innovativecat

I'm currently taking chinese lesson and I really enjoy it. I'm just curious how many characters one should know in order to pass the first level of chinese. My teacher is great but I wanted to know how we are doing in terms of phase. After the first level, what is the expected number of characters that a student should know?

I still couldn't get over my favorite koreandramas although they are old and there are new ones coming out which are also good ones. I love Autumn in my heart, Spring waltz, Winter sonata, Summer scent ( I don't know if it's the exact title as they usually change it if being shown in another country). I love love Kill me, Heal Me. Save the last dance for me, Heartstrings, Lovestory in harvard, Stairways to heaven, Full house and Dae Jang Geum. 

I read Diary of a wimpy kid in Greek. I'll probably find something more appropriate for my age as I don't enjoy books like this anymore. I used to love books for middle grade but I get bored with this book. Is it because the book is boring or because I read it in a foreign language? I also go to this site to read. They have children's book translated into foreign languages. childrensbooksforever.com

On 25/11/2015, 5:45:14, rcdpink said:

Russia is a big Country and to have the Russian language etched in your brain is an asset. But like you said, you can always learn it sometime in the future. As long as there is life there is hope.

Russian was a requirement back in college. I could still remember a few words but I never like it. I also had russian schoolmates and they speak really fast. It sounds nice for a native russian speaker but not something I would be interested to learn on my own. But it's really a good language to learn, career wise. I had a summer internship in a hotel and most guests were russians. Russian speakers are always in demand. I tried learning French and Spanish but lose interest in the end because I don't know which platform to use and didn't have a tutor to push me. I'm learning chinese now. I'd probably focus on Asian languages first as they're closer to my heart. I grew up watching asiandramas and anime. 

On 10/11/2015, 12:27:27, Chris_A said:

I can totally relate to what you said @anna3101. Maths was the most hated subject in school for me, and thankfully I only had it until the 10th grade, because I was on a humanities specialization during high school. Chemistry is another topic I will never ever totally understand. Physics is quite OK if you put your mind into learning it properly. But the fact remains that some people are naturally talented to master either humanities or sciences. And I`m definitely not a sciences person.

I hate Physics or maybe because I hated my teacher but Chemistry was okay for me. I'm not a science person too and was an average kid in Science and math during my school days. But I love languages. Learning a new language not only help you memorize things, it helps you understand not just a particular branch of knowlege but also people who speak that language, their culture and feelings too. It's fascinating to learn new things through language. If you're good in science, math, physics, learning is limited unless you're a naturally curious person like Einstein. Well. perhaps learning a new language is my strength and science and math is my weakness. I really hate working with numbers. If mathematics is a language, I'll probably be deaf. 

On 19/10/2013, 1:21:11, linguaholic said:

I know about 2000-2500 chinese characters, therefore I know about the same amount of Kanji :=) Still, as I am not very familiar with Japanese and Hiragana/Katakana, I am not very good when it comes to guess the meaning of Japanese texts. :frozen:

That's impressive! I'd love to be fluent in both Chinese and Japanese too. Are Kanji the same with most Chinese characters?

2 hours ago, anna3101 said:

Oooh. Mon Essentiel, I love it too! And 'être à la hauter'. The musical was quite fun, a lot of nice songs there.

Have you heard Moi + Toi by Gregoire? It's a very nice song too. I love Etre a la hauter too and Le sourire.

On 1/12/2014, 4:54:15, g2narat said:

I guess it's understandable that neighboring countries learn each other's languages easily. A perfect example of this is my Indonesian friend who didn't take any formal classes to learn Tagalog. He's only been in the Philippines for a couple of months but he can already converse well. It helps that a lot of the Indonesian and Tagalog words are the same like anak, sukat, tali, sakit to name a few. Have you or a friend had a similar experience with a neighboring country?

Also gunting (scissors). But the indonesian language has a different alphabet, right? 

On 19/11/2014, 9:30:56, zabina12 said:

There are several ways/words in Tagalog or Filipino with the same meaning.

These include Iniibig kita, Iniirog kita and Sinisinta kita. You might want to try the other dialects as well.

But it's weird to say it in a conversation. Usually we just say, mahal kita or I love you. I guess it will turned off a lot of girls if a suitor will say it to them because it sounds "Old fashioned" or makaluma.

On 23/12/2015, 1:58:35, AExAVF said:

It has always been a habit for Filipinos to use Spanish words when it comes to age, money, and time.  For instance, when referring to 15 years, we use kinse anyos instead of labing-limang anyos.  When it comes to money, there has to be some qualification.  If the amount is less than Php 100, we use the Spanish words such as bente for dalawampu, singkuwenta for limampu, etc.  If the amount is greater than or equal to Php 1000, we use the Filipino words (e.g. sanglibo, sampung-libo, etc.)  As for time, we have already gotten used to the Spanish terms (ala-uno y media, alas-quatro y media, etc.) but we also use the Filipino equivalent (isa't kalahati ng hapon, apat at kalahati ng umaga, etc.).  We also mix the Spanish and Filipino terms out of convenience (e.g. alas-dos ng madaling araw).

This is true. Using the exact Filipino translation for time, age and currency is very formal and usually being used only during formal writing or events. People will find you weird if you speak to them using the exact translation in Filipino.

On 21/12/2015, 12:17:58, pesic87 said:

I studied Greek for 2 years at the university. The first year was the year where each and every one of us, the learners, thought that we have acquired the language, being so proud of ourselves, not knowing or rather being unaware that we were studying the language that kids in the kindergarten study. So, it was pretty easy, and it took me approximately a week to learn the alphabet by heart.

I loved Greek, and was pretty confident about it until I had it the second year. Then, most of us unfortunate ones, got disappointed, when a Greek teacher appeared one day, and when he opened his mouth. We were shocked. All of us that were so much confident about the language could not understand a single word that professor was uttering. The second year was truly devastating for me.

I could totally relate into this.  I'm glad I went to study greek formally after four years as I already have a little knowledge on the pronunciation. Greek people usually speak very fast too that's why it's very difficult to learn Greek just by listening.The greek language has easy alphabets that could be learned in one sitting but they have a wide vocabulary and difficult to pronounce words. 

Definitely not a boring way to learn Korean alphabet. I love to be fluent in Korean. Currently, I'm trying to learn by watching Koreandramas but I would definitely love to be able to read and write too. Thank you for sharing this useful site.

I love listening to French songs and I'm slowly learning new words and their proper pronunciation. I love listening to Celine Dion and Emmanuel Moire. I remember the first french song that I listened to was Mon Essentiel. The melody was so calming and it inspired me to learn French. 

On 14/7/2013, 2:17:50, linguaholic said:

How do you learn/memorize Chinese Characters / Study Methods of Chinese Characters

 

There are of course several ways of Studying Chinese characters. Maybe the most common way is to simply write down the characters over and over again until you memorize them. I would call this the „classical approach“. Another method, formerly introduced by Dr. W Heisig, is memorising the characters with help of a so called „imaginative memory“. Each Chinese Character and each radical are associated with a keyword A Chinese Characters written form and its keyword are associated by imagining a scene or story connecting the meaning of the given character with the meanings of all the primitives/radicals used to write the Chinese character.

 

This method requires that the student needs to invent his very own stories to associate the keyword meaning wit the character in written form. However, at the beginning of his book „Remembering the Hanzi“, the stories are already made (to give you a good start). At a later stage, you will need to invent your own stories though.

 

It is indeed a very interesting approach and I used this method a few years ago to learn 800 Hanzi. I was able to memorize all of them in just 3 weeks. However, a few month later I forgot most of the characters and I got sick of making up stories. Still, I do believe that this method can work out fine and it was, especially at the beginning, a lot of fun :=)

 

PS: Of course, when using the „classical approach“, you might want to study all the radicals first. This will help you a lot to understand the „construction“ and the meaning of the characters. Also it will help you to memorise the written form (it’s logical; all the characters include radicals).

I sometimes get bored writing them down. To test my mastery, I'm taking a chinese article from the internet and encircle all familiar characters that I recognized. Is it really important to write characters, step by step? My chinese tutor told me to write it in a more convenient way as following the radicals could be confusing and more difficult. Is there a hidden reason for following the radicals? 

I'd love to learn both simplified and traditional. I want to know if learning the traditional will make me go back to scratch if I already know the simplified or just a few strokes in the character? Do they have the same grammar structure and meaning of words? Chinese is a very complicated language but very challenging to learn. Not to mention that in China alone, they speak different languages, like Cantonese, Hokien and the official Chinese, Putonghua. Do we have to learn them all? Do they have the same characters and only the spoken language is different? 

Your goals inspire me to take my language learning seriously. Hahaha! I'm currently learning Chinese and I want to master the basic first before studying another language but as I could see from all these posts that time management is the key. I don't want to confuse myself with all the characters from Japanese and chinese so I'll probably start studying Korean first and Spanish. I know this site that is very helpful for studying Spanish, Culture Alley. Check it out if you haven't. I also want to learn French and Japanese. 

On 13/1/2016, 12:40:47, Blaveloper said:

That's not entirely true though.
While it's a well known fact that both languages have a totally different grammar (Chinese is similar to English, Japanese is similar to Korean), the Chinese have simplified their characters differently from the Japanese too (like 飲 (Japanese) vs 喝 (Chinese), both mean "to drink").
Not to mention that many of the same characters have a different meaning in both languages (like 勉強, which is "study" (benkyou) in Japanese and "reluctanly" (miǎnqiǎng) in Chinese).

Oh, sorry. I'm talking about this "same characters have a different meaning". I think it will be confusing for me as someone who's learning chinese.

On 27/9/2015, 9:22:22, missbookworm said:

I used to have Korean classmates in college, and they taught me a little bit about their language. And it's really quite hard. Well, I think for you to be able to know more about it, you have got to immerse yourself in the language experience. You can probably start doing that by watching korean shows and movies. Aside from learning to speak their language, you have got to master their alphabet as well.

This is a great advice as I noticed whenever I'm watching Korean shows, I'm slowly picking up some words and getting familiar with the accent and the proper pronunciation. I'm watching shows with kids involve like Return of the superman. Kids usually speak slowly and although not clearly, they use basic words unlike adults who have wider vocabulary. I learned how to say hello, no, yes, brother and names of food in Korean language just by watching Korean shows. I'm slowly learning the alphabet too by checking some sites. It's less complicated than the chinese language but difficult too. 

I love using Duolingo as it has a facebook integration and translate familiar words in Facebook making you learn useful words that you encounter everyday. But it can be too formal and not exactly how you will use it in a daily conversation. Memrise is a good tool for both conversational and formal but not one hundred percent accurate as anyone can contribute. I strongly recommend Culture Alley but it only offers Chinese and Spanish.

I want to learn Spanish because I'm already familiar with some of the words. Our native language has a few Spanish words and it helps a little. There are also a lot of available learning materials in the internet plus it uses the same English alphabet and there will be no hassle learning them. I also find it easier to pronounce than other European languages like French. Grammar is not too complicated as well. I love how it uses the inverted question mark in the beginning as a sign that the sentece is interrogative. 

Chinese is the most difficult among them, I think. I tried to learn Korean and I find it easier than Chinese with lesser characters to memorize. But I think the pronunciation and accent is more difficult. I'd love to learn Japanese too if I'm already confident with my chinese language. It will be a little confusing for someone who's learning Chinese to learn Japanese at the same time because of the similarities in characters as Japanese and Chinese have a few similar text with different meaning. I guess my interest with asian language is due to the influence of asiandrama and anime. 

I think that Tagalog is the Filipino word for the official language in the Philippines which is "Filipino". Filipino is the English term for it. It's like the Greek language being called Ellinika by Greek speakers. Tagalog ethnic group are the main speakers of the Tagalog language which is the official language of the country. Filipino is an english term for the subject, the people and the language, as I remember that the letter "F" is not included in the Filipino alphabet. In tagalog, Pilipino is the term for the people and tagalog is for the language. 

I think the most common frame for proficiency uses beginners level, elementary proficiency, Limited proficiency, Advanced proficiency, Professional then native. I'm not sure though if it applies to all country. Getting proficiency for a language will cost you a lot of money but totally worth it. 

Tagalog is my native language 

2. Greek ( I'd love to speak this language fluently)

3. Chinese ( I started my lesson recently. This will be useful in my future career as most business people in our country are chinese and I'm also one fourth chinese)

4. Korean ( I would love to work in Korea someday. I love this country so much probably because of the influence from Koreandrama)

5. Japanese ( So that I could watch animes without subtitle)

Δεν μπορώ να φανταστώ τη ζωή χωρίς εσένα   = Den Boro na fantasto ti zoi horis esena

That's how you read it. It's greek. I  speak a little. Hahaha! In our language, Hindi ko lubos maisip ang magiging buhay ko kung wala ka.