There has been much debate over the grey area between language and dialect. It is usually national borders that serve the final definition. Chinese is a complex situation because there isn’t a word for dialect, causing misunderstanding among Westerners. We’re here to dispel myths: terminology in Chinese is presented and explained, and parallels drawn with European languages.
This talk delivers a top-down strategy for polyglots approaching multiple Chinese languages, specifically at how Sinitic fits into the linguistic jigsaw of language families in Asia, what the various languages and dialects are and their significance.
First, we’ll cover an overview of the sound system, the challenging sounds and a single universal tone system. We’ll demonstrate how to extrapolate the sounds and tones from one language to another. Second, we’ll cover how to tackle Chinese vocabulary and how to identify false friends. Finally, the specific Chinese syntactic structures that appear in the various languages are presented to help you pick up the languages faster.
This video was recorded at the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava 2017 (www.polyglotbratislava.com).
