Introduction:
Learning Chinese can seem like attempting life in hard mode. The writing system is unlike anything you have ever seen before. The word sounds peculiar, and absolutely everything is different from your native language. Learning any language’s heart. It’s an immensely difficult and time-consuming task to immerse yourself in the vocabulary, grammar, and culture of a foreign fault. But it’s also one of the most rewarding things you will ever do. Learning Mandarin adds about 1 billion people to those you are not able to communicate with, get to know, and understand. When you are able to have your first ever conversation in Chinese – even if it takes you a year or 2 to get their-the satisfaction and sense of pride you will feel will remind you that it’s all been worth it!
The most important part to understand is that Learning Chinese can be difficult for you but can be easy for your friend. It totally depends on person to person and their language grasping skills. There are some people who are able to immerse themselves into another country’s culture very easily and thus they are able to adapt to the native language of that country easily as well. However, you might not be comfortable with another country’s culture and end up facing a hard time learning another language. So in this blog, we will discuss two reasons why it is not difficult to learn Chinese and two reasons why it is difficult to learn Chinese.
Why it's easy
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It’s hard to pronounce, but you already know all the sounds
This is something with which you can really struggle and beginning. If you are a native speaker of English, you will find several sounds in Chinese that don’t seem to naturally occur in your own language, so they are very hard to see at first. Fortunately, you can have these tricky pronunciations by finding English syllables that are letter bearing that create similar sounds.
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The grammar is totally different but it’s an advantage for you
If you speak English then French is a lot more similar to your native language than Chinese is. Chinese grammar is a lot simpler and easier to learn than pretty much any other European language. While there is definitely correct and incorrect grammar in Chinese, as a beginner you’ll be amazed by how much you can get away with! In Chinese individual words are like bricks that you are free to arrange in your own order. Common grammar obstacles in European languages like dance and gender are comparatively trivial in Mandarin this means you will be constructing your own sentences within a few months of studying the language.
Why it's difficult
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The writing is extremely tough
The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the Chinese people began to realize the importance of universal literacy, it became clear that these ideal crimes were sort of like bound feet. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop a drop from the Past sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hold them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory. Chinese writing system has two sets of characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and simplified characters adopted by the People’s Republic of China in the late 1950s and early 60s. According to The Chinese Language: Fact & Fantasy book, it takes 7 to 8 years for a modern speaker to learn to read and write 3000 characters, which is frankly a very long time.
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Looking up words in the dictionary is complicated
One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of your high school. This is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile. Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on earth.
These are some reasons why it could be difficult for someone and easy for someone else. We hope that you belong to the latter category!
If not, we’re happy to help! Multibashi Learning Lessons Solutions offers online courses in Chinese for beginners to advanced level.
Happy learning!