Is Chinese really so hard to learn as a second language?
Posted on July 5, 2009
Filed Under Learn Spanish CD, Learn Spanish Online | Leave a Comment
Many foreign friends of mine are complaining to me that it is hard learning Chinese: the ridiculously difficult writing system, the confusing four tones, the extensive system of measure words, so a lot of things to memorize… It seems that you have a good luck just for being born Chinese. Is Chinese really that hard to learn as a foreign language?
Actually,I don’t agree with you. Compared to the European languages Chinese grammar is very simple. English speakers sometimes complain that languages like Spanish have a complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc), whereas the Chinese language has little or no bound morphology and there are no grammatical paradigms to memorize.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; okay, I’ve got one more encouraging and authoritative evidence for you. A few days ago I have a luck to come across one piece of inspiring news when reading Beijing Times:Less than 1,000 Chinese characters allow you to read 90% of the current Chinese publication, according to a survey conducted by the Education Ministry and Language Commission of China. The findings of this survey is claimed to be based on 900 million characters used in more than 8,9 million files chosen 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? Almost 100,000 and it’s still increasing.
Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this: I am not in any intention to convince you that it is very easy to learning Chinese or other languages like English are much harder; what I mean is that Chinese is really not that difficult as you imagined or heard about, it’s just very different from your mother tongue, but difference does not necessarily mean difficulty, right? And that hard Chinese idea will reduce confidence for you learn Chinese. Trust yourself, once that fear factor is overcome, the language is actually not that hard to learn. Good luck with your Chinese language study.
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