Photo: Aaron Jacobs

In the section Expat Corner, the ever insightful eChinacities writer Fred Dintenfass listed “7 Reasons You Should Learn Chinese: 1-3” followed a few days later with “7 Reasons You Should Learn Chinese: 4-7”  before. Over the course of the two articles, Fred gave some compelling and inspirational reasons for learning the Chinese language. Whoever you are, whether English teacher, lawyer, businessman or housewife there are plenty of reasons to get your teeth into learning Chinese to improve your quality of life.

That’s not to say, of course, that learning Chinese is all that easy. In Fred’s article he mentions that “Mandarin only has four tones…but they’re monsters” And that “I neither have time nor enough valium to get into characters.” Anyone who has picked up a Chinese text book will understand.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked whether or not I think Chinese is harder to learn than English. The following is the list of 7 reasons, according to the Chinese website Sohu, why the Chinese language is a pain for us ‘laowai’ to get our heads round.

1) The writing system is ridiculous

The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but those little pictures don’t seem too practical for daily use. It is absolutely true that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn. And Chinese is seemingly random, which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character, if there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character then your mind often just draws a blank.

2) The language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet

English is so easy because of the skills needed to master the writing system are 26 letters and they are written from left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries. In comparison, Chinese has nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. This can leave many people scratching their heads and wondering why they don’t just use pinyin!

3) Even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated

One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary seems to take about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on earth for there are various dictionaries. Indeed, once students get past beginners level you find yourself turning into a ‘dictionary monkey’.

Photo: alexandralee

4) Classical Chinese (Literary Chinese)

Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. For those students serious about getting to grips with Chinese on a cultural as well as day to day linguistic level, then a knowledge of the literary language helps. Classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards. But don’t let that put you off!

5) There are too many Romanization methods and they all suck

Perhaps that's too harsh, but it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by a committee or by linguists, or - even worse - by a committee of linguists. It is, of course, a very tricky task to devise a Romanization method; some are better than others, but all involve plenty of counterintuitive spellings.

Photo: quinn.anya

6) Tonal languages are weird

It's one of the most common complaints about learning Chinese, and it's also one of the aspects of the language that westerners are notoriously bad at. As non-native speakers, you must memorize tones along with the vowels and consonants. The real difficulty comes in when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature. Fear not though, it will become second nature to you too.

7) Cultural differences

One of the main reasons Chinese is so difficult for westerners is that the cultures of the East and the West have been isolated for so long. China has had extensive contact with the West in the last few decades, but there is still a vast sea of knowledge and ideas that is not shared by both cultures. When Westerners and Chinese get together, there is often not just a language barrier, but an immense cultural barrier as well.

However, when all is said and done, Chinese is just a language like any other. As the article above explains, tackling Chinese is not without pain, but it is worth it in the end. If you have any horror stories or tips from when learning Chinese, why not leave a comment at the bottom of this article.

 

Related links:
7 Reasons You Should Learn Chinese: 1-3
7 Reasons You Should Learn Chinese: 4-7
Where to Learn Chinese? University vs. Private Language Center

Warning：The use of any news and articles published on eChinacities.com without written permission from eChinacities.com constitutes copyright infringement, and legal action can be taken.