Chinese Language Lessons For Beginners - Is It Hard To Learn Chinese?

Frequently I have heard my students or anyone who is interested in learning Mandarin complaining: "Learning Chinese language is so hard, I can't even pronounce properly and the characters are complicated compare to English." Yes I agree that Chinese is hard, but the hardest thing I found is to get the learning process started effectively, and achieve a good foundation of basic knowledge and skills. Then once a student is on the right track, learning Chinese becomes much easier the more you study.

May I suggest some key ideas to make things easier for the first time learners?

First of all, for the basics, there are 4 tones in Mandarin Chinese, and each character needs to pronounce with 1 of these 4 tones. Without knowing this, pronouncing Chinese can be very difficult. If you want to master the pronunciations of Chinese characters, then learning and practicing the tones is one of the keys.


Second, the pronunciations of Mandarin Chinese language are represented with alphabets written in Latin, which is called Pinyin. That's why so many people find Chinese names written in English hard to pronounce, because you need to pronounce them as Latin instead. So the hard part is actually to remember the Latin pronunciations of English letters, and use them to pronounce each and every Chinese character with the tones, when they are written in Pinyin.

The Chinese characters themselves are unable to be pronounced directly, because they were evolved into a language from ancient drawings in the last 5000 years. To pronounce a Chinese character, you must know its Pinyin - alphabets written in Latin letters, together with its tones. And then when you memorize a Chinese character, you need to remember what it looks like, how does it pronounce with the correct tone, and what does it mean. This may sound hard at the beginning, but with practice, you can easily increase the speed to 10 characters per day. I would suggest learning the characters in the form of words and sentences, so that you can relate and practice what you have learned immediately, even if you are learning at the speed of 1 sentence per day. If you persist the learning process long enough, eventually you will be able to master more than 2000 Chinese characters in a year's time, or in other words, 300 sentences, which is enough for basic everyday conversations.

In terms of writing Chinese characters, I would recommend not to pursuit this skill at the beginning. The reason being that: unless this skill is absolutely needed, you can type Chinese characters on a computer using Pinyin, which is much easier. However, to learn the writing skills, you will need to study the components and the structures of Chinese characters first, and then practice the hand writing on paper. This can increase your efforts of learning Chinese tremendously, and can take years of dedication to master the skill. While we are living in a digital age now, learning to type Chinese characters is much easier and more effective.

If you have gone this far and spend all the efforts to learn and practice Chinese language, then things become much easier for you. All you need to do is learn more Chinese characters each and every day, and practice them when you have a chance. The grammar in Mandarin is much simpler compare to English; all you need is to put the characters together in a proper way to form a sentence. Finally, I wish you have a great experience learning Chinese language, and maintain a long term substantial passion and efforts for your study.