Is Chinese Hard To Learn Essay

Is Chinese Hard to Learn?

Why so many English speakers said Chinese is so damn hard to learn? Is Chinese really as hard as you think? Ok, first we can see some reasons:

1.Tones.

Tones are a vastly important and difficult aspect of Chinese that foreigners must study and master to truly learn Chinese. There are four tones and one neutral tone in Chinese. Many characters have the same spelling in pinyin but different tones, such as 水(shuǐ)饺(jiǎo)(dumplings) and 睡(shuì)觉(jiào)（sleep）, therefore they have different meanings. Or some Chinese homophones tongue-twisters, Chinese learners think it is so damn hard to speak, such as “si and shi”:

四(sì)是(shì)四(sì)，十(shí)是(shì)十(shí)；

十(shí)四(sì)是(shì)十(shí)四(sì)，四(sì)十(shí)是(shì)四(sì)十(shí)。

Because Western

Characters are the most difficult hurdle for foreigners learning Chinese. With no alphabet, a student must learn at least 400-500 characters to read a newspaper. As we all know, some characters are composed of numerous strokes, such as 赢(yíng)（win）and the way of their composition is also different this is completely strange for foreigners, thus is also very hard to remember and master. So how to learn Chinese characters? Are there some fast and funny ways to learn? Let’s see how to learn Chinese character fast, you can find the

1.Pinyin

Chinese language only has 26 phonetic alphabets and when you learn pinyin, you will easy to read Chinese characters, every phonetic alphabet has 4 tones, so the total number of sounds in Chinese is 104, the syllables approximately only 1200. It’s fewer than English syllables, because English has more than 8000 syllables. So learn pinyin is your basic and simple way to learn Chinese. You can see Pinyin pronunciation chart and learn pinyin today.

2.Grammar

I think Chinese grammar is the easiest part of learning Chinese for English speakers. Because Chinese verbs don’t subdivide past tense, present tense and future tense, they don’t have variant, such as only need one word “是(shì)“ can represent “is/was/were/been”, for example:

Past tense: I was a student two years ago. 我(wǒ)两(liǎng)年(nián)前(qián)是(shì)学(xué)生(shēng)。

Present tense: I’m a student now.