Who has Chinese as their mother tongue, the skin is not a foreign language, thought of Zhang Danhong. But when you made it with items, modes, and conjugation of acquaintance, she felt a game of the local characters as children.
With the mother tongue is the same as the mother – you can’t choose yourself. We Chinese have since pulled the Black Peter, if I might say today. 10.000 characters lurk in school books, non-fiction and literary works, to be seen, recognized and to be learned by heart. That more than 3,000 of them are no longer in active use, is only a weak consolation. And worst of all: the appearance and pronunciation of a character have nothing to do. Only when one has a veritable vocabulary, it can afford to be a guessing game in relation to the debate. It is also always the risk to be wrong and making a fool of myself mercilessly.
Against this Background, the German language appears to be every Chinese with your principle, “Written as spoken and spoken as it is written,” is downright gorgeous. No matter how tricky a word or set is created – it is beyond never the 26 ridiculous letters. After two years of a foreign language school in Beijing, we could have been Kant or Hegel with a bit of skill to read aloud, without having a clue what it is.
With the arrival of the German grammar in the teaching of our pride, but received a significant damper. Subject, predicate, object – the whole of the Latin words that were required of us with respect, but this pattern is unfamiliar. Also a noun, Verb, adjective and Adverb equivalents are to be found in the Chinese language. Even among departments such as temporal adverbs or adverbs of place are easy to understand.
German grammar – a book with seven seals
Difficult it was with the three specific articles. Why three? While “the father” and “mother” to follow the “Yin-Yang-principle”, we could not understand why a adolescent woman as “the girl” is referred to. And why are there for the same thing, “the car” and “the car”? Confusion arises from the fact that one and the same word can have different items and therefore different meanings, for example “Ball” or “court”. A couple of utensils in bed enough to bring English learners to despair: I put the pillow in the pillowcase, put me in the bed and take my blanket to the bed. What is the logic behind these articles?
The four cases got to us. Nominative and accusative are easy to convey, they do reflect the “subject-object”pattern. But what of the genitive and the dative. If we had known then, that the dative case would be the genitive his death, we would have used less energy to keep them apart.
Genitive stayed with us in the genitive. For “in spite of the bad weather” there was a point deduction
What drove me personally to the edge of a nervous breakdown, was the infamous conjugation – the diffraction of regular, irregular and reflexive verbs and auxiliary verbs in every tense and mode. When the Perfect and imperfect tenses, the main verb slips, strangely enough, at the end of the sentence. The demands high and constant concentration when Listening, because you are not waiting rare minutes, to with the main verb at the end of the whole point of the box set is released.
Chinese grammar – a children’s game
At least here, I have found, what for a luck we Chinese have with our native language. Since the sentences are mostly short and concise. The verbs are not conjugated. A few of the elements are there to indicate the future and the past form. We know neither the definite article nor any of the cases. We do not distinguish between conjunction and economic tional adverbs. In short: The Chinese grammar is wonderfully simple. I believe that all ancient languages together: Who has had Thousands of years ago, the time and the inclination, complicated grammatical rules with the aim of tormenting the descendants.
But there was something with the characters? True. To learn you may, however, in contrast to the German grammar is full of pitfalls, and Knitting, also fun. Chinese is a picture language. It’s the little Aha moments that break up the learning process. Example, 囚 (qiu): A trapped man (人) is quite logically a prisoner. For those of us from the English class, the third agonizing year with the German grammar, the grateful side effect is that we have stopped whining about the many characters.
Chinese is a pure joy: calligrapher Cai Xiaoming is solely for the character 寿 (long life) ten thousand spellings
I’ve often wondered which German has thought up all these rules and exceptions. Only in Germany I got the answer to that. It is the Central Franconian theologian Friedrich Bauer was, in the 19th century. Century, the Chaos of dialects relieve wanted, and uniform rules created. “The German language teaching has made my life very bitter,” he wrote in his diary.
Also I was bitter a little bit, as I noted in Germany that the rules of the German grammar, which we had at that time in China studying and cramming will not be taken by many Germans to be so serious. Not only is the album with the genitive, is also milked this fucking job in the separation of conjunction and economic tional adverbs (the best example of the confusion of “although” and “nevertheless”). What hurts my ears the most, however, is the fact that the full verb “do” without the Need to established an auxiliary verb. So I was asked seriously the question: “Do you dance?”
Zhang Danhong was born in Beijing and lives since 30 years in Germany. In the series “English is not a bed of roses” she writes once a week about your first contacts with the German language and their Integration in Germany.