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