Is it really hard to learn Chinese as a foreign language?Is it true Chinese is difficult language to learn as a foreign language?

Strictly speaking, it’s not so.  Comparatively grammar in Chinese is much simpler than that of the European languages.  At times, there is a complaint from English speakers that languages like Spanish have a perplexed grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc),, but the Chinese language has virtually no syllable structure or grammatical paradigms either to by heart.  Each word has a fixed and single form: verbs do not take prefixes or suffixes showing the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject.   Nouns do not take prefixes or suffixes showing their number or their case.  I do not mean that Chinese has no grammar; What I want to say is Chinese grammar is primarily concerned with arrangement of words to form meaningful sentences as they inflectional morphology.  Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that’s why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle.

Probably, you would say that the above is far from enough to convince you.  Alright, there is another encouraging and definitive proof with me for you.  A couple of days ago I fortunately came across one piece of inspiring news when reading Beijing Times.  Now you can be allowed to read 90% of the current Chinese publication with less than 1,000 Chinese characters as per the survey  conducted by the Education Ministry and Language Commission of China.  The survey’s claim is based on 900 million characters used in more than 8.9 million files selected from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and television.  Nowadays, the Chinese media is using fewer characters, and to understand 90 percent of the content in publications, you need only to know about 900 of around 50,000 individual characters that are made up of Written Chinese.  On the other hand, how many words are there in English? Nearly 100,000 and still increasing.  There is one significant reason for this and that is Chinese characters focus on meaning, not pronunciation like in English, and further, many characters are primitive and a few are found only once in the entire history of the written language . Only about 6,000 are known by an average graduate of Chinese university.

Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this.  I do not intend to convince you that Chinese is very easy to learn or other languages like English are much harder.   What I mean is that Chinese is not as difficult as you imagined or heard about, but different from your mother tongue, but difference does not mean tough necessarily, Isn’t it?What it means is that Chinese is certainly simpler than you imagined or heard about, it’s just very dissimilar from your mother tongue, but dissimilar does not mean difficult necessarily, Doesn’t it?  And that hard Chinese idea won’t be of any help in your study.  Trust yourself, once that fear factor is overcome, the language is actually not that hard to learn.  Wish you good luck with your Chinese language study.

I AM A PROFESSIONAL ARTICLE WRITER FROM INDIA, SPECIALISED IN VARIOUS SUBJECTSThis article describes just about chinese learning, chinese language, speaking chinese with the support of practical tips and ideas. It gives practical solutions to learn and understand the importance of chinese language and each of these tips and ideas are very effective.


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