The thing about Chinese is that it is not as difficult as people say. While language learning is a difficult process by default, many seem to associate learning Chinese with a higher degree of difficulty. However, what people say might not be true for everyone! The most important thing that affects your learning is practice, doing it every day, and finding a system that works for you. Some people find it helpful by reading the Chinese newspaper every morning, and others enrol themselves in online Chinese courses. If you are feeling intimidated by Chinese, here is why the Chinese language is not as difficult as it sounds!

What makes Chinese seemingly difficult

One thing that gives the Chinese language its infamy is how many characters there are. There are around more than 50,000 characters in the Chinese language, and this might cause one to feel very discouraged and give up all hope of learning Chinese immediately. However, what most people fail to realise is that even the average Chinese person doesn’t even know half of those characters. Most are only familiar with 8,000 characters, and to be familiar with Chinese, you only need to learn 6,000 characters. Sure, that’s still many thousand times more than the number of characters you’d have to learn in other languages, but here’s the thing — not all of these characters are entirely unique. What we mean by this is that a lot of characters in Chinese are very similar. It’s often small differences between each Chinese character that you’ll have to watch out for. The good news is that, once you’ve developed a familiarity with around the first 1,000 characters of the Chinese language, it’ll be easier for you to pick up the meaning of a particular character without having someone to explain it to you.

The simplicity of the Chinese language

On the contrary, Chinese grammar is actually quite simple. For starters, there’s no plural. There’s no gender markings either. Unlike in the English language where the endings of the words have to be changed depending on the tense, in Chinese, there is no such thing. For example, if you wanted to respond to the question of ‘Have you eaten?’ in Chinese, you wouldn’t have to know the ‘eat’, ‘ate’, ‘eaten’ equivalents in Chinese. You just need to know how to say ‘eat’, and describe the time separately with words like ‘just now’, or ‘already’.

Conclusion

The Chinese language is often misunderstood. The best way to learn any new languages is to throw all your fears aside and just get started! You will eventually realise that learning Chinese is no different from trying to learn any other language, or you might even end up thinking that it’s easier to learn Chinese compared to others! Learning Chinese alone might sometimes be challenging. After all, language is all about communication. What you can do is join an online Chinese tuition class to help speed the process of learning!