Here's another reason they didn't tell me about of why Chinese is hard. The duo yin ci. (multiple sound word). We have these in English too--is "read" pronounced "reed" or "red"? Well, it depends on the context of the sentence, doesn't it?
The thing is, though, that Chinese doesn't have just 26 letters to make an alphabet that you can learn and manipulate. It has thousands and thousands of characters, each of which has to be individually and painstakingly memorized. Once you build up enough of a recognition pattern you can start to guess by pieces of the character what the word is, but it takes a long time to even get to that place.
I've only started to reach that spot where if I see a character in context, and it's a word I am already able to hear and understand, sometimes I can guess the character and read more fluently. (Other times, there's still no way). But as soon as I hit that place of victory, these duo yin ci's started popping up.
And because they're so fully context dependent, your language has to expand a lot faster to have any hope of ever using them. You have to be able to read in chunks, not just a word at a time.
Patience, patience, patience. Humility, humility, humility. It's going to take a long time and a lot more humility and willingness to ask, to be wrong, to ever get this language. It's a hard but good process for us!
The thing is, though, that Chinese doesn't have just 26 letters to make an alphabet that you can learn and manipulate. It has thousands and thousands of characters, each of which has to be individually and painstakingly memorized. Once you build up enough of a recognition pattern you can start to guess by pieces of the character what the word is, but it takes a long time to even get to that place.
I've only started to reach that spot where if I see a character in context, and it's a word I am already able to hear and understand, sometimes I can guess the character and read more fluently. (Other times, there's still no way). But as soon as I hit that place of victory, these duo yin ci's started popping up.
And because they're so fully context dependent, your language has to expand a lot faster to have any hope of ever using them. You have to be able to read in chunks, not just a word at a time.
Patience, patience, patience. Humility, humility, humility. It's going to take a long time and a lot more humility and willingness to ask, to be wrong, to ever get this language. It's a hard but good process for us!
