Chinese for the Casual Learner
Is Chinese really difficult?
Chinese has earned a reputation as being a difficult language
to learn. There are several reasons for this.
- The most obvious reason is that the writing system is based
on ideographs rather than on an alphabet, thus to be able to read
an average newspaper one needs to memorize about 3,000 characters,
a daunting proposition for any adult learner. Moreover, since Chinese
is not related to any Western language; hence
lacks any of the cognates that facilitate the learning of related languages.
- Chinese is known for having a large number of mutually unintelligible dialects.
Although this is largely true, Mandarin, the official dialect, called
Putonghua or Common Language in China, is close to the dialect spoken
by about two thirds of the population. In addition, as the
official dialect, Mandarin is the only language used in the primary
and secondary school systems, which means that even in those areas where other dialects
are dominant, the younger generation can speak Mandarin fluently. This is true in both
Mainland China and in Taiwan. Moreover, even the mutually unintelligible
dialects are only so when spoken. Written Chinese has a common
script and a common grammar so that two speakers who could not converse
with each other could actually write to each other!
- Chinese is one of a very few modern languages that are tonal in nature. This
means that while in most languages different intonations may be
used on the same word to impart a certain emphasis or emotion,
in Chinese a different tone can change the same syllable into a different
word entirely. For example, the syllable ma could mean mother, hemp,
horse, or to scold depending on which of the four Mandarin tones it
is pronounced with.
- Few people realize, however, that Chinese grammar is elegant in its simplicity
because its highly evolved rules dispense with all of the unnecessary morphological
changes one comes to expect with Western languages. Anybody
who has struggled with Spanish or French can easily appreciate the
fact that the Chinese language, for instance, does not have articles,
that nouns do not change according to number or gender, or that verbs do not change forms
regardless of tense or whether the speaker is the first, second, or third person.
Instead Chinese relies heavily on word order, which, unlike Western language, also does not change depending
on whether the sentence is in the affirmative or interrogative.
As an English speaker, you will get the added benefit from the
fact that the basic Chinese word order is subject-verb-object, just as in English.
So the bottom line is that Chinese can indeed be take a very long time master
if one wishes to become fully literate in it. However, as a casual
learner you need not bother with the Chinese characters. Instead you
should focus your efforts on mastering the Mandarin tones and a few
key phrases. The simplicity of the Chinese grammar makes it possible
to express a lot of ideas with a very few basic sentence templates.
Next
- Introduction to Pinyin. You may initially skip ahead if you plan to learn the pronunciation using the
optional YellowBridge Talker text-to-speech software but sooner or later you should learn the pinyin phonetic system.
- Greetings
See also
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