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.