The key is how much work you are willing to put into learning Chinese, and of course, your level of determination. The general rule of thumb is that the more you practice, the easier it will be to learn Chinese -- as with learning any new language.
Thankfully, in this age of the Internet, there are many resources and learning materials available online. You have online courses, guides, podcasts, even apps that are designed to optimize language learning. Of course, you can also find and purchase textbooks and other reading materials in Chinese on online bookstores and platforms like Amazon and eBay.
You can even find and print out flashcards and exercises to help you broaden your vocabulary. A professional language tutor can be a valuable resource when you are trying to pick up a new language. A professional tutor will be aware of your main concern, "Is Chinese hard to learn? Because you are getting one-on-one instruction, the learning program is tailored to your needs and preferences. You will also get practice face-to-face, which will help a lot with proper pronunciation -- especially if you find it difficult discerning the different tones and inflections -- and familiarizing yourself with the nuances of the language.
If you have friends who speak Chinese, try to speak with them only in Chinese. Most friends are happy to help, and it can be a lot of fun. If you are close to or have easy access to a Chinese community or a Chinatown, visit the various stores and restaurants and practice your Chinese with the locals.
Watch videos, movies, and TV shows in Chinese. China has some world-renowned filmmakers who make fantastic movies. There's something for everyone, whether you like action-packed martial arts or breathtaking historical dramas. Listen to and learn to sing Chinese songs.
Download menus from local Chinese restaurants. Look up Chinese language meet-up groups -- there are always people who want to practice or help others practice. The more you hear and speak Chinese, the easier it will be for you to speak it well. The best possible way -- and the quickest way -- to learn a language and its culture is to live in a particular country for an extended period.
Not only will you be constantly exposed to the language, but it will force you to use the language every day. China is an exceptionally interesting country to explore, with many world-class metropolitan cities and a lot of old world history and delicious food. If you can find a way to study Chinese in China, by all means, take the opportunity!
More so than a lot of other languages, the consonants in particular in Mandarin don't map cleanly onto English consonants So for example, when I first started learning, I would sometimes mishear "k" as "p" or "d" as "t" or "j" as "d", or any number of other connections that I wasn't even "watching for" if that makes sense?
Like it really had me scratching my head. I also noticed that I'd try to pronounce something and native speakers would hear me totally wrong, or would be confused as to what I was trying to say, because of my consonants.
I went back and really paid more attention to the pronunciation and now things are really different. Native speakers now tell me that my pronunciation is unusually clear and correct for an American and that I sound pretty natural. When I got to that point, suddenly the language seemed much more easy and accessible to me. The grammar is very logical and I find it was easier to get into more complex constructions in Chinese than some languages because there are no endings to words and the word order is very predictable.
And practicing it is easy! There are Chinese people virtually everywhere these days I encounter them in my daily life almost every day, because I work at a university, and when I've traveled abroad I've met them in other countries too. There are ample opportunities to practice Mandarin! And lots of native Mandarin speakers who want to work on their English and who love sharing their culture too, so I find it's easy to have conversations where we are both learning lots of stuff!
And the writing system is also much easier to crack because of online tools. I primarily encounter written Chinese online, and online it's just a couple clicks to translate something AND see how it's pronounced. Thanks - this was a very encouraging note to read to orient myself as I dip my toes into Mandarin.
Are you using other sources to learn Chinese? It would help your learning if you used multiple sites. And do you know if you need simplified or traditional? They are distinct languages , but use the exact same writing system aside from a few minor cultural differences , and will take around the same amount of time to learn. Mandarin is more widely spoken than Cantonese, so we'll be using it in our example.
At every instant 1 out of every 7 people on the planet are using it to communicate. A question we frequently hear is " How long will it take me to learn all the Chinese characters?
Chinese has no true alphabet. How long will it take to learn enough Chinese to cover the bases for, say, a networking event? And then how long does it take to become fully fluent in Chinese? Of course there are many variables to get out of the way first. Determining how long it will take to master a foreign language depends on several factors. They make things easier, not harder.
So how does the Chinese characters impact the time it takes to learn Chinese? Well, first of all: Pronunciation in Mandarin is not that bad. The Pinyin alphabet has 29 letters instead of the 26 in English, and many of them are pretty similar. Have a look at this video for a quick walk-through of the Pinyin alphabet:. The real challenge with the pronunciation of Mandarin is the tones. In Mandarin, the pitch that you apply to one syllable can turn it into multiple very different words.
Chinese tones are neither hard to pronounce, nor to recognize. The real problem here, is getting used to a completely different way of forming words. In Mandarin, tones are essential to understanding and being understood. How much longer will it take to learn a tonal language compared to a non-tonal language?
For one thing, Mandarin is completely different from English and all other European languages. Mandarin has very few loan-words from Western languages, and its resemblance to languages we already know is almost non-existent. What this all means is, that it becomes difficult to create associations in your brain when learning the language, so new words become hard to fixate in there between your neurons.
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