Chinese is one of the world’s most important languages; but it’s also one of the most challenging to master.
Here you’ll find the answers on which type of Chinese you should learn, how you should get started and what resources are available for the beginner Chinese language learner.
How hard is Chinese?
Chinese is hard to master, but it’s a very easy language to start learning.
The US Department of State has a handy page which categorizes languages based on their difficulty for English speakers to learn.
It rates Chinese as a Category IV language, making it as difficult as Arabic, Japanese, and Korean. The US Department of State categories don’t include learning to write in their comparisons. If they did they’d probably need a whole new category for Chinese (and probably Japanese too).
However, that doesn’t really tell the full picture. Yes, Chinese is hard to master, but it’s a very easy language to start learning. Why?
- Your first 100 words will go further in Chinese than in most other languages
- Counting is simple. To count to 99 you only need to learn to count from 1-10.
- There’s no verb conjugation, so you never have to learn multiple ways of saying the same verb (go, goes went, gone are just 去(qu4) in Chinese)
- At the start people will understand you even if you get your tones wrong (they get real important real quick though)
- You can learn your first few words and phrases without worrying about how the Chinese writing system works.
So why is Chinese so hard to learn?
The first thing to understand is that Chinese is not equally hard for every learner. I’ve been told by multiple Chinese teachers that Korean and Japanese speakers don’t struggle as much with Chinese because traditional Chinese characters serve a function in both languages and are taught in school (to a greater degree in Japanese than Korean).
I have also been told by speakers of tonal languages (Thai speakers in particular) that learning to speak Chinese was a breeze for them but they still struggled with learning to write the language.
Interestingly native speakers of Chinese dialects like Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, etc. can often learn the other dialects in a couple of months!
So the real question should be why is Chinese so hard for English speakers to learn?
And the answer is because we don’t have many existing skills to provide shortcuts. When you learn French, German, or Spanish you already know how to read and write most of the alphabet so you’ve just got to learn how to put the components together.
With Chinese you’re really starting from scratch. Once you get past that first hump of learning how characters are built, and work out how to recognize and remember tones it starts to get easier and easier to progress.
And you can trust me, the pay off is absolutely worth it.
Which Chinese dialect should I learn?
We recommend learning Mandarin
There are a lot of different types of Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese are just the most well known. Mandarin is the most widely spoken by a long stretch, whereas Cantonese is actually only third on the list of Chinese languages by native speakers (Wu is the second largest).
We recommend learning Mandarin, unless you intend on living in Hong Kong or have family members who only communicate in Cantonese and would like to be able to interact with them.
Mandarin is considered easier to learn than Cantonese because it has fewer tones, and as more people learn it there are more learning materials available.
Should I learn Simplified or Traditional Chinese characters?
As with the choice between Mandarin or Cantonese the choice between Simplified and Traditional characters is really one of location. If you intend to live in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macau exclusively then you should learn Traditional Chinese characters. Otherwise, you should study Simplified Chinese characters.
Many Chinese people can actually read both (at least to a moderate proficiency), and it’s not very hard to learn to read Traditional after learning to read Simplified Chinese characters.
It is, however, extremely time consuming to learn to write Traditional/Simplified Chinese characters after having learned the other system.
Should I learn Zhuyin or Pinyin?
Pinyin is the standard in almost all educational institutes. It is also now the official romanization system in both mainland China and Taiwan, so you we recommend learning Pinyin.
What’s the best way to learn Mandarin?
The first step is to find some materials and resources which have done the thinking for you, and are suitable for your level. Yes, it’s exactly what you didn’t want to hear:
Buy a course book and work through it chapter by chapter every day.
Mandarin course books are a mixed bag, a lot of them assume that because you want to learn Chinese you’re also a linguist; so avoid those. Some recommended course books are:
- Integrated Chinese
- New Practical Chinese
Both course books will take you through reading, writing, listening and speaking Chinese.
However, the best way to learn to speak any language is with a partner.
You could look for a Confucius Institute in your area, these are run by the Chinese Ministry of Education, and take classes there; or alternatively take a course at a University.
However, I personally got the greatest benefit starting out from private lessons one-on-one with a tutor. The advantage of taking private lessons, either one-on-one or as part of a class, is that you can shop around for the perfect teacher who suits your learning style and your budget
Do not settle for a tutor who teachers you through English exclusively, or who does most of the talking. Look for someone who tries to use Chinese as much as possible during your lessons and works hard to get you speaking too.
If you don’t have the time or budget for lessons many learners recommend helloChinese as a great way to get started learning the basics.
What tools can help me practice reading and writing Chinese?
Reading and writing Chinese characters is literally about memorizing stroke order and combinations of characters that make up other characters/words.
A lot of people, teachers, and books will teach you methods that can help you guess at the meaning or pronunciation of characters but honestly there are few shortcuts. You will just have to memorize them.
That sounds scary but of the of the 50,000+ individual characters in existence you only need to know about 1,500 characters to be considered legally literate in mainland China. So if you learnt a character a day for 3 years you’d be doing fine.
One of the reason for that is that most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, so as you learn characters you don’t have to relearn them when they appear in a new word. For example:
好 – hao3 – okay
看 – kan4 – to look/see
好看 – hao3kan4 – good looking / beautiful
You had to learn to read and write two characters but you got the third word free. This compounds as you learn Chinese.
Our website mistermandarin.com helps you memorize stroke orders, tones and the meanings of characters for only $2 per month!