Mandarin - translations help

Mandarin doesn't half look hard

thanks a bunch

It's not actually that hard - once you start learning, you realise how easy it is GRAMMATICALLY than French/German/Spanish. Even the characters you start to at-least RECOGNISE (if maybe not write them).

The main hard part is actually just making sense of all the strange "sounds"! In Fr/Ge/Sp, you don't have to concentrate as much to the speaker since they're closer to English obviously, whereas in Mandarin you have to really listen carefully. After some time though, you get used to certain phrases and it generally gets easier.

Other than that, Mandarin is top top!! I'm definitely doing the Intermediate level next year (and "further" in my final year) hopefully.

I am studying maths at university
wo3 zai4 da4 xue2 xue2 shu4 xue2
我在大学学数学

I am 18 years old.
-> no idiomatic translation, as the question tends to be: how big are you? , and your answer: 18 years. (no equivalent of 'am')
ergo:

ni3 duo2 da4 le, OR, ni2 ji3 sui4 le
你多大了, OR, 你几岁了
and you answer, (wo3) and (le) optional

(wo3) shi2 ba1 sui4 (le)
(&#25105十八岁(&#20102

I live in australia
wo3 zhu4 zai4 ao4 da4 li4 ya4
我住在澳大利亚


Hope that helps.

I'm still not convinced - its the whole idea of a new alphabet that freaks me out, and I don't think I'd like the sound of it, which is a very important part of a language - hence the reason for liking the romance languages - I believe they are quite nice to listen to

Re: bally

if you can't see the characters, go to 'View', 'Encoding' and change it to UNICODE UTF-8. Most online characters will show up then. Otherwise you might want to install Chinese Simplified (HZ). UTF-8 and HZ usually covers up to 90% of sites (certainly the more reliable ones!). If you want to copy stuff, Word usually allows you to copy simplified characters. Typing is slightly harder, but if you try Google, downloading the programme NJStar is free on many websites and it is rather easy to use (if you know how to type pinyin!)

Re: gooner

There isn't an alphabet in chinese. I think you might be mixing it up with Japanese. Japanese has two alphabets, the katagana, for nouns derived from European languages or other proper nouns, and the hiragana, for most sentence compositions. The Kanji (third major component) in Japanese is basically chinese, which is used for names, place names and most nouns (which may also be written with hiragana). That's complication for you.

Chinese is technically easy to construct, especially if you're from a multi-conjugating romance language as it has no change in tenses (you only need to place the verb in context, as it were). It follows most English syntax, the only major problem being the possible confusions regarding 'possession' (the 'de' role in chinese is rather confusing, considering there are three different forms of the same word and even native speakers may mix them up!)

Speaking is hard to master, but if you're learning Mandarin, then there are only 4 basic sounds that you need to know (the 5th is a natural 'soft' sound). So once you know the 4 basic intonations, you can pretty much figure out the rest quite logically anyway!