Why Chinese is easy and you should learn it. | Page 2 | Success stories and anecdotes | Forum

Very interesting initial post! I am living in Beijing and studying intensive Chinese at the moment and hadn't even thought about some of the factors that have come up in this topic!

I do think Latin languages for non-native speakers are harder to learn, perhaps comprehension might come quicker since sounds might be similar to English for example, but to speak the language 'correctly' you require an extensive knowledge of aspects such as grammar, tenses, prepositions and to always be aware of the difference in male or female nouns. Not even Italians now a days speak 'proper' Italian. 

Chinese is a very rational and logic based language – it takes some time to adjust to the sounds and the pronunciation but with practicing as much as you can, you might be speaking it faster than you think. The point at which the language stops sounding so exotic I think is already a good sign!

I've been learning Chinese for a couple of months now, and so far I do tend to agree that Modern Standard Chinese is not that hard. I haven't really focused on learning characters too much, but I do have a decent understanding of their construction to know that it's not just hieroglyphs and random pictographs. By learning the radicals and meanings of basic characters, you quickly start to see the logic to all of it. However, I wouldn't say Chinese is an "easy" language. In all honesty, I do not think this label is appropriate. Learning a language is not an easy thing to do. And the difficulty of a language is a very subjective thing.

Anyhow, I think the greatest thing about Chinese is its lack of prepositions and verb tenses. Prepositions are really hard to learn for Asian ESL students, because they are so random in English. And verb tenses are also horrible. In English, you can use the present tense to talk about the future ("the plane leaves on Sunday), or the past to talk about the present ("I've got ten dollars"). In regards to tones in Chinese, they are not easy to nail down, but I believe they could be compared with stressed syllables in English. Basically every English word (or even part of speech) that has more than one syllable has a stressed one, and it's totally random. And vowel sounds are really inconsistent.

So is Chinese is an "easy" language? Well, not really, but it's probably not as hard as what most people would tend to believe.

Couldn't agree more! I actually bought a Kindle book on a rundown of Mandarin grammar and use it as light reading before bed. While English has hundreds of exceptions to each rule, Mandarin has very few – and they often make sense.

Also – TENSES. There are no tenses in Mandarin! Add a 了 here and a 就要 there – now you're talking about what you are going to do later.

Another thing I found was that while learning Mandarin, I haven't had to learn a lot of the English grammatical words that you often have to learn when picking up a new language. I can't think of any examples because I don't know them, haha. Things like Predicate Nouns and stuff. Thank goodness I didn't have to learn English as a second language – it's so hard to understand why we say things the way we do.

/rant!