so now that i can speak a little bit of chinese i think that i can say some things about the language. i am only doing this because so many people back home have asked me if i am learning chinese. and I am, but i would like to share some general knowledge of the language.
So, we all know that chinese uses charecters. They do look scary i will tell you that. but each one is built off of parts from others. so there is a method to the madness. the worse part is that there is no real phonetic guide to them. they have some things that help like (jin)近 looks a lot like （xin) 新 they both have a similar right side. look at them in a big font to realize it. but others like (wang) 往 and (zhu) 住 look very similar and have nothing in common. some are pictures as well like (ren)人, its a fucked up looking person. and ren means person and people. from there you take 人 add another 人， and get （cong) 从, which means to follow. so the charecter has two people following each other. it also means from, that makes some sense. but that works out hardly ever.
the charecters are really not that hard. i can remember 40-60 new works in about a week or so. so its not impossible. the hard part is that there only about 500 sounds in chinese. That means that EVERY word falls into those sounds. for instance there are about 100 different meanings for the sound SHI. some are more used than others. but that can make for some interesting situations.
Probably one of the worse things is that the average Joe ( or really average Wang) has really bad chinese. If your poor you dont get a good education, plain and simple. So a lot of people have bad chinese and are hard as hell to understand. they also speak in ways that could have many meanings, but you have to know what it means for that situatuion. for instance a bus driver asking if there is anybody for the next stop will just yell XIA(下）! which has about 20 different meanings, it just so happens to sort of mean to get off the bus. its hard to explain and things like that dont really happen in english
the last thing is that there are four tones in chinese. that just means that any word can be said four different ways and mean four different things. so this was made to along with the fact that many words have the same phonetics. but its totall bullshit. no one uses them, it just does not make sense to change the pitch of your voice all the time. So something that was supposed to clarify the language has just muddeled it up. YEAH!
well that is the basics, then there is the fact that the charecters have gone through simplifications in the past ( some up words of 40 strokes). so they have lost a lot of the differences in them and the are no longer pictures of what they meant.
thanks for taking time to read this. it is a real basic explanation of what i have been doing for 7 months here.
