I'm taking a chinese class now. It's pretty cool. I knew a little from my girl and my time in Taiwan, so I knew how hard it would be. The speaking really isn't that bad, but the characters... gah. My interest lies about 95% speaking and 5% reading/writing, so I'm having a hard time getting motivated about trudging through all of the characters. Any stories, tricks, ideas?

hmmmmm chinese food.....

nai

You have my sympathies.

I've been putting off learning Korean for over 2 years now, and it seems about 100x easier than Chinese, especially the writing.

Why Korean, drink?

(I can say "Hello," "Thank you" and some kind of approximation of "NICE ASS!"... remembered from when I lived there)

I managed to pass first year Chinese in university (and I failed English that same year - although I suspect if I'd had to write essays on books I'd never bothered to read for Chinese 100 I would've failed that as well).

Yeh, the lack of an alphabet was nuts, but it's the four different tones for every character (and different meanings for each tone) that I found really tough. Spent the year calling the teacher "rat" because teacher and rat are the same word but with different tones. It's like you've gotta sing each sentence instead of just speaking.

I would imagine when a professor looks at his role and comes across Rad's name, he thinks to himself, "oh fuck, it's gonna be long semester."

girlfriend is Korean

Sadly, I've picked up very little over the past 3 & 1/2 years.

I dunno, but there's some dude looking for sales reps.

Well, as far as I know, if said the way I spell this, it means "I like the way your ass moves from side-to-side":
Koon - Dingy - Naka - Naka- Chose - Im - Ni-da

Try it on her

Same here. GF is Taiwanese. But I'm very interested in learning. I love the sound of the language. It's great when I hear her talking with her family or whoever. Her english is great, but she gets frustrated with complex ideas and then begs me to learn chinese; as if i could cover the gap in less time than her and my chinese will be perfect by weeks end or something. I haven't taken a class or really studied anything in quite a whlie so this is good.

OH! I took one of those online IQ tests this morning and I only got 127... down from 151-153 about 7 years ago. BS.

Strange enough, my son has been taking a Chinese class at school all this year.

Yeah I found that odd but interesting considering he's 8. They've basically been learning some basics and about the culture itself. He's absolutely loved the class and it has made him even more curious about the Chinese culture.

Good to hear. Fucking travesty that I didn't study another language until high school.

* Insert generic vitriolic rant about American public schools here*

all look the same to me.

CSI: China, non?

I took a semester and had the same problem. I just couldn't pick up the tones at all. I'm hoping I have better luck with Japanese.

I can speak Japanese (at least enough to get by easily if i went there).

The speaking bit isn't so hard once you get used to the sentence structure, and the writing of the Katakana and Hiragana alphabets is pretty simple, but the writing of the Kanjii is hard as fuck. Kanjii use the same symbols as Chinese, but they mean different things.

let me say learning how to write korean is easier than chinese or japanese. i'm korean & japanese, but sadly i don't know anything. i can read & write korean but don't understand it (yeah i know it's weird).

korean alphabet consists of 14 consonants & 10 vowels which are combined together in syllabal blocks. once you learn those, it's easy to sound it out when reading it.

japanese has 3 different styles of writing: kanji, hiragana and katakana which i found more difficult to learn... i tried to take a japanese class but ending up dropping it.

chinese is the origin of the above 2, and consists of more strokes and characters to write the script. the pronounciation is harder than korean or japanese also. i tried to learn basic chinese symbols when i was taking korean classes in high school and holy hell, it was hard. also - there's a different dialect between cantonese, taiwanese & mandarin. it's confusing.

How many years did you study it for? My bro has just started his 6th year I think, but he did 4 years at school, so that makes it kind of easier.

I've just started my 2nd year of Japanese at uni, starting as an absolute beginner. First year was pretty easy once I got used to the sentences essentially being backwards compared to English, but some of the stuff being introduced now is crazy, like potential verbs, which makes certain verbs look really similar to the normal masu versions of other verbs.

And the kanji is ridiulously hard. I can memorise the 15 or so new ones we learn each fortnight for quizzes, but then seem to forget them. Then we have reading quizzes where the print is really small so its near impossible to discern what the kanji is.

Oddly, I also seem to have forgotten a few of the katakana, mainly the ones that aren't used much in my textbook.

I'm really glad mid-semester break is next week so I can catch up

What's the difference between "Chinese" and "Beijing-Wah" (I have no idea how to spell it, but that's how it's pronounced)? I know a Chinese guy who speaks "Beijing-Wah" and I've never even heard of it before. He says it's different than Mandarin.

I haven't written a stroke of Japanese in two years and i'm a little bit rusty with speaking, but i started learning when i was about ten years old and then stopped when i was about 16. If i took a class for a week or two id be back to where i was in no time.

Haha, yeah, I've wondered if my GF is expecting the same thing. If she has a hard time "getting" so many English/American expressions/vernacular/etc. after being here for 14 years then I don't know why she thinks I'll be able to understand (in any reasonable amount of time) any Korean concepts or expressions that don't translate well into English.

Still, I definitely want to learn it, and the writing system does seem pretty easy. Speaking is a little tough because the consonant sounds are different from English, but I feel like I could get a better handle on it if I learned the writing. But if pumachik hasn't, then I might not have much hope.