Before I came to China I bought a book which promised I could learn Mandarin in fifteen minutes a day if I studied from it for twenty weeks or so. This, unsurprisingly, is bollocks. The problem with the book, and I would venture, the problem that anybody starting to learn this language will have is that there are four different tones for each word. Essentially, this means that every syllable has four different meanings and if you say a sentence and you don't get at least a few of these tones right, you are risking being, at best, borderline incomprehensible and at worst, massively offensive. This is almost impossible, to my mind, to get the hang of without hearing it, and in any event it was barely mentioned in all of the one hundred and thirty
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