On my blog, I write that learning Mandarin is hard, but not too hard.
Some people really don’t like it and reply: What? You don’t know anything about it!
You’ve just begun learning Mandarin. You really don’t know.
They would like to hear you say that Mandarin is the most difficult language you’ve ever learned, right?
Right. When I first started with this goal, they said,
Benny, you don’t know! You WILL say that Chinese is the most difficult language.
I wonder, do you mean that you would find other languages are not important if you are learning, say, Spanish?
I don’t think you need to ask yourself whether other languages are difficult or not.
All you need to do is focus on your language.
Oh, so it doesn’t matter whether a language is difficult or not. What matters most is what you want to learn.
I don’t think the difficulty of a language matters. Most people are learning one language only.
you know? So this language is the most important one. Other languages are irrelevant.
You know, I’m learning Mandarin for now. Spanish is not important, and French is not important
because I’m only learning Mandarin at the moment, so I don’t need to...
But you can still at least compare different languages. Why not?
Well, you can, but ...
You have learned so many languages.
Yes, I have learned many languages, but when I am learning one language in particular,
I only need to know about this language.I know comparing languages is “interesting”.
It is especially interesting if you are a linguist, but I’m not a linguist.
But you can still talk about your feelings. It’s just like watching movies.
You are no movie expert, but you can still say, I like it. I don’t like it.
I feel that the movie is too long. I feel that the movie is too short. You can say whatever you like.
Yeah, yeah, you can, you can. But I don’t think that helps in any way.
Are you concerned that if you say it’s too difficult to learn a particular language, then people would give it up?
Uh-huh. You know, many people do not want to learn Chinese, because so many are telling them,
“Ah, learning Chinese is way too difficult.” I want to inspire other people to learn this language.
Do you have the same goal for every language that you have ever learned?
Yeah, I do, but I also have my own cultural goal.
I have my blog and I want to use it to help speakers of one language realize that
learning other languages isn’t too hard. So when someone says
that language learning is very difficult,
I would reply with a ‘no’.
OK. One question for you.
Which do you prefer; Mandarin spoken by the Taiwanese or that spoken in Shanghai?
Uhm... I like Taiwanese Mandarin more
since I’ve just spent three months in Taiwan,
so I don’t know much about Mandarin spoken in Shanghai yet.
For instance, in Taiwan, they say “I’m a teacher” (in a different accent) and I liked it very much.
Really?
Yes, yes.
Do you know what people from mainland China think,
people from Shanghai or Beijing?
They think that Taiwanese people, especially the men there, speak Mandarin a bit like a girl.
Ah?
But the girls there, Taiwanese girls speak pretty cute Mandarin.
Yeah, yeah. I...
Didn’t you know that?
Yes. For example,
when I was once taking the subway in Taiwan (which they call something different)
and I heard someone say, “Ah, super cute!”
Was the person talking about you?
Talking about what?
You.
On, no, not me.
Haha, well I don’t know, about a cat or something.
Alright.
OK. So, thank you.
You are welcome.
Tomorrow I will go to the Chinesepod
to interview your colleagues.
I enjoyed our interview a lot.
Good, I enjoyed it, too.
Well done, Benny!
Hehe, thanks, OK, bye bye.
Bye.