The BIGGEST Advantage of Mandarin Chinese

Do you know what a radiator does unless you're an auto mechanic? I guess the average person has no idea what a radiator does, but you will in a second. If we translate the word radiator into Chinese, it becomes a dispersed heat device. know what it does This simple example demonstrates one of the

biggest

advantage

s of Mandarin Chinese over English and many of the other Romance languages. The etymology or construction of words is very simple, which makes it very easy to understand new words, especially scientific concepts and technical terms. Word construction is super simple in Chinese but sentence construction is equally logical in Mandarin Chinese so let's talk about that in this video there is often a lot of confusion about how words are formed in Chinese or rather there is a lot of confusion about that a word, even if it is in Chinese, is a one character word, the short answer is no, it is not a word, it is a morpheme, the shortest unit of an idea, it may be a word, but in essence it is a morpheme that can stand alone as a word or combine with other characters to form a multi-syllable word, but this is precisely why words and etymology in Chinese are so simple to create new words, just stack the characters one after another, for example, FEI TI, literally, flying machine, is the record of the day of the plane, is the calendar and Tien now the electric brain is a computer.

This is also why you may have noticed a large number of two-syllable words in Chinese. In fact, I made a video about how two-syllable words took over Mandarin Chinese. If you're interested in that video, check it out here. This is actually the second part of a three-video series. The first one is definitely worth watching as well and if you are interested in Chinese grammar, check out the third one. No no. You might be thinking that you can do this in English too, like breaking up words. Depending on its components, for example, you could say that international is something between nations, but what makes this easier in Chinese is that Chinese has remained very pure as a language.

I know that, surprisingly, English is actually a great language to compare because English has not remained very pure as a language which means that it has borrowed so much from other languages ​​that it has lost some of its identity, for example Plateau is taken borrowed from French Waltz is from German bicycle has its origin in Greek Typhoon from Chinese and many many examples from Latin Origins, but Chinese comes from Chinese and that means that the average Chinese can understand the roots of the words and the origins of the words if you look at the English word narwhal.

This word supposedly came from Old Norse. Now, what the average American knows is any Old Norse. This word in Old Norse which I'm not going to try to pronounce means corpse whale because it was white and looked like a corpse or something, but if you look at the word narwhal in Chinese it's literally one-horned whale, so the average Chinese person really You can understand that because the origin of that word is in Chinese, let me tell you a story, so last year I was reading a science book in Chinese and I came across three Chinese words that I didn't know and naturally I looked I looked them up in a dictionary to see what they were in English and it turns out I didn't know what lignite bitumenus or anthracite were in English, but guess what their Chinese versions were, so lignite is hulamei or literally lignite bitumenus is yemme or literally. cold smoking and anthracite is or literally coal that does not smoke because the first is brown, the second smokes when it burns and the third does not smoke when it burns, how easy is that to understand and the curious thing is that scientific words in English often They are so hard to remember that we end up giving them nicknames, for example brown coal is commonly known as brown coal, actually bituminus is known as soft coal and anthracite is known as hard coal, but do you see how the official names of these things in Chinese are they?

As easy to remember and understand as their English nicknames, this is not an isolated case and time and time again I find that Chinese words are often easier to understand and remember than their English counterparts, so the characters Chinese create words and words create sentences and Chinese sentences are as easy to understand as Chinese words. What I want to say is that Chinese grammar is very easy. There are no conjugations of verb tenses. There are no honorific conjugations. There are no masculine feminine nouns. Speaking Chinese is not the difficult part. The writing system is the difficult part and so are the tones.

You're not used to tonal language, but I feel like a lot of other content creators, YouTubers, and bloggers have already covered this fact and it's pretty well known at this point, so I won't go into details while you know. Chinese grammar is pretty easy, the last thing I want to cover is that numbers in Chinese are super simple, there are only 15 unique characters to represent all numbers in Chinese, you have 0 to 10 and then you have Tien one e for one hundred thousand. ten billion one hundred million now, why is this important? Well, what if I told you that there has been research that suggests that Chinese students are better at math because their number system is easier, and because their number system is easier, they can understand numbers? and understand simple mathematical concepts at an earlier age.

You see, I just made a video about why I think the Chinese writing system is terrible and naturally some people were a little upset by the title I chose and others pointed out what I was actually talking about. In that video it was how difficult the Chinese writing system was and they say that a difficult language is not necessarily a bad language. In fact, I don't agree with that concept. I think a difficult language or an unintuitive language is a bad language and not for foreign students but for its own native speakers and here's why when you are learning a foreign language, you are only learning it for fun, you are learning it as a hobby, it doesn't really affect your livelihood in any way, but when you are a native speaker of that language like you are a child trying to learn your first language, which actually affects your livelihood, everything you need to know to survive in our society It has to be learned through that language, so if that language is difficult, if it's not intuitive to learn, then it actually becomes a bottleneck in terms of how much information you can absorb and how quickly you can learn.

Would they be Chinese? It is not that the language is difficult, what matters is the quality of the education. Okay that's a good point but what you're forgetting is that quality education costs money like it's not free just look at the cost of college and just because I can run three miles because I've trained well and I'm in good shape doesn't mean it wouldn't be easier for me to just go get a car and drive three miles, so if a language is difficult on an absolute scale, it will cost more resources to educate that population to the same level as another country with a simpler or easier language, it is a hidden cost that cannot be done.

I don't see it and a lot of people forget about the numerical part of a language, it's a great way to demonstrate this because it's a smaller subset of the language so it's a little bit easier to quantify and it affects mathematics which is a different theme again, which makes it easier. To quantify this, this is why I gave so much importance to the Chinese writing system being objectively difficult and why that makes it a bad writing system when you evaluate it as a tool and why in this video I give so much importance to simple that are Chinese words. are and why it is a positive attribute in a language because if it takes me less effort to understand scientific terms in Chinese that means I will have more time to learn about anything else and if Chinese children are able to grasp numbers and basic mathematical concepts at a At a younger age, that means they can move on to more complex math concepts and be ahead of their English-speaking peers, but at the end of the day, all languages ​​have their

advantage

s and disadvantages, and anyone from any linguistic background can do great things. things if you can buy your natural talent with hard work and a little luck and as we wrap up this year I want to wish all my viewers the best of luck, enjoy the rest of this year and see you in 2023, bye.