THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

Chinese is often considered the most difficult language in the world. In fact, it contains unsuspected facilities and difficulties that are not the ones we usually think of.

As a translation company, we regularly introduce you to the intricacies of the languages we translate. Here is a short presentation of Chinese.

Different Chinese languages

In China, Beijing Mandarin has been the official language in China since 1956. But there are many other dialects in the Middle Kingdom, which remains the first language of their region of settlement. On the other hand, Mandarin is now spoken by all throughout China, which was not the case before its official language status.
These important dialects include Cantonese and Shanghai. Shanghain is spoken throughout the Shanghai region, although even within this dialect there are subdivisions (actually collected under the name Wu language). Cantonese is more widespread and is spoken throughout southern China, including Hong Kong. The inhabitants of these regions will therefore speak Cantonese or Shanghain among themselves, and Mandarin with people from other regions. They can translate their dialect (everyday language, family language) with Mandarin (language of education and media) without experiencing any difficulty.

No conjugation

One of the little-known facilities of Chinese is the absence of conjugation. They will say: yesterday I eat; today I eat; tomorrow me eat. This evocative example should not make Chinese look like an inelegant language - it is, on the other hand, refined. But it illustrates the fact that many forms and rules of no use exist in Chinese, conjugation and beyond.

Pronunciation difficulties

A difficulty you never think about: tones. Chinese is a language of tones. There are four different tones. This means that a syllable can have four different meanings depending on how you pronounce it. This is one of the major difficulties of learning Chinese, especially for those whose mother tongue does not know this concept, such as French.

Chinese characters

More than anything else, it is the characters that forge the reputation of the difficult language of Chinese. Unlike our Latin alphabet languages, no pronunciation evidence of a Chinese character can be drawn. Which brings them closer to hieroglyphics. It is impossible to guess a articulation between letters when one could with the Cyrillic alphabet even without mastering it. Finally - a coup de grace - Chinese typography does not include space between words even though combinations of characters form different words. Let's add that the punctuation is famelic. So we find ourselves faced with tight lines of characters that are very difficult to unravel.