Is Chinese That Difficult to Learn?

 Hey guys! This week, I decided to write about the difficulties of the Chinese language. For a long time now, I have been wanting to learn how to speak and write in Chinese. I have, however, been discouraged quite a few times because I found the language to be quite unapproachable. In this post, I'll be exploring the truth about learning the Chinese language.

Here is the link I used this time : https://studycli.org/learn-chinese/is-chinese-hard-to-learn/

Easier Aspects

Whether you believe it or not, Chinese grammar is actually easier than the English grammar. It's relatively simple and straightforward, and as opposite to English, Chinese doesn't have any verb tenses. The pronoun changes, but the verb stays the same. Another thing that makes learning Chinese easier is Pinyin, which is the romanization of Chinese characters (writing them using the roman alphabet). People can write on the computer in Chinese using Pinyin, which means that there's no need to memorize thousands of characters in a short period of time. You just need to know the character's spelling and be able to recognize it. On top of that, the structure of the language isn't as complicated as some may think. While it is true that each word has it's own symbol, knowing one symbol can lead to many different words if combined with other characters. In that way, the characters for "mountain" and "fire" can be combined together to form the word "volcano".

Harder Aspects

Although the Chinese language does have a few easy points, there are many reasons why many consider it one of the hardest languages to learn in the world. The first reason is undeniably the Chinese characters themselves. As opposed to the English language that is composed of 24 letters, you are considered able to understand Chinese after memorizing 3,500 characters. On top of that, an unknown character gives no clue on how to be pronounced, as opposed to an unknown word in English. The characters are a difficulty of the written language. The spoken language also holds its own hassles. Chinese has four different tones that are used regularly. If you don't know how to master them, you can end up saying things you don't want to say. For example, you could end up calling your mother "horse" because both are composed with the same letters of the roman alphabet, but are pronounced differently. The last difficulty mentioned by my source is the different accents and dialects. Just like English has the American, British and Australian accents, the Chinese language also has a variety of different dialects. The differences are more important in the Chinese language however, as two fluent people from different regions may have trouble understanding each other. Thus, even if you learn Chinese, there will be people who won't be able to understand you.

My Opinion

I believe that while the Chinese language has a lot of easy aspects, it remains one of the most difficult languages to learn (for English speakers, at least). It is completely different from what English natives have been exposed to since their childhood. Indeed, from the characters to the absence of the alphabet, and from the particular pronunciation to the different tones, Chinese is no piece of cake. Because it holds so many contrasting aspects to a lot of languages, learning it is like asking someone to restart learning how to speak from the basics. However, I think that no matter how difficult the language is, it is possible to learn how to use it. Just like any other subject of discipline, whether you're naturally gifted or not, you can learn if you receive proper training. You need to put in the time and effort though. Chinese is a complex language, and if you're not serious about it, it may take way more time than what you originally thought it would take. 

This is my question for you this week : What type of Chinese are taught mainland Chinese people at school?