Learning Chinese

Most people know that Mandarin Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn for a native English speaker, and this truly is not an understatement. But people who have not studied Chinese in China can't truly grasp the true difficulty of the language. Chinese characters are thought to be the hardest part, but I am here to say that though it is definitely not easy to learn characters starting out, the hardest part is actually the pronunciation and getting the right tone for each word while speaking. Chinese is one of the few languages that has 4 distinct tones to each syllable, and mispronouncing the tone for a given word totally changes the meaning of what you are trying to say. For example, its common for a beginner to mispronounce "excuse me?" when trying to ask a question to a stranger (请问, qǐngwèn) and say 请吻 (qǐngwěn － "can I please kiss you?"). Although it is a funny mistake, it can lead to a lot of misunderstanding when talking to native speakers outside of the classroom. Tones were something I completely ignored when I was studying Chinese in the classroom in America and only when I went to China was when I realized the importance of the tones. On top of that certain words are only used when speaking (口语) and other words are only used in writing (书面语), so there are a lot of words that have the same meaning but depending upon the circumstances you are using the word under, you can't interchange them otherwise the usage is incorrect.


This brings me to my main point, which is that Chinese cannot be learned anywhere other than in China. Its true when people say that a language is not learned in the classroom, and that it is when you apply it in real situations is when you truly start learning, but what I mean is that for Chinese it's an absolute necessity. Students studying European languages like Spanish and French in the US can definitely gain a pretty good grasp on those languages within a couple of years just because the grammar and words are so similar to English, but the fact that Chinese is so different makes it nearly impossible to get an advanced level of proficiency and fluency without at least a year or more spent studying and living in China. I recently saw an interesting graphic that lists a few languages and ranks them by difficulty for English speakers, and it was no surprise to me that Chinese was ranked one of the hardest, requiring at least 2,200 class hours to reach proficiency. That's 90-110 weeks (about 2 years) of 20-25 hours of class of just Chinese every week. That's why taking a class in college that only gives you 5 hours of class time per week is never going to get you very far in Chinese.


From my own experience, I recommend students to first build a solid foundation in Chinese before packing up to do an intensive language program in China. You should have about 2 years of Chinese instruction at your university before going because your learning in China will be much more accelerated. Much of the beginning of learning Chinese is getting used to characters and pronouncing syllables, which no doubt would be learned quicker in China, but your time would be used much more efficiently if you went to China with an upper elementary or intermediate level. For example, some of my friends in China had not learned a word in Chinese before starting school and attained a proficiency level in a semester about equivalent to mine sometime towards the end of my first year in Chinese, but living in China was much harder for them as they did not know the language well enough to get around and caused a lot of frustration for them in the beginning. In my case, I had taken about a year and a half worth of Chinese before going this time and my vocabulary literally tripled while I was there. I went from knowing between 1200 to 1500 words to over 4000 words. The level of fluency of my Chinese by the end of my trip was better than some people who had finished Chinese majors in America. And all of this happened in 1 semester. I can't imagine how good my Chinese would have been had I stayed even longer. Once you have a basic knowledge of at least 1000 to 1200 words and some grammar structures then learning Chinese becomes a bit easier and you learn at a much faster pace. In closing, if you are serious about getting good at Chinese, definitely plan to set out at least a semester to a whole year of your time to study in China, but wait until you have at least 2 years of Chinese under your belt.