Monday, April 23, 2018

Chinese

Urk.

I just can't produce the sounds. Learning 4000 characters. Not a problem. Tones. Not a problem. Learning words, grammar, sentences, not a problem. Phonemes? A huge problem.

I am Finnish. Finnish consonants are pretty hard. I find Chinese incredibly soft and... sort of melting... It's the same thing with Norwegian. Some consonants are very soft. I feel like I should make my tongue a snail trying to fill my mouth to be able to produce these letters... The Norwegian N... I just can't.

Now, apparently, this is a problem not only for me.


And R is a problem both in Norwegian and Chinese :-D For different reasons. The Norwegian R is a bit like rj (consonant y, not English j)

But, but...

I decided to use Duolingo, and learn the characters at the same time, and also learn the radicals. Sounds like a lot, huh? I'm not moving to the next lesson on Duolingo until I have learned the characters, however long time that will take.

Anyway, the first lesson has two... er... what ever to call that. Sentences? Words?

你好 nĭ hăo (hello)
and
再见 zàijiàn (goodbye)

The characters are 你 nĭ (you)  好 hăo (good) 再 zài (again) and 见 jiàn (to meet)
The radicals are  亻 rén (man) 小 xiǎo (small) 女 nǚ (woman) 子 zǐ (child) 一 yī (one) 冉 rǎn (slowly) 目 mù (eyes) 儿 ér (feet)

And I find it extremely humiliating that I cannot copy the Chinese characters. My copy looks awful. And I do calligraphy... (blush)

So, what I have done today is
study Spanish
Read the Russian word of the day and the sample sentences
Write the Maltese word of the day for this blog, and then I searched some Maltese recipes - that is, recipes written in Maltese, and that was pretty hard, and then I stumbled over an interesting blog entry about Christmas, moved that to LWT and now I'm going through it, so I have studies Maltese
Then the Chinese. I went to Duolingo, and found that they have a lot of interesting stuff there, so I have studied Spanish, French, German, Valyrian,  Korean and Welsh :-D
I wonder how the heck they have Valyrian but not Maltese or Finnish.

I like this :-D I don't have the slightest idea if anything sticks, but this is fun. 




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