Chinese is such an archaic language, it will be very difficult

You are my density @Gain :blush:and I know that you have watched back to the future :wink:

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Which Americans canā€™t even pronounce!

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R is usually among the last phonemes that even native English speakers grasp. The liquids L and R are tough. Thatā€™s why young Amewican childwen tend to tawk wike this fow a whiyo.

Most/many Europeans use a ā€˜rollingā€™ R.

Well the characters help already, besides ppl tend to know a bit Japanese from the anime and stuff.

Japan borrowed the entire Chinese literary apparatus, of which characters are the most visible part.

They borrowed the word combinations and onyomi pronunciations.

This comedian gives a linguistics lesson on Japanese and Chinese. Heā€™s a little off because he suggests there are no cognates.
https://youtu.be/Lz7zYGuM_LM

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Who is ā€˜peopleā€™?

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people who are interested in japanese stuff sure, normal people, no.

Liquid L and R are at least easier than alveolar trill R for most Taiwanese. For some reason Iā€™ve been making that sound in kindergarten, Iā€™d run around the playground making trill sound, so it never was a challenge for me, but my parents couldnā€™t make the trill sound if their lives depended on it.

Because the sound exists in Mandarin.

Iā€™ve heard English people say ā€˜wewldā€™ instead of ā€˜worldā€™

Some people just canā€™t seem to trill their Rā€™s. I think even some people for whom itā€™s a native phoneme have trouble with it.

It might have something to do with the same sort of limitation that prevents people from being able to roll up the sides of their tongue, flip it over, or do other tricks with it. I can make a three-leaf clover shape with my tongueā€¦

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You have the front tongue rolling R and throat scratch R (French speakers)

alveolar trill

uvular trill, voiced uvular fricative or voiced uvular approximant

I doubt itā€™s anything physical. I can only roll my tongue, making it a simple tube shape, but so can my parents and that ability doesnā€™t help them make the trill sound.

I also know people who can do the tongue lotus thing and they couldnā€™t do the simple trill r.

It might just be if they are exposed to it or practiced it at an young age.

Iā€™d love to hear from someone who couldnā€™t do the simple trill r when they were growing up, but learned to master it as an adult because Iā€™ve never known someone who pulled it off.

Some Taiwanese aboriginal languages have the alveolar trill sound.

From my TUR sheet:
image

Pangcah (Amis), Atayal, Puyuma, Rukai, Tsou, Paiwan, Saisiyat, Tao, Ita Thaw (Thao), all have the simple trill r sound.

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I have a linguistics masterā€™s and have learned bits of many languages, from Old Norse to Arabic, to varying degrees of proficiency but without ever really ā€œmasteringā€ any of them. I just enjoy the linguistics so much. That said, I can safely say that, for the most part, Mandarin is one of the easiest and also most rewarding languages Iā€™ve learnt, though I only reached intermediate level at my peak.

Other languages Iā€™ve reached a similar level of proficiency are Arabic and French, and by the same level I was drowning in a sea of grammatical rules and general annoyances. In contrast, I found Chineseā€™s grammar by this point to be remarkably uniform. It also helps considerably that itā€™s mostly a subject-verb-object language, like English. I personally find that memorising vocabulary is much easier than wrestling with complicated grammar, and in this Chinese has another advantage because so much of the vocabulary sounds the same! (I donā€™t know if this is a fact, but I get the impression that Chinese has less sounds than most big languages, especially English.)

Tones are a fucking bastard, but it just takes practice, practice, practice. Yeah, it fucking sucks when you try to order a green tea and the girl behind the counter canā€™t understand you, but I find that most people tend to be patient.

I personally also find Chinese characters enjoyable and better-suited to the language than using a Romanisation system like Pinyin. I always recommend that people memorise all of the radicals first and then treat the characters like jigsaw puzzles. Iā€™m surprised that so few Chinese courses recommend this approach, because I think it makes learning the writing so much easier.

Over all, I think Chinese is a wonderful language. Nice and straightforward, not nearly as frustrating as what Iā€™ve encountered with Japanese which Iā€™m currently learning. But if you go into it thinking itā€™s ā€œarchaicā€ and begrudging the people who canā€™t understand you instead of trying to improve yourself, then you may as well just pack it in and not bother with languages at all.

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At least for Mandarin, I think itā€™s true. It only has 25 consonants and 9 vowels. Mandarinā€™s simple syllable structure model, with only n, and ng for coda, also contributes to how repetitive it sounds.

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Yeah French is such a mess. Thereā€™s no logic to anything, only exceptions and exceptions to exceptions.

Yes! French is a walk in the park compared to Arabic and some of the other languages Iā€™ve dabbled in, but itā€™s all over the place compared to Mandarin. I donā€™t know how anybody who has gone through French could complain about Mandarin being ā€œhardā€.

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French contributes largely to English being such a mess, too.

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