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How Hard is it to Learn Chinese?


There are a couple of reasons that Chinese is classified as one of the hardest languages around for English speakers to learn. I see a lot of these concerns as imaginary barriers. People have a deeply ingrained historical perspective that Chinese is a nonsensical and alien language that takes years or decades to learn properly, and that simply isn't true. It may even be easier to learn Chinese than some European languages that people are more ready to tackle. Anyway, here are the challenges you'll face.

1. Tones

People shudder when they hear the dreaded word "tones". When people see pinyin, or romanized Chinese - they see all the tone markers and freeze up. It's true that tones are a major hurdle for English speakers. Improperly using tones makes your speech extremely difficult to understand for Chinese speakers, and it takes time to get the tones right, but here is a revelation for you.

It is next to impossible to memorize all of the tones and force your mouth to pronounce them correctly. It is not even worth trying. Learn the pinyin so that you have an idea about what the tones are, and then stop worrying. Instead of focusing so much on the tones, focus on copying the way the Chinese words are spoken by native speakers. Just copy the sounds, and remember that you can't change ANYTHING about the way it's spoken. Become a tape recorder. The tones will take care of themselves, and your pronunciation will be great.

2. Sounds

Chinese contains a number of sounds that don't exist in English, and this can be very intimidating and confusing. Some solid practice with pinyin can really help clear this up and build your confidence. The fact that "zhou" is pronounced like "joe" (more or less) can be bewildering in the beginning, but again - with practice the difficulty disappears.

3. Lack of cognates

In Spanish or French you can bluff your way through entire paragraphs sometimes just by guessing at the meanings of words based on their similarities to English. You can't do this in Chinese. It does make things more difficult, but once you learn a word you've learned it and it's in your vocabulary for good. It means you can't be lazy about your vocabulary practice, and there's no way around it.

4. Writing

It is not necessary to learn the Chinese characters when you begin learning Chinese, and for many people it is enough to speak conversational Chinese and be able to write it in roman characters with pinyin. However, I really recommend taking the time to learn Chinese characters. They can clarify your understanding in many ways, and if you ever go to Asia you'll quickly discover that no one writes anything in pinyin. It can be a confidence builder as well. It's fun to write down a full sentence and discover that what seemed like crazy lines before has developed into something you can really read.

The challenges are there for English speakers, but they're not insurmountable, and they're not nearly as big a deal as they're made out to be. With a little memorization and a LOT of listening and repeating, Chinese becomes easy to learn. Besides, these obstacles are only really a problem as you begin learning Chinese. Later on, when pronunciation troubles are behind you and you get involved in grammar and syntax you'll see that things in that arena are really very easy.




Justin White lives in Jhubei Taiwan, and frantically works at learning Chinese.

Want to learn Chinese (or another language) quickly? Don't make the common mistakes that keep people struggling. Learn to avoid the pitfalls, and go to Learn Chinese Fast for tips, tricks and strategies to improve the speed with which you learn Chinese, and decrease the amount of time it takes you to reach fluency.




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