Question about learning languages (Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish Portuguese)

[Deep13]

No, I don't need to learn them all. I'm going to grad school for history and whatever area I study will have a language requirement with it.

I have been told that it is possible for a westerner to learn to READ (not write, speak or understand spoken) Mandarin by simply memorizing the word characters. Apparently, there are no verb declinations or noun genders in written Chinese. Having said that, the instructor who told me this said that it is a tremendous amount of memorizing work and that most find it pretty boring. Also, the wash-out rate is very high. If, however, I can learn to read it, I would have little trouble finding a teaching job in Chinese history.

Does anyone here read Mandarin? What do you think of learning to read it?

What about Arabic? Obviously, having a phonetic alphabet, I'd have to learn to speak it as well as read it. How does it compare to learning a European language like French or German with their verb conjunctions, declinations and noun genders? I know Arabic has four letter cases, but no block print (only cursive) and that most of the vowels are not written. Middle-Eastern history is another hot area.

Can anyone tell me how similar Spanish and Portuguese are? They're both from the Iberian penninsula, but are seperated by a not-too formidable mountain range. This is for Latin American history, which I feel will be in demand soon because of the growing proportion of Latin Americans in our population. With Portuguese you get one big country and with Spanish you get a bunch of somewhat smaller ones.

[bif]

1. I would opt for Spanish

Portuguese is sort of a cross between Spanish, French and Italian. It's only practical in Brazil and Portugal. I have a hard time with languages but A found Spanish was pretty easy to learn.

[RedCloud]

2. It may be easier to start with a linguistic, anthro linguistics and the nature of languages

They do vary but there are some patterns that would help in the rapid assimilation for adult learners once you know what languages can do, structurally speaking.

Portuguese was a dialect that cleaved from Spanish. I have often heard Portuguese speakers say they understand (Castillian) Spanish with almost no difficulty at all.

Portuguese (especially if you like Brazil) will have a variant according to continent.

If you have had Latin then Portuguese and Spanish are relative pieces of cake.

As for Arabic and Chinese, I wish you luck and will say that the qwerty keyboard is not their friend, although more sophisticated translators are being developed and could aid in the assimilation. But translation in and of itself is often why adults take so long to learn a language in any aspect: total top down control or nothing! Kids who can learn as fast as 1 month under ideal circumstances are bottom up natural learners, playing with the words testing the rules etc.

My 2 cents.

[Deep13]

7. The Chinese history instructor...

...said the only real way to go is to forget about how it sounds and just learn the characters. The idea is to be able to read source material. He said he had 15 books of essays that if I could learn to read them would be sufficient. I can't imagine one would look up a Chinese character since with no alphabet, there's no alphabetical order. I assume the translation dictionary is arranged either by character shape or by general concept which one could figure out from context.

One side benefit of any of alphabetic languages I mentioned is that in learning to speak them I could use them if I ever decided to return to the practice of law.

[eppur_se_muova]

26. Chinese dictionaries are usually arranged by stroke count ...

simpler, usually most common characters come first. Also, ryhyming dictionaires are available -- handy for reading poetry, but sounds like you wouldn't need that. Many modern dictionaries (for foreign learners) are in pinyin -- that is, transliteration of Chinese words into Roman text, arranged alphabetically, followed by the Mandarin characters.

The same characters are pronounced differently in different dialects, and pronounciation varies over time. So modern Chinese in different provinces can communicate in writing even when they can't converse, and can read older Chinese texts without knowing the original pronounciations, for the most part. Surprisingly, there are some advantages in a NON-alphabetical written language!

Have you considered Japanese? True, Japanese has two alphabets and also uses Chinese characters (kanji), but modern Japanese culture is pervaded with both English and "Romaji" (Japanese in Roman characters) and travel to Japan might be both easier to arrange and more comfortable. (I only learned a few Japanese characters to read record album labels! :) )

I should add that I'm not an expert in any of these languages -- I like to learn a little bit about many different languages, rather than aim for fluency in one. Personally, I'd stay away from Arabic -- I've looked at it for fun, and the grammar and word formation are so different from Indo-European languages that it's a little too much of a challenge.

A good place to start with any language is Wikipedia, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_system , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Hindi , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Standard_Arabic .

[XemaSab]

3. You ever consider Russian?

Interesting countries.

[Deep13]

8. Short answer is no. There seems to be little interest in Russian history...

...now that the cold war is over.

[Flaxbee]

16. It's just that Russia has access to one of the largest reserves

of natural resources in the world; these resources are only going to become more valuable as time passes. Kazakhstan is a rapidly growing country, and of vital importance because if its position on the Caspian Sea. Russian and Arabic could be very good languages to know.

[geardaddy]

4. Learning to speak Mandarin is much easier

than learning to read it. I don't think you could learn to just read Mandarin without learning to speak it as well.

You are correct that there is no conjugation or tense inflection in Mandarin, as well as no gender. There aren't even definite articles.

Learning to read Chinese characters is all memorization, but once you recognize patterns, it is easier to learn even more characters.

Just my 2 cents from a Mandarin speaker.

[hayu_lol]

5. More on spoken Mandarin...

use language tapes where women's voices predominate. You can more easily hear the tones in women's voices...where the men all sound like they have mouths full of gravel.

There are Pinyin courses in Chinese(Mandarin)that are set up to give you, from the outset, the most used characters the first year...at Pomona College(Claremont)the first year taught 500 characters. That is just enough to be able to plow through a normal Chinatown newspaper and understand most of what you are reading.

To be considered educated, one needs about 8000 characters minimum.

[Deep13]

9. Right, he warned me of that.

It's not enough to have a second grade reading level.

[JCMach1]

6. My daughters took Arabic for 8yrs and live in an Arab country

They can still barely say a dozen words or so. It is hard.

Me, I have never had the time to bother. And yes, the hard nature is part of that.

[Deep13]

11. I take it they interact mostly with English speakers. nt

[Deep13]

10. I forgot to ask about Hindi.

Is that an alphabetic language like Greek, Latin and Arabic or is it a pictogram language like Mandarin (or both like Japanese?)

[geardaddy]

20. I'm pretty sure Hindi is phonetic

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm

[Book Lover]

12. Finally, my work for a translation agency comes in handy!

First of all, I recommend http://www.omniglot.com/ to get basic information on all the languages you mention in your OP, and more.

Second, check out http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm In the sense you ask in your question, yes, Hindi is written using an alphabet and not a character-based system

Third, Portuguese is Portuguese. There is no such thing as "Spanish Portuguese," though there is Iberian and Brazilian.

Fourth, you are going about this backwards. Choose the culture you want to study, then learn its language.

[Deep13]

14. Well that's what I'm trying to do.

One problem is that I want to study all of them, so I have to narrow it down. But I need to know how much of a barrier the language is going to be. And to really study the culture I will need to be able to read source material in that culture's language. History is not just the study of what happened, it is specifically the study of written evidence. My intention is to spend the summer learning the language pretty much full time.

[Deep13]

15. Awesome websites, BTW. Thanks. nt

[wickerwoman]

23. Seconding your fourth point.

Grad school is *a lot* of work. Like studying fourteen hours a day, every day, work. If it's not something you're absolutely passionate about, you're not going to get up at six am on Sunday or stay in every Friday night for months to study it.

Plus, once you get through, you're presumably going to be researching/writing about/teaching this culture for the rest of your life. Do you really want to make that decision based on which language was the least hassle?

If you're not sure, maybe you should try to take a break if it's at all feasible. Take a quick ESL certification course (you can get a TEFL Certificate in 6 weeks) and it will be easy to get a job teaching in China, South America and the Middle East (they're all hot markets for English teachers). Live there for a bit. Learn some of the language and culture. Try them all for 3-4 months. Decide if you want to dedicate your life to studying that culture.

Whatever you do, don't drift straight into grad school without knowing *exactly* what you want to study. At $20,000+ a year, this is not the place to find yourself. I know *way* too many people who took 13-14 years to finish their PhDs, racked up six figure debt and get paid less than $40,000 a year now for their trouble. In real terms, this means that they have sacrificed home ownership, retirement and starting families for a degree that hasn't translated to any more money than they would have made managing a McDonalds.

You're setting yourself up for massive frustration and a lot of wasted time and money down the road if you don't go into grad school with a very focused plan for what you're going to get out of it.

[dimbear]

13. Here's the deal on Portuguese and Spanish:

The European speakers can understand each other pretty well, particularly if they speak loudly and slowly. I understand Spanish pretty well, and once read a whole page of a short story before I even noticed it was Portuguese. Spanish has a boatload of regional dialects, more or less city dialects, that drift slowly over into Portuguese as you get closer to the border.

A further advantage is that you can also understand Italian. There are good courses in Italian presented for Spanish speakers on the net. We're talking about picking up a language in about a day here. :)

OTOH, don't count on get away easily in America. The differences in the American versions of those two languages are pretty steep. Especially, of course, in slang. It is always thus.

[raccoon]

17. The Foreign Service Institute has rated many languages according to their level of difficulty for

English speakers to learn. This may help you decide.

Language Difficulty Ranking

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn a specific language as an English speaker. After this particular study time you will reach “Speaking 3: General Professional Proficiency in Speaking (S3)” and “Reading 3: General Professional Proficiency in Reading (R3)”


There are 4 Categories:

Category I: 23-24 weeks (575-600 hours)

Languages closely related to English (Spanish, for example)

And from there on to:

Category V: 88 weeks (2200 hours)

Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers..(Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, for example.)

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty

[Deep13]

18. So, wicked hard as my relatives in MA would say.

Of course with Mandarin, I "just" need to know the characters (about 8000 of them) and not how to speak them.

[Flaxbee]

28. hey raccoon - interesting site, thanks for posting

:hi:

[Bake]

19. I'm sorry, I thought you said MANDOLIN.

Nevermind.

Bake

[wickerwoman]

21. It helps to learn reading and speaking Mandarin together.

I can't imagine learning them in isolation.

Mandarin characters are made up of "radicals"- pieces of characters that are repeated in different combinations. A lot of them are mnemonic devices and a lot of those depend on knowing the sound. Like 马 妈 and 吗 all are pronounced "ma". The first one means "horse". That radical is repeated in the second one which has the woman radical and the horse radical. It means "mother"- a woman and "sounds like horse". In the third character you have the mouth radical (the box) next to the horse radical which means "a word that sounds like horse"- this is a question particle put at the end of sentences.

So yeah. I guess you could just learn how to write all three characters and what they mean. But they're a hell of a lot easier to remember if you know that they are all pronounced the same way and that that radical actually means something.

[Deep13]

22. Thanks for that.

I'll have to keep it in mind.

[Withywindle]

24. Portuguese and Spanish are both Romance languages

meaning they both derive from Latin, and they are very closely related and have a lot of vocabulary more or less in common (pronounced and spelled slightly differently, but still recognizable as the same word). If you have a background in those and/or in Latin, picking up the other Romance languages--French, Italian, Romanian--is much easier than if you didn't know them.

My mom is a native Portuguese speaker, and learned Spanish well enough to teach it at the high school level so quickly that no one who hired her ever even realized it was her THIRD language. (I think she kind of played on our isolated, rural school district being full of people who didn't realize that Brazilians generally are not native Spanish speakers....:D)

You might want to consider that Brazil is a rapidly emerging world power, and so Portuguese will probably be very much in demand for international business for a long time to come.

I know very little about Arabic as a language, but obviously it's very much in demand too, and also has a huge and amazing body of literature and history in that language to read and research, much of which has never been translated into English, so I think that would be a fruitful pursuit too.

I agree with the poster who said, choose the culture that interests you the most and then learn its language. Learning a new language is hard (though languages that use the same alphabet as English, I would gather, are generally not going to be as hard as ones that don't) and if you don't have a passion for it, you probably won't make it.

[krispos42]

25. I had trouble learning Spanish because of verb conjugation

I spend 3 years in middle-school Spanish learning basically nothing because I had no background (as an English speaker) what the hell conjugation was or why it was done.

It didn't help that my understanding of grammar rules and terminology was weak, either. I was smart enough and well-read enough to do good writing and pass tests without actually knowing what things like "perfect tense" meant, so when different verb forms cropped up in Spanish I was totally lost. I didn't know what she were trying to accomplish and probably wouldn't have understood the explanation if I had asked.

:shrug:

If you come right down to it, I doubt I would be able to do it now. Although I took a year of Spanish in college and did better.... got two "C"s. :-)


And you want to tackle two non-latin-alphabet languages... oy.

[eppur_se_muova]

27. Skip grad school. Learn Portuguese. Move to Cabo Verde and become a barfly.

Spend the rest of your life enjoying the morna!

http://www.caboverde.com/evora/evora.htm