Learning Mandarin Grammar Is Easy

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Inventing a character script was a pure necessity to distinguish them, because an alphabetical system is simply too limited to do that. For anybody who has bad memories of learning French or Spanish regular and irregular verb conjugations, or German article declinations in Nominativ, Akkusatif, Genitif or Datif, or learning plurals of nouns in French, or trying to memorize if words are masculine, feminine or neuter, look no further, the Chinese language is completely devoid of all those complications of Western languages.

In Chinese, forms never change, because the pronunciation of a character is fixed. The sound of a character will never change in function of the person, tense, number, gender of words. In general, Chinese vocabulary is built up in a very logical way. Once you know some basic words, your learning process will speed up in no time. As you progress, you will notice that many new words you learn are simply creative combinations of other basic words you have learned before. All of the above words are examples of how the Chinese use known concepts of single characters to form new words.

Ten Reasons Why Chinese is Easy

Chinese vocabulary makes sense! As you can see, the Chinese language constructs new words by combining very basic meanings of existing characters, which are usually more than years old themselves, as we will discuss in the next section. In Western languages, words often stand much more by themselves, since the alphabet also allows many more letter combinations syllables than is possible in Chinese. Learning how to read Chinese characters is not an absolute must from the very beginning. Yet, Chinese characters actually have all of the above in them.

As the above examples show, the oldest version of the character on the left was indeed just a drawing of the object. Over the years towards the right , the form became more polished, but the original object can still be traced back. In the above examples, the meaning is always abstract, hence, it was impossible to make an actual drawing. Picture below indicates how the radical already gives you an idea of the meaning of that character. The phonetic element is usually a character in itself as well, which has a pronunciation very similar to the pronunciation of the new combination.

Chinese Is Easy – 5 Reasons Why Learning Chinese Is Not As Hard As You Think

The best way to learn any new language is to throw aside all your fears, excuses and imaginary obstacles and just get started. The best way to learn any new language is to throw aside all your fears, excuses and imaginary obstacles and just get started [ Tweet this ]. This article really make sense, am actually giving up on learning chinese language. Thank you for encouraging those who want to learn chinese, evnthough it seems so hard to understand. Really appreciate your work guys! Yes, I agree with you. Chinese is not hard to learn. Te methods you described in your writing seems to be good.

Keep up the good writing. I am researching the web how to master the Chinese language. Since I just found this amazing article that points out exactly what to do, I think this might be good for your discussion as well to explain. You need a bit of a musical ear to sort it out. The Hutong School […].

It really helps i was about to quit but now i have a new encouraging idea in my head!!! I can provide countless more examples, both where the pronunciations are even more similar, and those with vastly different modern pronunciations. In any case, because most characters are composed in this way, learning new characters is much easier than people make it out to be it's only the first several hundred that are the real challenge. I agree that the basic word order is pretty simple, and not too dissimilar to English.

That being said, the Chinese structure, while quite alien to speakers of European languages, is relatively easy to learn. There are plenty of other structures and expressions that are quite different from English, but overall, it's still not too hard to get used to. Although having no tenses makes the grammar a bit easier, I wouldn't say that the aspect markers "aren't necessary to use". While sentences may occasionally remain grammatical even when leaving them out, the meaning might not be readily understood, and they would often sound extremely unnatural.

Sure, it's easier than English, where we have both tense and aspect, combined to form complex constructions, but aspect in Chinese is no less important than in English after all, there's a difference between "I eat shrimp" and "I'm eating shrimp". I'm not sure if Chinese is any more flexible than English when it comes to parts of speech. Just flipping through a magazine next to me, here are a bunch of examples: There are plenty more, and that's not to mention the hundreds of two-syllable words where the stress can also determine the part of speech present, record, object, perfect, etc.

I agree with your point 9, but you can extend this further and point out that Chinese has no grammatical case markings at all. English only marks case on its pronouns, but learners of languages such as Polish or pretty much any other Slavic language , Hungarian or other Uralic , or any language with grammatical case, will find Chinese as a relief from this headache.

Allow me to also point out a couple other things that make Chinese easy. Those familiar with Korean, Japanese, some Southeast Asian languages, or even most European languages and many other languages around the world , will be delighted to know that Chinese essentially has no obligatory politeness levels.

Additionally--and this would probably be the most motivating factor in my opinion--Chinese is easy because it's so easy to practice. In every country I've traveled to, I've had opportunities to speak Mandarin, and the presence of speakers online on certain chat websites is large enough that you can almost always find someone to talk to. I'd also like to stress that people are genuinely happy to speak with someone learning their language, whereas I've had plenty of trouble trying to find speakers of German to practice with me. If you're living in Hong Kong, why didn't you learn Cantonese?

2) Simple Word Order (Not Too Dissimilar From English)

With all the tension in Beijing-Hong Kong politics, I know Hong Kongese people want to keep out the mainland China influence as much as possible, including Mandarin. I don't plan to stay in Hong Kong for more than a few years. If I were planning on staying, I might learn Cantonese instead.

Plus I think Cantonese is a lot harder to learn. There are more tones compared to Mandarin 4 and the spoken and written languages are two distinct languages. Thanks for writing this, it was very interesting!

I am considering learning Chinese as there is a large population of Chinese people in Australia especially in my area so it would be quite useful to learn and I would have a lot of people to practice with. However, I haven't ever had the time but after reading this post I now want to learn it quite soon. I often read that Chinese learners don't find Chinese that hard to learn in comparison to other languages.

Most people who say that Chinese is one of the toughest language in the world only seem to claim that because of their own fear of learning it because it is so different. Sure, learning all the seem to take time and writing Chinese is another challenge as well. All in all it just seems to be different, but not impossible to learn.

Immersion, example, Learning French and living in Hawaii as opposed to learning French and living in Paris.

One is certainly easier. The main language in Hong Kong is Cantonese a dialect of Chinese , but many mainlanders have moved to Hong Kong, so around half of the population also speaks Mandarin. Also, the written language is either the same or very similar depending on how you think of it. The radicals are really just the tip of the iceberg though, they are to the rest of the writing like ingredients are to recipes.

Whichever way you look at it , Chinese writing is a memory game. It's fine once you start to understand the mechanics, but its still a major factor that makes it impenetrable. This reminds me of this article, a must-read for every overly-enthusiastic beginner to Chinese: I was once at a luncheon with three Ph. I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day.

I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China".

1) No (Very Few) Grammatical Exceptions:

Can you imagine three Ph. Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. I wonder how much of this I can understand.

I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found.

After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese. I think that what makes it hard, is that the learning strategy that works in China for Chinese people is already far too advanced for beginners to comprehend. You can't just throw it at non Chinese, because in general we know nothing about it, and we even find it hard to swallow on basic design principles.

Someone needs to keep developing a teaching method until you can explain everything about it in a way that instantly makes sense. If we could get to that point, then suddenly, everyone would be able to understand them. There's a thing called Chineasy which is a great grounding in the subject for people who have never had any experience with it, i. Characters are a pain. But if someone wanted to learn Chinese, but thought the characters were too difficult, I would just recommend learning to listen and speak, and just use pinyin for reading and writing.

Then once they gain some experience and confidence, go back and learn to read and write. You have some good points but, there are many polyglots who think Chinese and a few other languages are the most difficult languages to learn from English. But at the end of the day, different languages are difficult to different people. Chinese is pretty easy to me, but French is actually really difficult.

But I know a lot of people are the opposite. You can try an app called hellochinese which is viewed as "Duolingo for Chinese". I'm learning with it on my pad. That is very interesting, thanks for this great post: Perhaps later I will start to learn it. Actually I have to do enough with the other languages which I am learning. English also not is my native language. But of course no one really cares about it in daily life: Is this just in Guoyu?

Ten Reasons Why Chinese is Easy

I don't believe this distinction exists in Putonghua. So I guess maybe you are right. At first, I felt the same way just because the spoken language is so different from English including tones and a few new sounds. The written language just seemed so much more formulated and logical. But now that I have got my head around speaking in Chinese, I think I find speaking easier. Just a side thought: Isn't it interesting that all languages that were at one point written vertically seem to have made the shift to horizontal?

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all used to be written vertically, but are now written horizontally. Mongolian is another interesting one, as it had a script that only made sense vertically. They ended up abandoning it in the 40s, and replacing it with the Cyrillic Alphabet used by Russian, Ukrainian, etc.

Beginner Guide to Chinese Grammar

Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi have maintained their Right to Left writing style, which doesn't seem to be a problem. But I can't think of any languages today that still write vertically. Virtually all newspapers, all manga, and most books in Japan are still written vertically, read right to left. The only exception is sometimes books for children, manuals, textbooks aside from those that teach Japanese as a subject in Japanese schools , and some other types of books, but never novels. Technically there have been a couple novels published horizontally in recent years because these novels were originally written on and for cell phones, so the original horizontal format was retained.

In other words, if you read Japanese in your daily life, you will inevitably encounter Japanese sometimes written vertically, sometimes written horizontally, and one has no problem with reading it one way or the other. Some books in Hong Kong still use this orientation. I would say that news sites are almost guaranteed to use the western orientation. You only really see the old orientation in some books. In Taiwan, books of literature, history or social science are printed from Top to Bottom, Left to Right traditional way?

The part that kills most people is the writing system.

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