hiddenhappiness Wrote:I find Mandarin so hard. XD But that's because I'm Cantonese. The only thing I really struggle with is saying it.
Mandarin follows the way you write, whereas Cantonese isn't like that. XDD So it's really confusing sometimes~~ Haha.
I strongly agree with what you said. At first I thought that knowing how to speak cantonese would make learning mandarin easy, but it turns out that no matter what language you try to learn (meaning any language that is not your native one) is hard at first. If you put enough practice in it, you will eventually learn how to speak it. It's just like English, we all have to learn the alphabet and how to pronounce words in english.
The only advantage of knowing cantonese is the ability to write and identify chinese characters more easily than others who are not familiar the chinese text. So if you know the basic chinese text/characters, learning mandarin is slightly easier if people want to learning it through mandarin tv shows/series with subtitles.
However, the way of speaking and pronouncing mandarin turns out to be very tricky as a cantonese speaking person. You would think that pronoucing chineses words slightly "off" the cantonese tone will sound like mandarin, but only certain words applies to that method. The pronouciation of the same chinese word may either be quite similar in both languages or may be totally different.
Carmen made a very good point about catonese slangs. Although the mandarin language has its own slangs during conversions nowadays, but in general speaking mandarin involves proper grammar to make it sound fluent. In short, you speak mandarin the way it is grammatically written. It's the same way how French works.
Anyways, I would suggest listening to more mandarin songs along with watching mandarin language TV. Just remember, like any language, if you don't practice or it often, you tend to forget how to fluently speak it. For example, for anybody who has taken French classes in school but rarely use it outside of school, how fluent can you speak French now?
