Chinese Mandarin Conversation
Getting to grips with Chinese Mandarin conversation.
We have all experienced the following situation either when at school or when learning in your own time. It’s when you think you know the language very well, you feel confident that you have mastered the right tones, vocabulary and inflections that are identical to the native speakers. Suddenly you are chucked head first into a social situation where you must converse and put your knowledge to the test and this is when the part we all dread occurs- our mind goes blank.
Chinese Mandarin conversation may be quite overwhelming at times as all of the actual words themselves may become blurred and blocked out by the four distinctive tones or five if you include the neutral tone!
This means you need to be prepared before jumping in to a Chinese Mandarin conversation with native Chinese speakers as if you are not then the situation may become confusing and also very discouraging as you may become irritated, thinking what was the point of learning the language if I cannot speak it!
Within the Chinese Mandarin conversation there are certain structures and word forms such as phrases, which in modern Chinese grammar pull together two plus words depending on particular grammatical systems. There are several words within the current Chinese grammar as of course you would expect with any other language. This ranges from monosyllabic words which only contain one syllable so are very simple words to quadruple or more syllables.
A fascinating fact is that over 70% of the words which crop up in the Chinese Mandarin conversation are disyllabic words (contains two syllables).
A great way of gaining an upper hand and preparing you for the practical situation is through the language exchange systems or having contacts with native speakers in China and writing to them frequently. Keeping this up you will keep up to current collocations and phrases that are used in everyday Chinese Mandarin conversation and will be able to carry this experience over for real life situations.
