention!” in English. So thanks for your
attention! Goodbye.

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Chinese is easy

Chinese Word Formation

But how does it function?

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