Over 5 years ago I decided to start learning Mandarin for fun. Mainly because my friend was already learning it and I thought "How cool would it be to be able to speak a little Mandarin". I thought this because I had always heard how "impossible" it is to learn Mandarin Chinese. Another friend of mine even told me "You will NEVER learn how to say even ONE word!"
The challenge was on!
Imagine my shock when I found Mandarin to be FAR easier than French (which I had studied for 10 years and still barley fluent). I had been deceived! This is one of the easiest languages to learn! Let me explain why.
First of all, when learning to SPEAK a language, we have no need to learn how to read it. Mandarin gets its "impossible" image due to the Characters it uses in its written form. I will concede that when it comes to reading and writing, Mandarin Chinese IS one of, if not THE, hardest language out there. But no one needs to know how to read or write in order to SPEAK, and that's the point I want to make here.
Allow me to demonstrate how EASY Mandarin Chinese is. Let's take English as an example. When it comes to verb conjugations English and other languages e.g. French, have many different verb conjugations depending on the pronoun used. For example the verb "to be"
Infinitive = to be
I AM
You ARE
He/She/It IS
Notice that "to be" becomes "am", "are" and "is" depending on the pronoun used.
Now, how EASY would English be if we spoke this way instead?:
Infinitive = to be
I TO BE
You TO BE
He/She/It TO BE
Notice in my hypothetical example above the infinitive "to be" never actually changes when using "I" "You" or "He/She/It". If you know any French then you will know the infinitive of the verb "to be" is "etre" but when using pronouns French renders it "Je suis" "Tu as" "Il/Elle est". Here again French also changes the verb for each pronoun the same as English. French also takes it one step further in complication. In English we say "We ARE" which is the same conjunction as "You" i.e. "You ARE" but French have yet ANOTHER conjugation for "WE" making their language just that much more difficult!
Now let's get back to Chinese. Chinese does exactly what I have illustrated above. The infinitive of their verbs NEVER EVER change! When I learned this I was over the moon! One of my most hated things about French was the endless verb tables we had to learn. There were regular verbs and irregular verbs, so hard to remember all the rules and then the exceptions to the rules!
With Mandarin Chinese, none of that is an issue. In Mandarin Chinese the verb "to be" is "shi" (pinyin spelling). So when saying: I am, You are, He/She/It is - in Mandarin Chinese you say "shi" each and every time regardless of the pronoun. Isn't that really easy?
So when learning English, a foreign speaker must remember: "to be", "am", "are", & "is", but when learning Mandarin Chinese we only need to remember 1 word "shi". This rule is repeated for EVERY SINGLE verb in the language without exception! Therefore you have just cut your language learning workload down by 75% if you choose to learn Mandarin.
In my next article I will show you how incredibly easy Mandarin Chinese is to express Past tense verbs. Yet another nightmare for me when I was learning French.
The Author started learning Mandarin Chinese over 5 years ago, and was amazed at how easy this language was despite what he had heard. He now lives in China in order to perfect his language ability in hopes of becoming a professional freelance translator/interpreter one day. He has created a How to Learn Chinese blog to help others with this language. He also enjoys tinkering with other website's like his wife's Women's Sundresses site.
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