Chinese, the official language of China, has nearly 1.3 billion speakers on the globe.
Considered as one of the most difficult languages in the world, yet it is the second most spoken language too. The difficulty however depends on the learners more depending on their linguistic backgrounds. Anybody who has experience in languages similar to Chinese will not find it difficult to learn and similarly speakers of languages that are completely different from Chinese will find it difficult to learn. In this blog we will be looking at how easy it is for Indians to learn Chinese.
Is learning Chinese easy for Indians
Learning Chinese can be considered easy for Indians as compared to speakers of any other country. India itself is a land of hundreds of dialects and languages, both easy and difficult. The majority of the Indian population is multilingual with a lot of Indians speaking more than three languages. This is what makes learning Chinese easy for Indians. However, there are more reasons as to why Chinese is easier to learn for Indians. Let’s read them.
Why is it easy?
Let us look at all the possible reasons
Variety of languages
The biggest advantage as discussed earlier is the variety of languages in India with ranking difficulty levels that train almost all the Indians into grasping any other language easily.
Multilingual
Almost all Indians speak at least two languages, and trilingual Indians are also very commonly found. Already knowing two or more languages other than one’s mother tongue makes it easier to grasp and learn and acquire more and more languages.
Similarity with Tamil and other south Indian languages
Even though Chinese and Tamil have completely different origin and language families, it is quite a shocker that both of these still have a lot of similarities. They share a lot of vocabulary with each other. For example the word “You” in Tamil and Chinese is used as “Ni”.
Similarities in grammar
Chinese grammar, unlike other languages, is not complex and very similar to the grammar in a lot of Indian languages. So it becomes easier for Indians to understand the grammar and be able to use it accordingly.
What is difficult?
Even though there are so many similarities, what does make a difference is that Chinese is a tonal language and has a lot of characters whereas Indian languages have a limited number of alphabets as well as sounds. One must learn the tonal effect in Chinese and practice it thoroughly in order to ace the speaking section of learning Chinese.
Chinese is moderately easy for Indians to learn.
Along with a lot of similarity in the vocabulary and grammar, it is still very different when it comes to pronunciation and writing in Chinese. It is moderately difficult because even if you master the vocabulary and the grammar, you will still have to work hard towards understanding the tonal sounds and learn the almost never ending characters. Once you master this, making progress in the process of learning Chinese will seem much easier. And practicing it regularly will do the rest of the work.