» Mon Oct 26, 2015 6:00 pm
I have decided to take Mandarin as a wild module for my second year at uni, and as a native English speaker, it is a really hard language to learn.
Has anyone else learned/ or is learning Mandarin? if so what tips do you have.
As a further question what is your native language and what was/is the hardest language you have/are/could learn?
» Mon Oct 26, 2015 7:42 pm
English is my main language. It took me about 5 years before I could converse in Tagalog with any proficiency. Mahirap ang Tagalog sa akin kasi hindi ako matalino.(Tagalog is hard for me because I am not that smart).
» Mon Oct 26, 2015 10:31 pm
You have a big rote-learning task in front of you with all the character meanings and pronunications. Characters are systematic and aren't as hard to learn as it seems. However, with Mandarin you have to rote-learn all the pronunciations with tones.
Tones are super important if you want to be able to speak. There is no way around this but memorization. So it is just a task you have to do every single day with books and flashcards and such. It is only a matter of putting the time in, starting as soon as possible. Just study whenever you have a free moment. There is a flashcard app called Pleco that seems quite good.
Then you have the grammar. Chinese grammar is pretty simple and logical, so there is nothing much to worry about there.
» Tue Oct 27, 2015 7:03 am
my native language is English, but I do know some limited conversational French (was forced to take it up until high school), some basic German (learned while living overseas for a couple years as a kid), and some even more basic Japanese (had to take a language course back in university)..
out of the three, the Japanese was by far the most difficult for me to pick up. especially the writing considering they had us learn Kanji and Hiragana at the same time..
the french and German were not hard for me to pick up what little i know, and if i had been more interested in learning them back when i was a kid i would probably be much more fluent than i am..
good luck though, learning even a small portion of another language feels very rewarding 
