Chinese is easy

[Music]

i want you all to think about

the hardest language in the world to

learn

some of you may have remembered of maybe

arabic or

japanese but i bet a big part of you

would directly

think of chinese well what would you say

if i told you that

chinese is actually easy or much easier

than you think it is

and i’m telling you that out of my own

experience i started learning chinese

one and a half years ago and since then

i’ve been astonished by the extent to

which the language is

being misunderstood by most of

non-chinese speakers because of the many

stereotypes

it’s shrouded in and with this brief

overview of the china of the language

its structure writing

i want you i would i hope you will get a

better understanding of how it actually

works

now let’s start with these

the characters by far the most feared

part of the chinese language

which if you look at them like that like

bunch of random lines and squiggles

will definitely intimidate you and

overwhelmed you

but they’re actually not that random

they even though there are thousands

upon

thousands of chinese characters they all

consist of

just 214

radicals or subunits building blocks

which really help you when learning

because

as you’re learning uh new new characters

and you familiarize yourself with more

and more radicals

learning others is easier because

the shapes that you are already familiar

with

come up now but what are these

radicals exactly that make this

seemingly hard

process so much easier

i have an example here of a radical in

use in the language

so the radical here it stands for tree

and i think you would agree it even

looks like a tree

that’s red as mu now what do you think

two radicals for tree like this

would mean well it means woods

and then three trees stacked upon each

other like this

it means forest

now the simplicity of this

of how chinese make up their words and

even characters

doesn’t stop there it also goes on to

the actual

word formation i have here

because the simplicity of the chinese

words no

even though they’re in general actually

quite short which is good news because

they’re

quite easy to remember they’re mostly up

to three syllables long

is not in their shortness but the

simplicity lies

and how they’re being constructed and

put together

so for example here we have the

characters for

uh electricity tien and uh

speech hua now what do you think these

two characters put together

uh tien hua would mean uh well

electrical speech

dian hua means a phone call

now what do you if this if we continue

with the same logic what do you think

the character for fire hua and

the character for mountain shan would

mean together so

fire mountain well it means a volcano

and the simplicity of the grammar

doesn’t stop here too

chinese and i uh chinese in comparison

to the western languages

and in the european languages in

particular i’m sure

i’m sure you’re familiar with these

because english is also one of them

and you would be familiar also with the

uh giant grammatical tables teaching you

which verb tense to

to use with which pronoun in which in

which a

verb tends well in chinese there is none

of this you don’t have to memorize

any of this in chinese there you won’t

see a single table in chinese

a grammatical table because in chinese

there are no declinations there are no

articles there are no plural forms

the verbs don’t change at all and i’m

sure you’re asking yourself right now

but how on earth does this language

language even function

and well long story short the answer

lies

in particle words particle words

are these one syllable long

uh teeny tiny words that allow us uh

when added

into the sentences to to give our

sentences different grammatical

meanings to give you a better

understanding of gathered up here four

different sentences in both

uh english and chinese i’ve colored the

words

uh with the same words in both languages

the same color

and the words that are the words that

are

purely for grammatical purposes in the

sentences they

uh they i have left uh those i have left

uncolored so white so that you get do

you have a better understanding of how

much more

grammatical input is needed in english

than in chinese to make sense of the

sentences

now the first sentence is a very the

most

simple grammatical sentence i think you

could

construct so she eats an apple

she eats an apple now in english to

make up the sentence you need to know

that the

verb eat in a third person form

needs to be to have s in the end and you

have to make sense

of the whole articles um

the whole concept of articles and how

they’re used you have to know that you

have to

uh apply the article a here

and that since the vort

word apple starts with a vowel you have

to

um you have to make it turn it to an n

now in chinese there is no grammar in

this sentence

at all you just stuck this text stuck

these words the words

upon each other so this same sentence in

chinese would be

uh tachi pingwa which is directly said

uh directly translated just she eat

apple and that is a correctly a

fully correct sentence now if we

make it a bit harder and put it into a

different tense so the past tense for

example in english it would be

uh she ate an apple right

now in english you introduce a

completely new form of the verb

eat which you have to memorize eight and

then

the same thing with the the same thing

with the articles

stays in chinese the only thing you do

which also applies to every single verb

if you want to put it

into the past tense you just add it um

uh you just add the particle

la to the end of the sentence to their

end of the verb

so the same sentence in chinese would be

tatsila pingua so she ate an apple

and we just add la uh to the end of

the verb too now the next uh

sentence we have is having done

something so

she has eaten an apple here we have to

uh we have to introduce a completely new

verb

so uh the auxiliary verb as it’s called

which doesn’t really have to do anything

with

actual uh grammatical with actual

act of eating something but is rather

there just for grammatical purposes

you have to put it into the right form

has

and then you introduce again and

completely new

form of the verb uh eat eaten which

the learner had to memorize too and the

article

uh concept applies here again but uh

in chinese the only thing you actually

do is

just add the particle word

which stands for having done something

so

the same sentence in chinese is

and let’s move on to the uh last

sentence which is in the question form

so we are asking a question does she eat

an apple does she apples and

in english here we introduce again a

completely new verb

just for grammatical purposes which we

have to put in the right

uh correct form so do becomes does and

we have to put it in the beginning of

the sentence

and then uh we change

the apple the word apple from its uh

to to its plural form so we add the

ending s as i told you in chinese

there are no plural forms so you don’t

change the word pingua

apple uh at all and the only thing you

do

to give this give the listener

uh to make this and under a listener

understand that you are

asking a question is just add the

particle

ma to the end of the sentence which

stands for questions

so the same sentence in chinese would be

uh now many people say that

chinese and in general tony languages

are hard for

speakers of european and middle eastern

languages because

those languages don’t have tones but are

you really sure you don’t have you don’t

use tones every

day well don’t keep ask don’t keep

yourself busy asking

what uh because i’ll assure you you

actually

do use tones every day you see what i

did there

i uh used three of the four chinese

tones in just

three english sentences now to give you

a better understanding of

how the tones actually work and what

these tones are

i’ll let’s look at the graph here so

the first tone in the tiny chinese

language it’s called the flat tone

so uh m a uh the syllable m a here would

be read as

ma ma my sent my a voice stays the same

now if we move on to the second tone

that’s the rising

tone so uh here the same syllable would

be pronounced as

ma ma as in when we ask questions

in english or western languages like

what

and then the fourth tone it’s the

falling tone so it’s ma like

when we say yes no that’s the fourth

tone

now i know that you would have noticed

that i missed the

third tone and that was intentional

because that’s the only tone i couldn’t

really find the

direct correlation in english with but

it’s not really that hard if you know

the third and the fourth tones it’s

basically the

falling and then the rising tone so um

the same syllable here would be

ma you see my

voice it goes down and then goes up

again

um and i’m sure uh that

this uh is not that easy it was not in

the beginning

uh it was not that easy for me either so

in the beginning

me speaking uh chinese i used to

when speaking chinese i used to move my

hands along with the tones in my head

so me speaking chinese back then would

look like something

uh guys

but now i can just stay

which by the way means thank you for

your attention so

thank you all for your attention