Gollevainen said:
I hope so...what I meant, was that how those guys that have propaly born in china but came to live in west before school age have build their national identity, what languages have their home used and how have they adjusted to the 'foreing' languacic outside world...from my experiences whit htis forum, it almoust seems that strongly represented chinse-nationalism (as blindtied as all nationalist brusts comes) by these 14-17 years old outside chinese could be somesort of counter mechanism to the immigrant/alien situation where they currently live....if it isent the case, feel free to correct me...but do confess about when and why did the chinese identity of yours to begun to build, or was it there from the beging
Oh, no.
What you've seen is the tip of the iceberg.
Most kids born in China and related regions and moving to the West at around 3 are pretty much the same as most ABCs(America born Chinese, in US' case.) They share the same kind of knowledge, fashion, culture, etc.
I can name two members in here that are true to your scenario, but the other kids, born in China and in the West by 3, don't give a care of China at all. So you don't really get to see a good distribution for such people.
Kids who had same schooling in China forst is a totally different case, though.
(I belong to neither case, I am ABC, born in Vermont, but I did go to school in Hong Kong for some years.)
Oh, and on the gender issue, French assignees gender to almost everything also, so we do have a gender language in Europe
So does Spanish and German. In fact, I think English is one of the few that has a neutral gender.
To Goll: I think the development of the Chinese identity of the youth actually develops after you come to the West.
Agreed. I've always seen myself as an ETHNIC American when I started living in Hong Kong. (I was a racist then....... Thinking China is evil.....) And now I am usually pro-China. (Well, Bush did help with that.) :rofl:
I'll be interested to see that list of "classifications" by difficulty. I'm surprised Spanish is considered easy, from the tales of grammar tests my friends told me, it seems not that way. But again, all natural languages are just arbitrary mish-mash that are more complicated than necessary, as any computer scientist trying to build a natural-langauge parser will tell you
One of the big differences between languages is the use of word ordering and inflection. Some langauges (like Russian?) use inflections (prefixes or suffixes) to indicate what job a word plays in a sentence, and the ordering is not important. On the other extreme, Chinese has no inflections in general and uses more words or word ordering to imply meaning. So people who learned langauges on one extreme will have extreme difficulty with languages on the other extreme. This is perhaps why some langauges are easier to learn as a 2nd language given your first langauge. I think English is somewhat in the middle. It uses ordering, but also has inflections to denote things like verb tense, adjectives/adverbs, and plurality, but not to the extent of, say, German or Russian.
Yeap, I agree!
if you are Ms. Chan is not exactly the best chinese teacher, i played (chinese) computer games in her class in grade 10, didn't learn a thing.
Try Ms. Kaiser(married a German.) I can guarentee to you after seeing Kaiser, Chan will seem a good teacher.
maybe you find it difficult but the rest of us agree 4-3 year of basic eduction will teach you good chinese
Well, if you learn Chinese as a 1st language, I'd say it's easy. Every kid can end up speaking Chinese with little grammar error.(Contrary to English, with its, to me, weird grammar, I see a lot of kids end up speaking ebonics when they are out of school or just don't speak proper English. No offence.)
But as a 2nd language when you are from the West(Well, Chinese is to the East as English is to the West: The East is filled with Chinese), it can be very difficult due to huge differences in function and grammar. And if you are learning traditional, the strokes can be a hazzle. The different dialects and writing can be a problem too, though not as big as India's I'll say.
Personally I prefer it when "Westerners" use Juyin to learn Chinese, because it forces them to adopt to the different language nuances, for instance a lot of 'foreigners' tend to mispronounce 'ㄕ' (shr or whatever, I'm not good at pinyin) and it tends to come out like 'sh'. You know, the twisting the tongue thing? Argh, I'm losing my touch with words.
To me, pinyin lets non-native speakers "cheat" a little because they can relate to the English alphabet, which makes it arguably harder to adopt to the correct pronounciation, because it's easy to get into the bad habit of pronouncing the words as if they were in English. But that's just what I think.
I think pinyin is better though. For the same point. It sounds more like Chinese, though I've never actually touch juyin, only seen some of it, like tsa or chi. I mean, wouldn't such "cheat" help? If you use english in Juyin, it's not going to help much.
I never said it was impossible to learn outside of china. Ever heard of chiense school? asian kids go there every wekend to learn
I don't think those help THAT much. People can speak it usually fluently though sometimes with a little local accent due to English exposure 1st. But writing? Doubt it. It's on weekends anyway.
Um... so basically it's pinyin all the way?
For instance in Taiwan, you start off by learning Juyin, when you see a Chinese character in beginner's reading books it will have Juyin next to it, and you'll learn how to pronounce it from there.
Now after you grow up and increase your vocabulary there will still be words that you haven't memorized or seen before. When you have to learn them, you still use Juyin to figure out how to prounounce them.
And I take it that's the same with China? Just replace Juyin with Pinyin? Which is interesting if true, because you'd have to learn the English alphabet first.
Don't know about China, but it's here in San Francisco all the time, even in the newspaper.
In HK, I don't remember I learn any pinyin except in Mandarin class.
What the? Did you go to Mandarin school on the weekend or something? Hong Kong didn't standardize Mandarin into fully public/government schools until I think 1997. And still then, it was not present in other schools (public chartered) like those Anglican or Buddhist schools.
Not trying to offend anyone, but does it get annoying to you when people start speaking your language with sounds available only in their language?
And does ebonics count as a language?