Kirjoittaja Aihe: Is Chinese Hard to Learn? (Luettu 423 kertaa)

upamfva · 19.04.23 - 06:12

Is Chinese Hard to Learn?

The Chinese language is often considered one of the world's most difficult languages to learn, but this sentiment is a major oversimplification. Like any language, learning Chinese has its challenges. As a language learner, placing yourself in an ideal learning environment is key to learning Chinese. Let’s have a look at both the difficult and easy aspects of Chinese.To get more news about chinese alphabet for beginners, you can visit shine news official website.

Chinese has relatively few grammar patterns—most of which are straightforward. Moreover, there are no tenses in Chinese language. Chinese words do not change forms, or conjugate, like English verbs. This is something Chinese learners can be grateful for. Below is the notoriously unpredictable English "to be" verb next to it's perfectly consistent Chinese counterpart:

Pinyin is the standard system of romanized transliteration of Chinese characters. It is an enormous help for Chinese learners. One great thing about pinyin in this digital age is that, you can type pinyin into your computer and they will give you character suggestions. This means that you can text or write emails in Chinese without needing to know each stroke of the character.

The common idea that learning Chinese means having to memorize three to four thousand completely unrelated characters makes the language seem completely impossible, fortunately this idea is also completely untrue. Learning one character opens up a whole world of other logically interrelated characters.

For example, perhaps you already know the character for fire, 火 (huǒ), and the character for mountain, 山 (shān), but you're trying to figure out how to say "volcano". After looking up the Chinese word for volcano on your online dictionary, you realize it's incredibly straightforward: merely add fire (火) to mountain (山) and you get fire-mountain, 火山 (huǒshān), or volcano!
4. Welcoming Culture
In a sense, the difficulty and inaccessibility of the Chinese language is an advantage: upon discovering that you are trying to learn their language Chinese people are almost always eager to help you in your learning journey.

Chinese culture instills a deep sense of pride about China's millennia-old culture and its distinctive language. In addition, there are relatively few foreigners who ever try to learn the language because of its perceived difficulty, so having even a few basic phrases and simple words under your belt will make a powerful difference in your relationships.

If you mutter a few simple greetings in Chinese upon entering a restaurant or a shop it will almost unfailingly be answered by a surprised, slightly confused face that immediately transforms into a welcoming smile. By using Chinese, making friends in China is easy. Since chatting with friends is one of the best ways to attain Chinese fluency, this is another way learning Chinese is simple.
1. Chinese Characters
Beautiful, mysterious, ancient and tremendously hard to learn. Reading and writing Chinese characters is perhaps the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese. The Chinese written script, called 汉字 (hànzì) in Chinese, is based on the use of "logograms"—single characters that can represent an entire word.

Logographic writing stands in stark contrast to the phonetic scripts (alphabets) utilized by virtually all Western languages. In most phonetic scripts, roughly two dozen symbols are used to represent all the sounds and words in the language. This makes memorizing and verbalizing words much easier.

On the other hand, Chinese is more closely related to a pictographic script (think Egyptian hieroglyphics), which means that there are a huge number of characters to memorize. In fact, to be considered literate one should be able to recognize about 3,500 simplified characters, not to mention traditional Chinese characters. In English, if you come across a word that you have never heard of, you will at least know how to pronounce the word.
2. Tonal Language
Another major difficulty for foreigners in learning the language are the tones. English is a non-tonal language which means that trying to master adding tones to the Chinese words your trying to pronounce involves learning a completely new skill. For English-speakers (and speakers of other non-tonal languages like French, German or Russian) the learning curve is quite steep and the learning period can be very strange.

There are four tones in Chinese, five if you consider the neutral tone as well. Simply learning how to detect the difference between these pronunciations is the first challenge. Furthermore, there are many words that sound exactly the same except for an added tonal change which alters the meaning entirely. This means that the same syllables with different tones can have two completely different things.