Ni Hao!

There’s a perception in western countries that Chinese is an extremely difficult language to learn. If people were asked what would be the most difficult language to learn, Chinese would probably be up there in the top 5.

However, I will let you in on a secret that Chinese language learners find out quickly: Chinese is a simple language.

I know that the writing is intimidating, and I’m still pretty bad at reading and writing, but it just takes repeated practice, not incredible brains, so I know that I can get there one day.

Check out these characters that really do look like their meaning:

It’s easy to learn these very quickly. It’s not essential to learn characters but it does help the understanding of the language. Before I got here, I had zero intention of ever learning any characters, and now I know a few hundred of them. If you just learn 3 characters every day, it’s not difficult at all. And just text yourself on the previous days too. It takes up no time and is actually really fun! It’s like being a kid again!

Some of the things that make it easy are:

1. There’s not much grammar to learn because:
2. Some similar grammar structures
3. Where the grammar is different, it is simple. For example;
   – “Do you have a dog?” becomes “you have not have dog?” and “do you want tea?” becomes “you want not want tea?”
   – And “I’m going to the shop” becomes “I go shop”
4. Mostly, there is no need to use the words “is”, “to” or “and”
5. There are only a certain number of sounds to remember, and they’ll never change (unlike in English where the same letter/similar sounding words can be totally different, e.g. through, thought and though)
6. There is a system called “pinyin” which is Chinese characters (or “hanzi”) written in our English alphabet, making learning simple when you don’t know anything about the characters.
7. There are 4 tones which affect the meaning of the word, I know this seems incredibly foreign and different, but once you realise that we have tones in English too, it seems less complicated. I watched this video early in my learning and it made it seem much more doable – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wV8B4bx1lM
8. There are many “loanwords” words that have been taken from English, such as kafei (coffee), pai (pie), chao mian (chow mein), qiao ke li (chocolate). So even before you start you can easily get a big vocabulary just using these.
9. Each character has just one syllable, one tone and a meaning.

When I first started learning, I would watch these Youtube videos by a channel called “LearnChineseNow”. A western guy and a Chinese girl (whose English is potentially better than mine) chatting and teaching you in such a simple way that it makes you wonder how you ever believed Chinese was difficult! (However, even though Chinese is simple to learn and speak, most of the world thinks it’s super difficult and you’ll be congratulated whenever people find out you can speak a bit of Chinese!)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtjhXzMNWJxcytxa7kkAH5Q

The first video on tones it 2:07 long. So in 2 minutes you can master the tones of Chinese and learn some greetings too. Why not give it a go? It’s more productive than scrolling through your acquaintances Facebook updates… right?

Have fun learning Chinese!

Zaijian! (Goodbye)