Showing posts with label Mandarin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mandarin. Show all posts

20 Apr 2013

What language fits your personality?

Language is communication. Communication in different parts evolved to be more beneficial for those who speak it. These changes gave the language a 'personality'. Lets find out what language suits your personality. This is my expression of these languages. 

Creative Common by Enric Archivell
Spanish:
An easy to spell and pronounce language which has a Latin American exoticness. If it was a food it would be spicy without too much to burn on your tongue. It can be helpful with business, if you live in the Americas. It can be seen as a travellers language as it is the second most spoken language after Chinese. 


Creative Common by Doug
Creative Common by Fingle

20 Jul 2012

What languages are harder to learn - Photo Blog

Source: http://zidbits.com/2011/04/what-is-the-hardest-language-to-learn/

I believe the table is missing German and Indonesian / Malay. If I was going to add them, I would have German in the bottom of the easy list or at the top of the medium list. I would have also put Indonesian in Medium only because of the diverse vocabulary (Indonesian has a lot of loanwords from Malay, English, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese languages, Portuguese, Sanskrit and Arabic). Indonesian grammar is simpler than Spanish and other Romance languages, the sentence structure is logical and there is no tense. Also questions can be made out of sentences very easily. E.g. Saya tinggal di... (I live in...), Anda tinggal di mana? / Di mana anda tinggal? (Where do you live?).

I agree with 80% of the table but the only fact I disagree with is that it takes 88 weeks to learn Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Arabic because Benny Lewis learnt to speak relatively fluent Mandarin in 3 months.  
What do you think of this picture? Please write your thoughts in the comment section below.

12 Jul 2012

Should I learn Chinese or German?

En español

When you decide to learn a language, you may find yourself in a situation where you want to learn two languages, but do not know to choose one over the other. 
I have come up with an educated solution to this problem by creating a table with properties of a language. For those who are deciding between Chinese (Zhōngwén) and German (Deutsch) you're in luck. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincrosbie/4712869739/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjuel/5604964197/


Chinese
German
What is the better choice?


Countries
Officially: PRC, ROC and  Singapore. Widely understood: Malaysia and Hong Kong but also spoken worldwide.
Officially: Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Luxembourg, South Tyrol in Italy, Belgium. 
Either, both spoken in many places.
Number of Native Speakers
Around 1.2 billion people 
(2005)
 Around 98 million people
(2005)
Chinese

Pronunciation
Tones, most sounds don’t exist in English
Quite easy to pronounce, except for ü, ch and ch in the middle of a word. 
German
Grammar 
No flexion, very easy syntax
Gender, many word endings, verbs at end of phrase
Chinese

Vocabulary 
Words are normally made up of one - two syllables
Long analytical vocabulary (words can be build upon themselves)
Chinese

Language Group
Sino-Tibetan
Germanic (along with English, Dutch, Swedish and other languages)
German



Writing System
No relationship to sound of the word. Made up of characters.
Very phonetic due to spelling reform. Nouns are written in capitals so you can recognise them easily, which speeds up reading.
German
Tally
3 Chinese
3 German
1 Either





http://www.flickr.com/photos/strandell/2658759725/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/phil_p/3344862675/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanwalsh/4179921545/in/photostream/














Overall, it comes down to whether you want to travel or are on a business trip to Europe or Asia. If you want an easy language to read and write, learn German, if you want a language with easy grammar, learn Chinese. If you still can’t decide, you can always flip a coin.

Danke / 谢谢 

22 Apr 2012

How to impress many, increase iq and meet and speak to more people?

Do you want to impress many, increase your iq or speak to more people?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, I believe learning another language or a word in a couple can help you. When you start a conversation the first word you would say is hello (to an unfamiliar person) or hi (to someone familiar). So the word for hello or hi or 'how are you?' would be good word to know in another language. 

Key:
(r) = rolled r
(rh) = guttural r
˜ = nasal sound

How to say hello in common languages:


#1 Mandarin Chinese: 你好 (ni2 hao3) (pronounced 'knee' with a high rising tone and 'how' with a high falling then rising tone) 

#2 Spanish: Hola (pronounced o-la)
#3 English: (I hope you would know that already)
#4 Hindi: Namaste (pronounced na-mahs-tay) or Namaskar (pronounced na-mahs-ka(r) )
#5 Arabic: مرحبا (pronounced ma(rh)-ha-ba) or السلام عليكم (pronounced al-sa-laahm a-lay-koom) meaning 'peace be with you' or 'peace upon you'


#6 Bengali: Nomaashkaar (pronounced no-maahsh-shkaah(r) (Hindu) or Asalaam Alaykum (Muslim) 
#7 Portuguese: Olá (European) or Oi (Brazilian)
#8 Russian: привет (pronounced p(r)ee-vet) or Здравствуйте (pronounced zd(r)ahv-stvoo-ee-teh)
#9 Japanese: こんにちは (kon'nichiwa) (pronounced kon-nee-chee-wa)
German: Hallo
Vietnamese: Xin Cháo (pronounced shin chow or sin chow depending on the dialect) 
French: Bonjour (pronounced bãn-zho(rh) )
Korean: 안녕하세요 (pronounced ahn-nyeong-ha-se-yo 
or ahn-yông-ha-se-yo)
Cantonese: 你好 (pronounced lei with a high rising tone and hou with a high rising tone or nei with a high rising tone and hou with a high rising tone)
Turkish: Merhaba (pronounced ma(r)haba
Italian: Ciao (pronounced chow)
Polish: cześć (pronounced cheshch) 
Indonesian: Selamat (pronounced se-lah-maht):  Pagi (pronounced pah-ghee) (in the morning), Siang (pronounced see-ung) (in the early afternoon), Sore (pronounced so-(r)ay) (in the late afternoon) or Malam (pronounced mah-lahm) (at night) or Halo
Thai: สวัสดี (pronounced sa-wa-dee)
Tagalog: Kamusta (pronounced ka-moos-tah) or Halo
Romanian: Bună Ziua (pronounced boo-nuh zee-wah)
Dutch: Hallo
Khmer: Sok subai tei? (how are you?) (pronounced sock soo-bye tay)
Greek: γειά σου (pronounced geia sou)
Catalan: Hola (pronounced like Spanish)
Czech: Ahoj (pronounced a-hoy)
Swedish: Hallå (pronounced ha-looh)
Hebrew: שלום (pronounced shah-lom)
Finnish: Hei (pronounced hay)
Afrikaans: Hallo
Norwegian: Hallo

... and one more -

Esperanto: Saluton (pronounced sah-loo-ton)


Pop quiz:
1. What is significant about the first nine languages on the list? 
2. Why is Dutch before Norwegian and Vietnamese before Italian?

Please write your answers in the comment section below. Answers revealed next post.

11 Jan 2012

What language should you learn?

There are many reasons to learn a language such as being useful for business, it is useful for traveling and it helps you understand how difficult or easy your mother toungue is. If you learn an 'easy' language you will realise that your native language is more difficult than you thought and vice versa with more difficult languages. I have made a quiz to help you decide what language should you learn.
What language should you learn?
I hope you enjoy it.