The Difficulties of an English Speaker Trying to Learn Chinese

The Difficulties of an English Speaker Trying to Learn Chinese 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, if you were to learn French then you already have hundreds, 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 dont have that advantage trying to learn Chinese.

2. Complex Written Characters

This part scares off many a well intentioned Chinese learner, with the thousand strong character list and complex patterns. Really though it isnt as difficult as people think, as a single character generally represents entire words and phrases as opposed to a letter like we have in English, 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, depending on how you say a word will shape its meaning. For example, the word, he with a high tone means to drink, but if you said he with a rising tone then it means, river. There are 4 tones in Mandarin, and if you dont use them then you will make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Believe it or not, this is not impossibly difficult to learn, you simply need a good course to study from.

About The Author Final Thoughts No doubt, learning Mandarin is not a walk in the park, though that doesnt mean you shouldnt try to learn it. The benefits are simply too good to not learn Mandarin because its a little difficult. If you need a course to help you get started learning Chinese, check out the top 3 learn Chinese software packages guide for more info.