For those who want to learn
Chinese characters, I think the difficult lies not in the writing part,
because Chinese characters are imaginary and will be very easy to remember if
you divide a certain character into parts. What really troubles the Chinese
learners who learn mandarin online is the polyphone of certain characters.
The most common polyphones
in Chinese for beginners are: “乐” in音乐(yīn yuè) and 快乐(kuài lè), “干” in 干净(gān jìng) and 干部(gàn bù), “似” in 似乎(sì hū) and 似的(shì de).
Once there was a foreigner
who was taking Chinese for beginners, he
considered Chinese people to be very arrogant after his trip to China. However,
others disagreed in that Chinese people were generally famous for their modesty
and humility. When asked why he thought so. He replied: “In China you can see
sentences like ‘中国人民很行’, ‘中国建设很行’, ‘中国工商很行’, ‘中国农业很行’ and ‘中国很行’ everywhere in the streets,
that is too pompous, don't you think so?” Actually, he has actually mistaken “银行(bank)” for “很行(very good)”. “银”resembles“很” and“行”is a polyphone,when pronounced
“xíng” , it means good or okay; When pronounced “hang” in the phrase “银行”, it means bank.
No wonder the foreigner misunderstood the names of the banks, polyphone is so
puzzling and deceptive.
In order to learn
mandarin online well, it is necessary to understand the usage of the
Chinese characters with more than one pronunciation. There is no doubt
polyphone is a barrier if you intend to learn Chinese well. So if you want to learn
pinyin or Chinese characters, never ignore the polyphones or jokes like
the one above may often happen.
Enjoy your process of
learning Chinese!
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