Topic: Taking Chinese in High School?

I'm transferring to a new High School this year and oddly, they offer CHINESE there! Being the nerd I am, I'm interested in it. Has anyone took this before? I don't have good grades at all, so motivate me? haha

Chinese is pretty difficult from what I've heard so keep that in mind. However, anythig you have an interest in will be easier than that which you don't, so if you're really into it, then it'll be worth your while.

If you're interested in it, or have some use for it, then go for it. But it's a VERY difficult language, and if you're not getting good grades anyway, you might want to give it a miss to let yourself focus on improving in the more important things.

Thats neat I remember back when I was going from 8th grade to high school the high school I went to offered Japanese. I was so excited and I signed up for it so I could take it in the fall. Than that summer hit and the school cut some programs Japanese being one of them and I was stuck taking Spanish.

An increasing number of schools in the western world are offering Chinese in recent years with China becoming the world's leading economy in the coming decades. However, it is VERY hard to learn as it is completely different from western languages and putting the accent on the wrong part of a word can cause its meaning to become completely different. And then there's those hundreds of characters instead of our 26 letters.

@Tasuki something like that happened at my High School. I wasnt sure I was going to like High School at all and than they told me I could take Japanese and I thought "SWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEETTTT!
Only to find out they just said that to make me have a positive look on High School over the summer.

cool, the high school I'm going to offers Chinese too, but I was hoping for Japanese lol
Hey Raylax, do you got on Deviantart? your avatar gave it away

Yeah, as Rensch, O.B and Raylax said Chinese is a tough language to pick up.

I honestly recommend Spanish. Not just because that is what most students take but because you'll most likely get more use out of it. That, and it's really not that difficult to pick up the basics.

Yup. NL gets the SUPERDELUXE version of my avatar because dA has an insanely small (15kb) size limit, haha.

Back on topic; wish my high school had offered language courses. Best I got was 3 after-school classes in Spanish which were promptly cancelled because only 4 of use went to it.

I wish I could've learned Chinese in high school - it would've made things much easier now since my wife is Chinese. That said, it's one of the hardest language to learn and probably isn't very useful unless you plan to travel to China or want to hit on Chinese girls in college. Resisting urge to post pictures of uber-cute Chinese girls.

Have you seen the Ubisoft "My Chinese Coach" game for DS? Actually does a surprisingly decent job of helping to learn some basics, although it really drops you into the deep end at some points. Was selling very cheap at local GameStops recently. Might be a nice supplement to your school learning if you do decide to take the class (or might give you an idea of what the language is like if you aren't sure).

Definitely take Chinese. Yes, it's a difficult language; that's why it's best to take it in high school. Classes will move more slowly there than if you were to take it in college. Also, challenging yourself to take a more difficult language will make your overall transcript look better to college admission committees. Chinese is also very practical as something like half the world speaks it.

There are two difficult aspects of the language: the tones and the characters. The tones take a while to get used to and take a lot of focus to pronounce correctly. In the beginning you can get by even if you muck them up, so don't get frustrated. Characters are a pain, but there is a logic to them (the thousands of characters are formed from combinations of only 100some character parts). There's no way around a long haul of rote memorization. It does get easier as you go though.

On the plus side, grammar is comparatively simple. There are no verb conjugations, so no memorizing complicated tenses and irregular verb rules you'll face in Romance languages.

If you have a good ear and can memorize things, but suck at English grammar, Chinese may be the better option for you. I'd recommend you check out www.chinesepod.com. They have free podcasts for learning Chinese, so you could test it out to see if you like it.

They just started offering Mandarin Chinese in my school about a month ago. My friend takes it (I couldn't, I have I.T. at that time ) and she enjoys it. Maybe you should try it.
_{I speak a pretty complicated language myself with importance in tonations and writing characters. It's almost impossible to learn it without having some past experience of it (it's my native language) and a lot of people find it harder to write (surprisingly I don't.) So you see, it'd be interesting to go for it. =)}

Different brains react to different languages. There's a test the military gives (gave?) that tells you how well your brain will learn a different language. My spanish teacher had spanish way down the list as being more difficult for him. Not sure how that all works, but you might find chinese to be simple where others find it difficult. I say take it. America will be owned by China someday and you'll have job security.

My school only teaches 2 languages (Spanish and German). I'd love to have Chinese or Korean taught at our school, considering the ammount of exchange students we have.

I've done Japanese for about 3 and a half years, and it's freakin' hard. I'm going to take it through VCE (year 11 and 12) though, since I would have wasted the 3 and a half years of crap loads of homework if I stopped.

And I still can't read Mother 3 well.