First of all, Chinese is an awesome language! Unlike English, there are many versions of Chinese depeding on where in China you are. The best feeling that comes with learning Chinese, as I guess with any language, is speaking the language learnt, and been understood. An equally quality feeling, is been able to answer a question, or reply to someone, even if it’s just in a shop or a taxi.
A hard thing to get over is the characters, to me they are unfathomable, complex drawings. So far, I only understand 1234 in them. However, with the characters comes pinyin. Pinyin is the Chinese language written in the alphabet, and I think it’s easier to read than written English. Of course I can read English correctly, but it’s very complicated to grasp for people learning it. I’ve become much more aware of this since I became a teacher. Weight sounds like ‘wate’, and height sounds like ‘hite’. Even though they both have ‘ei’, they are pronounced differently. There’s none of this in pinyin. Vowels, and vowel combinations, are pronounced the same way every time. So once you learn the rules of pinyin and remember them, you can pretty much read it. I can read pinyin rather fluently now, even though I might not understand what I’m saying.
Another easy thing about Chinese is the lack of past or future tense, and grammar. Don’t get me wrong, there is grammar in Chinese, just not a lot. ‘Am’, ‘is’ and ‘are’, are all the same word. It’s not hooked up on putting an ‘a’ or a ‘the’ before nouns, and don’t really use plurals from what I gather.
All in all, I’m not saying Chinese is easy, not by a long shot. But it is formularised, the rules are simpler and easier to understand. The thing that makes it very very hard is the tone system. I’ll explain that tomorrow.
More to come ……….