Learning Chinese, and in particular Mandarin, may well be one of the best investments of your time, as China emerges as a world power it will enable you to both communicate and do business with the Chinese and look very good on a resume. However if you decide to learn Chinese there are several difficulties that a native English speaker has.
1) Little common ground with English
Learning how to speak Chinese is difficult firstly because there are very few words that sound similar to the English equivalent. By way of comparison, you already have hundreds if you were to learn French, if not thousands of words that have a similar root word and are therefore essentially the same. For example:
· Person = Personne
· Telephone = telephone
· Newspaper = journal
And you also have words that while not identical are very similar, such as busy=occupé, etc. You don’t have that advantage trying to learn Chinese.
2) Complex Written Characters
With the thousand strong character list and complex patterns, this part scares off many a well intentioned Chinese learner. As a single character generally represents entire words and phrases as opposed to a “letter” like we have in English, though it really isn’t as difficult as people think, and you will probably not need to know how to write them so much as recognise them in writing.
3) Tones
Tones are an aspect of Chinese that is completely absent in English, which makes it a somewhat difficult concept to grasp. Basically, it will shape it’s meaning by depending on how you say a word. For instance, the word, “he” with a rising tone means “river”, but if you said “he” with a “high” tone then it means to drink. There are 4 tones in Mandarin, you will make absolutely no sense whatsoever if you don’t use them. Believe it or not, you simply need a good course to study from, this is not impossibly difficult to learn.
Final Thoughts
No doubt, Learning Chinese is not a walk in the park, though that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to learn it. The benefits are simply too good to not learn Mandarin because it’s a little difficult. If you need a course to help you get started learning Chinese, check out the 3 top learn Chinese software packages guide for more info.
