The BIGGEST Advantage of Mandarin Chinese

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The simple etymology of words in Chinese makes a huge difference in how easy it is to comprehend and remember new words, especially scientific and technical terms.

Why Chinese Hates 1 Syllable Words Series

📚 REFERENCES:

NOTE: You’ll notice that all the examples I used for this video are nouns. This is not because this concept only applies to nouns, but because it’s difficult to explain how it applies to verbs and adjective unless you already have an advanced understanding of Chinese. For example, 保护,拥护,维护 mean protect, support, uphold. You’ll notice that the Chinese versions all share one characters, whereas the English translations look nothing alike, despite carrying similar meanings. So verbs and adjectives are also easier to understand in Chinese, but it’s really difficult to explain why 保 means protect, 护 also means protect, and yet, to express “protect,” you have to use both characters together most of the time.

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ...or too early for that?😂 This was a topic I planned for later, but after the feedback from my last video, it seemed appropriate to make it now. Hope you like it!

Edit: English is not a Romance language, sorry for the slip up! I was probably thinking about Spanish in my mind😭

ABChinese
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When you read Chinese writing, you know the meaning but not the pronunciation.

When you read any Western writing system, you know how to pronounce it but not the meaning.

There are pros and cons to both systems of writing.

modmaker
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My favourite example of this is for doughnuts, 甜甜圈, where the literal translation into English kinda means, "sweet sweet circle".

DuckForPope
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As a Japanese speaker I've been trying to explain this to people for ages. English literally makes learning concepts more difficult via unnecessary abstractions. It's one of the reasons I'm against the increased overuse of Katakana for loan words.

shin-ishikiri-no
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I used Memrise to learn all the words up till HSK3. Then, I didn't study Chinese for a year and began studying Japanese more seriously and also a bit of Korean. Now, 1.5 years after, I STILL remember Chinese characters and words better than Japanese and Korean, because Chinese words just make so much more sense and are so much easier to remember because every word and character is basically a little mini story and my visual associative memory kicks in lol.

rigelr
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I used to study Mandarin Chinese a little, because I was strongly inspired by work that chinese colleagues in my profession area do (I am an information security specialist), and because chinese part of the internet contains a lot of unique knowledge about it, that would be much less available and meaningful for me as an English or Russian speaker.

So when I started to learn it I started to understand why chinese people are so good in technical areas. I had a feeling that the language itself was made by an engineer. Strict, short, laconic and yet poetic in many ways in this shortness.

I absolutely loved the idea of chinese characters, but the hardest part for me personally is the pronunciation - tones are not an easy concept if your native language doesn’t have them :)

Thanks for an interesting video!

ivanov
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I understand how simple Chinese can be. And that's what makes it so hard.
If you know enough characters, it's easy to infer the meaning of a word you don't know. But while listening, that's a completely different story. There are so many homophones - even when you do take the tones into consideration - that it makes it really hard to infer the meaning of words you don't know.

danilopablo
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For people interested in the coal example...go read about the periodic table in Chinese...every element is one character, half of the character tells you the pronunciation, the other half denotes the category:

all the metal elements have a radical meaning literally metal: 钅(铁 iron, 钠 sodium, 银 silver etc);
all the room temperature gases have a radical meaning gas 气 (氧 oxygen, 氦 helium, 氮 nitrogen);
and the water radical 氵/水 denoting elements that are in liquid form under room temp., (溴 bromine, 汞 mercury);
So even if you've never heard about the element before just by looking at the character you can get a rough idea of what kind of element it is,

One character/syllable per element also makes remembering the table extremely easy, it's like reading a poem, and depending on what's needed, students can recite it either horizontally (so every element recited have the same number of layers) or vertically (so the elements all have the same number of outer layer electrons). Give them a blank sheet of paper most high school students can reconstruct 60% of the periodic table just because the pattern is so organised and it's so easy to remember.

kuri
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Very interesting point about the Chinese language being clear and Chinese children potentially being able to better understand math as a result! I much rather that than the persistent (harmful) stereotype about "Asians just being smart." No group of people is somehow magically smarter than another just because they are a certain nationality/ethnicity. Everyone works hard. Math confuses us all, lol.

jlady
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I used to be an English teacher in China, and had gotten started developing an English course for electronics engineers, who were not uncommon among adult students. Here is some of the vocabulary list:

voltage - 电压, electricity pressure
current - 电流, electricity flow
ammeter - 电流表, electricity flow indicator
resistor - 电阻器, electricity resist device
circuit - 电路, electricity path
power supply - 电源, electricity source
switch - 开关, open close
short circuit - 短路, break path
electric signal - 电信号, electricity letter number
battery - 电池, electricity pool
generator - 发电机, send electricity machine
motor - 电动机, electricity move machine
photoelectric - 光电, light electricity
wireless transmission - 无线传送, without line pass-on deliver
electrostatic - 静电, calm electricity
electro-mechanical - 机电的, machine electricity of
electromagnetic field - 电磁场, electricity magnet field

jimzorn
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I fell in love with this language when I discovered that the word for popcorn is "exploded grain flower" 😅😊

cameronayers
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You're actually the reason I started learning Chinese, written and spoken. Your video truly demystified a language that–while you'll have to put in hours if you want to learn to write and read–has so many amazing benefits and uses highly sensible morphemes to make up words. Thank you for starting my journey and making the whole process new and exciting :)

lucasw
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I started learning mandarin by my own self because I am fascinated with the characters, rich historical culture, and the language itself but never been consistent with my learning, this video is my great motivation now. Thank you so much dear creator ( sorry don't know your name yet).

rubinasharma
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Chinese is a logical language, while Japanese is ad-hoc. A Japanese linguist once wrote that, and having studied both languages, I completely agree. I had a lot of fun to learn Mandarin and always recommend to other people. Its a really cool and fascinating language.

stevens
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Currently studying Mandarin, and I find the language much easier to learn and understand than English (my native language). English has so many different, complicated things within the language that makes it far too difficult. I find that English has too many words for some things, and not enough for other things. I'm thankful that I have decided to learn Mandarin because it has opened my mind quite a lot.

caspianjuniper
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Even as a native Mandarin Chinese speaker, this is the first time I truly understood the efficiency of the language! Very informative, keep it up!

Jamesloh-zmbr
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Learning Chinese is really satisfying for how practical it is. Reminds me of a really good programming language

nextos
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Great video. I actually find it quite funny how this aspect is reflected in some other languages including my native one: german. For example plane is "Flugzeug" as in "fly thing" or more closely "flying equipment". I mean germans just stringing words together to create new ones is a common joke. So seeing wild compound words and expressions in chinese was a welcome surprise. Just now, I thought "lignite is just Braunkohle, right?" (actually the term for lignite in german) and you followed it up with the one-to-one translation :)

I found there are more examples of this commonality and it's pretty amusing. Even some stuff like 再见 translates one-to-one to "Wiedersehen".

KR-ucei
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You make a very valid point. I remember how I struggled in school with science especially because we always had to memorize scientific names and often you need a basic understanding of latin to understand why it is named whatever it is named. If we could spend less time memorizing names and more time understanding scientific concepts, that would be much better. And of course that can be applied to any area of study. I find Chinese relaxing so I study for enjoyment and to hopefully keep my brain sharp.

Drestic
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Good video ! I was just thinking about this earlier today. One thing though, I don't think English numbers are really more complex than Chinese numbers. "ty" in English functions just like "shi" in Chinese. Examples:
Er-shi-yi
Twen-ty-one
Ba-shi-san
Eight-ty-three
and for 13-19
Shi-san
Thir-teen
Shi-si
Four-teen
The only exceptions would be the numbers 11 and 12.

AlcatelVelikiy