The BIGGEST Advantage of Mandarin Chinese

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😭

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

In my opinion the only positive thing about the Chinese writing system, is the fact that it can convey a lot of information in very few characters, and that it’s more compact and a person fluent in Chinese is able to grasp the meaning of a text or sentence way faster than if it were in English or any other similar language.

radiate in English means to emit energy of some sort such as light or heat, so we can pretty much get the idea of what a radiator does without needing a chinese translation. But this was a very good example.

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!

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).

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

This is a really good point on how making the words easier to understand through their meaning makes more room to learn more easier! I think I heard somewhere that Mandarin is the only real pictographic language, and I think that's really cool that all words are made of concepts expressed through pictures. Happy new year!

I appreciate how you presented this video. 👏🏾👏🏾

This video has blown my mind🤯I’ve never heard anyone explain how Chinese works. I thought Chinese was purely memorization, but you’ve taught me that Chinese grammar follows a logical pattern. Thank you for this extremely informative video. I think I’m too old to try to learn it now. You’re a great teacher to make something so complicated understandable 👏🏾

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.

I've become enamored of mandarin and am working on immersion. This was a very well thought out video and it was nicely conveyed. From the perspective of a person of European descent, you hit the mark of where my focus should be, Ty.