So i recently started to learn Chinese, and i have to say it's been a very positive experience so far. I found the grammar refreshingly simple and the writing system not as intimidating as it first appeared. I still struggle with hearing tones but that will hopefully come with time.
But one thing that still gets me really frustrated is homophones. There are so many of them. And sometimes not even the tone is different. I know plenty of other languages have homophones, English has a bunch of them too, and most of the time you can infer through context which word is meant, but it's still tough for a beginner.
The advantage in Chinese is that the written form is usually very clearly distinguished even if the spoken word sounds the same. But there is one case i've come across where it really seems like the same word, written and sounds exactly the same, seems to be used for two completely different meanings and can't for the life of me figure out why: 只
Can someone please explain to me why this word is used to express both the idea of "only" and also at the same time is a counting word like 个 but for animals (and body parts?):
我只有一只狗
This sentence is so confusing to me. Why, Chinese, why?
That's more or less how i would generally approach this too. It works well when reading, but it's a little more tricky when listening to spoken sentences because for a beginner it can be hard to tell whether a given syllable is a word in itself or if it's part of a multi-syllable word.
In this example it's not a huge issue because the "一" sound is pretty unmistakable as the number "one", but let's say it was five instead.
Assume you're hearing: 我只有五只狗 but you don't see it written out. If you don't know 只 is a measure word you might not immediately conclude that 五 refers to the number "five" because you don't hear a measure word you're familiar with, and so (五)(只狗) with 只狗 being one word makes no sense because then the measure word would be missing, so then you think, ok, maybe it could be a homophone that just happens to sound like five, like for instance 午. So then the way you would parse the sentence in your head could be: "I only have (午只狗)"... And then you're super confused and you ask yourself:
WTF is a "午只狗"? Is is some compound word i don't know? What is a "noon-only-dog"? I must have misheard something!
Whereas if it was 个 instead of 只 you would much more easily recognize it as number + measure word + thing.
Anyway, I'm sure all this is just a matter of experience, once you get more practice listening and as you expand your vocabulary these issues probably go away. It's just beginner issues...
Yeah, experience should make a lot of difference. I know there are certain things that looked, well... foreign in the beginning. And now I can just scan them and kinda just know. Auditory can be a struggle for me more so than reading, maybe because most of my learning is through apps. But also, I think it's a language with a lot of context-based things in general. Like with your example, you'd probably get used to certain words being in the same context and that would help with a lot of parsing. Even so, there can be regional differences with how it sounds, so it's not like natives never have any trouble either (which can also happen with English and dialects, depending on how extreme the dialect difference is).