Understanding Chinese Language

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Reason Online: Child Labor


The title of the link is not representative of the information contained within. It's actually an editorial piece on learning Mandarin Chinese and the trials of adopting a child from China. I applaud the fact that the author of the article is attempting to learn Mandarin Chinese so that he can communicate with his adopted Chinese daughter. The problem I have is that he seems to be using only written materials to educate himself in the language, and that is simply not good enough. Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, unlike English which is atonal. Trying to learn Chinese from a book is a near impossible task. A sentence like "ma ma ma ma de ma ma?" "Is mother scolding the horse's rope?" becomes unintelligible to the person being spoken to. Whereas tone in English often carries emotional context, "That one. That one! That one?", in Mandarin Chinese, the tone of the word stays consistant regardless of regardless of the emotion -- emotion is conveyed in the language in the choice of the words themselves, as well as the volume of the words spoken.


A recent study showed that
Mandarin Chinese requires use of both sides of the brain, whereas English only requires one. Mandarin and Taiwanese were the first languages I learned as a child, I learned English early on, and it has since become my primary speaking language. The dictionary of my mind looks something like this:

I: gwa, ngoh, wo, watashi, boku, yo

speak/say: gong, jang, hanashite, shuo, habla

english: yingyi, yingwen, yingmahn, eigo, ingles

question indicator: a, ma, ka

When I speak a foreign language, my brain shifts into the grammatical structure of the appropriate language and constructs the sentence using the index. Words from English are subbed in for words that I can't remember.

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