Why are high school Chinese classes so terrible?

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by approximately 1 billion people globally, making it the most widely spoken language on the planet. Mandarin Chinese has 873 million native speakers and an additional 178 million secondary speakers.

As a Mandarin learner, you’ll be able to communicate with 13% of the world’s population (as opposed to 0.55 percent for Spanish, the currently the third largest spoken throughout language). Chinese is one of the six official United Nations languages, along with English, Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish.

Before enrolling in Chinese classes, you should have a clear understanding of why you want to learn the language in the first place. Is it merely a new interest you’d like to pursue? Is it to boost your career prospects? Or is it because you’ve decided to study a new language and have chosen Chinese as your first choice?

To learn Chinese effectively, you must first understand why you want to learn the language. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s the most crucial element of strategy. Because, as you may know, Chinese is a difficult language to learn and understand. Work ethic, discipline, and perseverance are all required. This is impossible if you don’t have good reasons to enrol in a Mandarin online Chinese language course.

Tones

Mastering the Mandarin Chinese tones is one of the most difficult tasks for students. There are four primary tones and a neutral tone, and the pitch and intonation with which you pronounce the word changes its meaning.  Tāng indicates soup in a high tone, and táng implies sugar in a rising tone. The markings above the vowels in pinyin, the Latin alphabet-based writing system, can be used to determine the tone to assign a phrase.

Writing Chinese characters

Another feature that distinguishes Mandarin is that it is without an alphabet, instead consisting of 50,000 characters, which might be intimidating for beginners. However, just over 10,000 characters are used in everyday communication, and according to a study, knowing just 2,500 characters allows you to understand over 97 percent of written Chinese.

Traditional Chinese is used in traditional works like poems, calligraphy, and works of art such as paintings, whereas simplified Chinese is used more frequently online and in various publications such as magazines and newspapers.

Speaking and understanding

When you’re learning Mandarin, it’s important to remember that it’s a tonal language, which might lead to misconceptions. However, this can happen in any language! So don’t be too tough on yourself if you find it difficult to speak and comprehend Mandarin Chinese at first. You must teach your ear to hear the Chinese elemental sounds, as well as your mouth to pronounce them. It’s similar to learning a new instrument. You won’t understand it right away, but the more you practise and train your muscles, the better.

Chinese is not a phonetic language

The Chinese language does not have an alphabet. It’s a graphical language that uses strokes and radicals to form individual Chinese characters, which are then combined to form Chinese words. This means that once you’ve learned the alphabet, you won’t be able to read the language. To read Chinese, you must learn all of these components and memorise each individual Chinese character which might create some difficulty for a high school learner.

Chinese requires a lot of memorizations

You must study Chinese vocabulary in order to learn Chinese. You must learn four distinct things with each word. The character, the meaning, the pronunciation, the tone and you should truly memorise the components that make up the letter and practise writing it on blank pieces of paper! It’s tough to learn to read, write, listen, and even say one Chinese word! And there are a plethora of them!

Chinese has many accents and dialects

There are various dialects of the Chinese language family, much as there are many variants of English (American, British, and Australian). While some of them are interchangeable (slightly distinct accents, slightly varied localisms), others are not. You will still be unable to understand dialects such as Shanghainese and Ningbonese.

Don’t forget to concentrate on your pronunciation! It’s quite simple to improve your reading skills and expand your vocabulary, but it’s more vital to get your pronunciation right sooner rather than later so that you don’t end up reading in Chinese with the incorrect pronunciation ingrained in your muscle memory.

Over one billion individuals have learned it so far! By any stretch of the imagination, learning Chinese is not impossible. You can study Chinese at any age (kids, teenagers, adults) and yet come near to fluency. Try an online course at Multibhashi to see how difficult (or easy!) the language is for yourself, and believe me when I say you will learn a lot.

Begin slowly and attempt to include it as much as possible into your regular routine.

Cheers!