I am considering learning some Chinese. I do quite a bit of business in Asia.
The question is which Language/dialect shoudl I learn?
I do a lot of work with Singapore, and unless I am mistaken they speak a combination of dialects there. I do some work in Hong Kong and I am pretty sure Cantonese is the main dialect spoken there.
I was hoping to use some cd/books guides along with finding a native speaker to have conversations with to help me out.
Since I live in the Seattle area, I am sure there will be no shortage of people to practice with.
So if there are any native speakers or folks who have learned to speak any of the chinese dialects, do you have a reccomendation based on my above comments or your experience?
Although I don’t speak Chinese except a few phrases, I would recommend you study Mandarin. It is the official Chinese dialect in mainland China and wherever you go in mainland China, almost everyone speaks Mandarin. For countries and territories outside the mainland, Mandarin is still an important dialect. In Taiwan Mandarin is an official dialect. In HK, although everyone speaks Cantonese, business focus is towards China and HK Chinese are also studying Mandarin. In Singapore, the most prevalent dialect is Hokkien, but there was a move a few years ago to get people speaking Mandarin. This was a move to replace English as the main language. That is no longer the case and most people in Singapore speak English anyway so there is no real need to speak Hokkien.
I should point out that, although Hokkien is the most prevalent Chinese dialect in Singapore, the official Chinese dialect in Singapore is Mandarin. Singapore has four official languages; English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
Judging by your post, it should be Mandarin. Mandarin is widely spoken and understood in China, although many Mainland Chinese still speak a local dialect as their first language and Mandarin as a second language. No problem getting around the major cities of China speaking Mandarin.
Singapore has long had a speak Mandarin campaign (for at least 20 years), and most ethnic Chinese in Singapore speak Mandarin as a second language. Very few people in Singapore speak Mandarin as a native language. English is generally the business language in Singapore.
HK is pretty firmly Cantonese, however most people under 30 or 40 can at least understand basic Mandarin and can usually speak it (although with what is widely acknowledged as a really thick accent).
On the other hand, if you learn Cantonese, you’ll be limited to Vancouver, San francisco, HK, Guangdong province, and overseas Chinese scattered around SE Asia.
Hokkien has several mutually incomprehensible sub dialects. Meinanhua is the most widespoken (?) or common. I’m not sure. If you speak Meianhua, you can get by in Singapore, Taiwan and Xiamen area of Fujian (aka Fukien aka Hokkien). Outside of those areas it’s of no use.
I believe the poster with Hokkien is referrning to Fukien. If they really mean Hakka, then even less people speak that. Although there are Hakka populations scattered around southwest China, Taiwan (IIRC 5% of the population), SE Asia including Singapore.
As I always suggest, unless you’ve got a special interest in one of the dialects (SO, only do business in HK, etc) then it’s a no brainer to choose Mandarin.
Thanks all for the feedback. Looks like Mandarin is the consensus for a Chinese language.
My wife was urging me to try something closer to English first (like a romance language) and then try a harder language. I’m not sure if that would help. When I was younger I took a lot of Spanish classes. I didn’t vigilantly study and use it so now I can only read a little Spanish.
Is there any truth to the fact that learning a 3rd language is easier after you have a second, or does that only apply if the languages are similar?
I have heard that is is easier after you have a 2nd. It may be because your mind has learned to process information in a certain way. For me, I have a limited knowledge of French (I barely speak it, but can read it passably well) but it has helped me so far with learning Romanian, another Romance language. However, I will be taking Chinese in the fall, so I don’t know if I will have any benefit or not.
My girlfriend has been teaching me some Chinese (Cantonese) and it’s not that hard (so far,) except for the fact that you have to learn to make sounds that you’ve never used before. I learned a lot of Spanish beforehand in school though, don’t know if that made a difference. Structurally it seems like a much simpler language than English or Spanish.
Learning Chinese well can take a long time and a lot of effort. The two major obsticles are learning the tones of the language and going through the drudgework of learning characters by rote memorization. Studying French or Spanish will do nothing to help you with this.
I think the more important factors are starting as young as you can and putting in the work required. I don’t want to scare you off, but Chinese is indeed a difficult language to learn. Procrastinating only makes it harder – I learned that after my first year in college!
Bahasa comes in various forms, the official language of Indonesia for instance is Bahasa Indonesia. In Malaysia it’s officially Bahasa Malaysia. Although in Malaysia, they usually just call the language Malay. Indonesian and Malaysian Bahasa is very similar, but there are apparently minor differences. From what I understand, it’s like the difference between Swedish and Norwegian. If they speak their own language, Malaysians and Indonesians would still understand each other.
One thing I really like about Bahasa is the way there is no variation when you want to emphasis plural. In Bahasa, plural emphasis is to utter a word twice. So instead of saying beers to mean more than on glass of beer, you say “beer beer”.
One thing I like about Chinese is how they use scalar ranges to form compound words. Some examples: “Size” is “big-small”. “Length” is “long-short”. “Quality” is “good-(not good)”. Quantity is “many-few”. Degree of hunger is “hungry-(not hungry)” And so on. Very logical.
Definitely Mandarin, as stated above. And keep in mind that if, in the future, you decide to learn Cantonese or one of the other Chinese languages, you’ll already know most of the characters (there are only a few specific to one of the Chinese languages) and you’ll already have a pretty sophisticated grasp of the grammar.
Learning another language well is always hard, no matter how closely related the languages are, and the grammar of Chinese is a little more foreign in some respects than that of the Romance languages, but weigh that against not having to memorize verb conjugations or noun declensions. I don’t buy the idea that some languages have ‘harder’ grammar, and Chinese isn’t so different that you’ll be having to learn any grammatical features that are particularly tough - no syntactic ergativity, no bizarre combinations of hundreds of affixes. Personally, I’ve found my Chinese classes fairly easy, and I’ve been quite satisfied by my own progress in learning over the last couple years.
I think learning a third language is always easier than a second, because you’ve already learned to make some intellectual leaps in terms of figuring out which usages in your own language are metaphorical or idiomatic, and so on. My observation has been that the transferable skill you gain is learning to ignore the way things are done in your native language - figuring out when a word has multiple (but related) meanings and so on. That’s transferable no matter what language you’re talking about. I learned Spanish starting in middle school, and I’d definitely say it’s made Mandarin easier.
Besides, I’m always fascinated in comparing which grammatical functions are the same between English and Spanish to those shared by English and Chinese. In some ways, I find Chinese to be a little less foreign than Spanish. And Chinese has a lot of lovely, wonderful words that express things hard to express in English.
