Recently, I’ve been making lots of posts about Chinese, as I am learning Chinese myself, and I thought it would help others as well. And today, I’m going to be talking about the hardest part of learning Chinese.
The tones are one of the hardest things in my opinion, because tones change the meaning of the word as soon as you use a different tone.
Mā means mother.
Mǎ means horse.
Mà means to scold.
So you can understand how difficult it can be. Another hard part is understanding people who speak Chinese fluently. They often speak very fast, so it can take a while to register what they are saying in the first place, and then you still have to deal with the tones. Luckily, I haven’t had many issues with this right now, as I’m still at quite a beginner level, but there are lots of jokes based only on tone differences in Chinese.
I haven’t had a problem with Chinese characters yet, because I haven’t started learning them. But the difficulty I see is that in languages like English or Hindi, there is a fixed set of alphabets. English has 26 alphabets, and Hindi has 46. Once you memorize them, you can generally read most things in the language.
Chinese is very different. There are over 106k characters. The average person from China knows around 3000 to 5000 characters. An advantage of Chinese characters, though, is that some of them originally started as pictographs, and many characters are made from smaller components that help show their meaning.
But other than that, I actually really enjoy learning Chinese. It’s very fun to learn, and there are a lot of resources online that support you while learning Chinese.
Advantages of Learning Chinese
Okay, I’ve talked about the hard part of learning Chinese, but what are the good parts? Every language has its pros and cons, so what are the pros of Chinese?
Chinese has a reputation for being the hardest language in the world, and in some small ways I would agree. But the thing is, Chinese is actually a very logical language. Once you understand the structure of it, you start getting the hang of it quite quickly. After you understand the logic behind it, it can actually start to feel like a very easy language.
You do go through some struggle while learning it, but that struggle is not very different from learning any other language. It is not something that only happens with Chinese.
One advantage of learning Chinese is the ability to communicate with a very large number of people. Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world, with more than a billion native speakers. Because China also plays a major role in the global economy, being able to speak Chinese can create many business and professional opportunities. Even having a basic understanding of the language can make it easier to build relationships and communicate with people in Chinese speaking regions.
And that’s it for this post! See you all next week!
