Mandarin Chinese is often described as a difficult language, sometimes one of the most difficult ones. This is not hard to understand. There are thousands of characters and strange tones! It must surely be impossible to learn for an adult foreigner!
That’s nonsense of course. Naturally, if you’re aiming for a very high level, it will take time, but we have met many learners who have studied for just a few months (albeit very diligently), and have been able to converse rather freely in Mandarin after that time. Continue such a project for a year and you will probably reach what most people would call fluent. So definitely not impossible.
How difficult a language is depends on many things, but your attitude is certainly one of them and it’s also the easiest one to influence. You stand little chance of changing the Chinese writing system, but you can change your attitude towards it. In this article, we are going to show you certain aspects of the Chinese language and explain why they make learning a lot easier than you might think.
Why Mandarin Chinese is easier than you think:
No verb conjugations – Partly because of bad teaching practice, many people associate second language learning with endless verb conjugations. When you learn Spanish or French and care about being accurate, you need to remember how the verb changes with the subject. We have this in English too, but it’s much easier. In Chinese, there are no verb inflections at all. There are some particles that change the function of verbs, but there are certainly no long lists of verb forms you need to memorize. If you know how to say 看 (kàn) “look”, you can use it for any person referring to any period of time and it will still look the same. Easy!
No grammatical cases – In English, we make a difference between how pronouns are handled depending on if they are the subject or the object of a sentence. We say “he talks to her”; “him talks to she” is wrong. In some other languages, you need to keep track of different objects and sometimes also not only for pronouns, but for nouns as well. None of that in Chinese! 我 (wǒ) “I, me” is used in any situation referring to myself in any way. The only exception would be plural “we”, which has an extra suffix. Easy!
Flexible parts of speech – When learning most languages other than Chinese, you need to remember different forms of the words depending on what part of speech they belong to. For example, in English we say “ice” (noun), “icy” (adjective) and “to ice (over)/freeze” (verb). These look different. In Chinese, though, these could all be represented by one single verb 冰 (bīng), which incorporates the meaning of all three. You don’t know which one it is unless you know the context. This means that speaking and writing becomes much easier since you don’t need to remember so many different forms. Easy!
No gender – When you learn French, you need to remember if each noun is meant to be “le” or “la”; when learning German, you have “der”, “die” and “das”. Chinese has no (grammatical) gender. In spoken Mandarin, you don’t even need to make a difference between “he”, “she” and “it” because they are all pronounced the same. Easy!
Relatively easy word order – Word order in Chinese can be very tricky, but this mostly becomes apparent at more advanced levels. As a beginner, there are a few patterns you need to learn, and once you’ve done that, you can just fill in the words you’ve learnt and people will be able to understand. Even if you mix things up, people will usually still understand, provided that the message you want to convey is relatively simple. It helps that the basic word order is the same as in English, i.e. Subject-Verb-Object. Easy!
Logical number system – Some languages have really bizarre ways of counting. In French, 99 is said as “4 20 19″, in Danish 70 is “half fourth”, but 90 is “half fifth”. Chinese is really simple. 11 is “10 1″, 250 is “2 100 5 10″ and 9490 is “9 1000 400 9 10″. Numbers do get a little bit harder above that because a new word is used for every four zeroes, not every three as in English, but it’s still not hard to learn to count. Easy!
Logic character and word creation – When you learn words in European languages, you can sometimes see the word roots if you’re good at Greek or Latin, but if you take a random sentence (such as this one), you can’t really expect to understand how each word is constructed. In Chinese, you actually can do that. This has some significant advantages. Let’s look at a few examples of advanced vocabulary that are really easy to learn in Chinese but very hard in English. “Leukemia” in Chinese is 血癌 “blood cancer”. “Affricate” is 塞擦音 “stop friction sound” (this refers to sounds like “ch” in “church”, which has a stop (a “t” sound), then friction (the “sh” sound)). If you didn’t know what these words meant in English, you probably do now after looking at a literal translation of the Chinese words! These are not exceptions in Chinese, this is the norm. Easy!
Post time: Apr-09-2020