If you’ve decided to tackle Chinese, you’ve probably already realized how much good news there is. Anyone who’s wrestled with German conjugations or Russian tenses is in seventh heaven with Mandarin in week two. Conjugations? Chinese verb forms never change. I eat, you eat, the emperor eat. And no tenses: I eat yesterday, we eat tomorrow.

And of course, no plurals, with their pesky noun-adjective and subject-object agreements: one cat, two cat, and a hundred cat!

But of course, there are plenty of reasons why Chinese isn’t a picnic. First and foremost, as we all know, is the writing system, but before we come to that, let’s look at another curious feature of Chinese, and why it’s a problem. The best way of explaining it is to contrast Chinese with English. In English (and many other languages), the basic building block of the language is the individual unit of sound, like the “f” sound in “fox.” So if we want to make a new word, we can either string old words together in a new way (like when we made up the word “software” in the 60s) or we can make up a completely new word that no-one has ever spoken before, like “bling”. It also makes it possible to pinch words from other languages and turn them into English (sushi, sauté, blitzkrieg, boomerang).

 

But in Chinese, the basic building block is the monosyllable (bing, mei, deng, lou, ge, etc). If the Chinese need to make a new word, they do it by dipping into the store of monosyllables and stringing two or more of them together to make a new compound. That’s what they did when they saw the telephone: they didn’t borrow the whole word as other languages did (think of tilifon in Arabic, or telefon in German), they made the new compound diàn huà (electric speak).

 

Why does this matter? Well, one minor problem is that in Chinese, nothing is familiar. Learn most other languages and you’ve got ready-made “handholds” - words like “taxi” or “machine” that have crossed over from English into the other language, and which are freebies when you’re building up your vocab. Not in Chinese. And because most other languages can borrow brand names as well, you can ask the way to McDonalds in Moscow or Paris or Istanbul … but not in Beijing, where they eat their McNuggets at Maidanglao. But the really big problem is that the total number of monosyllables in Chinese is tiny: around 480 in all. What’s more, the number is fixed: they aren’t making any more of them, and haven’t for centuries. One way that Chinese extends the “bandwidth” of each monosyllable is through tones. Say jiāng and it can mean “river,” say jiǎng and it can mean “tell”. But even when we stretch the 480 monosyllables out across the four tones of Mandarin, we still only have around 2000 distinct sounds, compared with the tens of thousands we can use in English to build words.

 

The result? Chinese is full of homophones - words that sound the same and have different meanings. We’re familiar with words in English like “board”, which can mean committee, plank or lodging. But while they’re oddities in our language, they swarm through Chinese like vast shoals of fish – innumerable, indistinguishable, but different. Say jiao with a level tone and you could mean pay. Or proud. Or fragile, or handsome. You could mean cross, or irrigate. Or you could be referring to a reef, or to glue, or the suburbs of your town.

Particularly for the beginner, this is maddening when it isn’t fascinating. To the Chinese, of course, it’s an endless source of fun and creativity – wordplay is one of the basic forms of Chinese humor.

 

Another great challenge (the great challenge, some would say) in Chinese is the writing system. If you’re learning a language that has an alphabet, as soon as you’ve mastered how it’s written and read, you have a powerful learning tool for decoding new words. But with Chinese, which has no alphabet, you have no way (or almost no way) of working out how a new word is pronounced when you see it, or written when you hear it.

 

Is it possible to learn Chinese without tackling the writing? Sure, but here are three reasons why you should dive in and come to grips with characters. The first is that it’s so much fun. If you’ve ever got a buzz out of working out a tricky puzzle or a maths equation, it’s nothing to how you’re going to feel when you read your first Chinese sentence.

 

The second reason is that it turbo-charges your learning. Studying Chinese without the characters is like doing a jigsaw puzzle with blank pieces. If you’re not learning to read, it’s hard keeping all those thousands of homophones apart and remembering why they’re different. When you know the characters, it’s much, much easier. It’s also easier to see how compound words – the connective tissue of the Chinese language – actually work. 

 

The third reason is that understanding the writing – even at a basic level – gives you insights into the Chinese language, people and culture. There is probably no other language in which the grammar and the way of expressing thoughts and ideas are so closely bound up with the way the language is written.

 

In passing, we’ve mentioned one other feature of Chinese that’s a challenge for the new learner – the tones. As you probably know, Mandarin is a tonal language: its individual monosyllables can each be spoken in one of four tones, and the tone that you use changes the meaning of the word. For people who’ve never encountered a tonal language, this is pretty alarming. But it’s not as bad as you think. That will be the subject of our next post on Learning Chinese: some good news on tones!

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