[lit-ideas] Re: Chinese -- ??

I've been learning Chinese in the last few months. I've taken Japanese courses several times; spoken Chinese is much easier. It's the easiest language I've ever learned (and I speak German, Danish, Spanish, etc.) No conjugation of verbs, no plurals, no conjugation of prepositions. The entire grammar is basically just "subject-verb-direct object".
The tones are a bit of a challenge. A sound can be spoken with four tones. We have tones in English too: the tones to indicate questions, exclamations, and orders. Once you realize that, it's not a big issue. Just learn the words. Canton Chinese has nine tones; Common Language Chinese (Mainland Chinese) has only four.
The real challenge is written Chinese; to be able to read, you need to learn a few thousand characters and the shapes are hard to memorize. I'm not bothering with written Chinese; I'll learn just the characters for basics (toilet, etc.)
My goal is to be able to have casual conversation and negotiate business in Chinese, so the basics is sufficient. 

yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com 
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