True, Chinese has no (?) conjugation, but to compensate, there's quite a strict word order.
I took a couple of courses of Chinese too, but gave up because of the nasty characters, difficult pronounciation, and the countless ways in which you can screw up even one word by mis-pronouncing the tones of the syllables :)
On the other hand, pronouncing Japanese is virtually like pronouncing Finnish, but I never bothered to learn those Chinese characters for Japanese either.
We're a Beijing startup and are changing the face of Chinese language instruction. If characters are causing problems just switch everything to pinyin. We've got a huge variety of shows and tests and speaking drills and are getting rave reviews.
There are lots of issues with traditional educational methods. In my personal opinion the biggest is that traditional classroom-based methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language.
Well, I took my beginner's course in Chinese in 2000..
I gave up on it around 2002, and have since moved on to learning Japanese up to daily conversation level, and now I'm considering taking a look
at Korean.
> methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language.
From my experience, I'd say that this is a good point. Our teacher made us (try to) draw those Chinese characters quite a bit, and it didn't really help me at all. There was no way I was going to remember those scary things that soon.
My Chinese studies were spread out over two years and two courses, and I only remember a few simple sentences. Only one of them happens to be relevant now: "Wo you yi ge gongzi" (+tones) - I own a company. :P
A sole proprietorship, to be exact, but technically a company anyway!
I took a couple of courses of Chinese too, but gave up because of the nasty characters, difficult pronounciation, and the countless ways in which you can screw up even one word by mis-pronouncing the tones of the syllables :)
On the other hand, pronouncing Japanese is virtually like pronouncing Finnish, but I never bothered to learn those Chinese characters for Japanese either.