Learning Chinese is NOT as Hard as You Think

How hard is learning Chinese? In this video, I want to challenge the common belief and show you why Chinese is not the hardest language in the world with 10 facts about Mandarin Chinese. 大家好,我是玲瓏老師。 Hello everyone, I'm your Chinese teacher, Ling Long. No matter if you're new or experienced in Chinese learning, I promise by the end of the video, you'll understand how Chinese language works so much better. Fact number one, Chinese have limited number of sounds, which means you'll be able to learn and master all the Chinese sounds within a short amount of time. To understand this better, I'll quickly go over two basic concepts, character and pinyin. These cool and mysterious looking scripts are called characters. It's how we normally read and write. But for beginners, it is impossible to know how a word is pronounced just by looking at characters. And that's why we have pinyin. Pinyin literally means spell sounds. It's a romanization system designed to help people pronounce Chinese words. While it takes longer to learn characters, pinyin is relatively easy to master. And as soon as you know pinyin, you can read everything in Chinese. I mean, everything. And by the way, pinyin wouldn't even look boring to you because it shares the same alphabet as English with an additional ü sound. Back to Chinese pronunciation. In Chinese, each character is one syllable. And this is what a typical Chinese syllable looks like. Consonant plus vowel or other ending plus tone. As we know, there's a limited number of consonants and a limited number of vowels. What does it mean? Yes, a limited number of sounds. This pinyin chart you're looking at right now literally contains all Chinese sounds. I mean, if you master the sounds in this chart, you would be able to read anything in Chinese. And I can tell you from experience that anyone can learn to read pinyin in less than one month because all of my students have successfully done so. Fact number two. Now you might've heard Chinese is very hard because of the tones and characters. Let's address the elephant in the room right now. Yes, tones are hard, but guess what? You already have the skills to master them. First, you need to understand tones are just changes of pitch. Nothing special really. Your language might not have tones on every syllable, but it definitely has intonation, aka changes of pitch. For example, when you raise your pitch to show confusion. Huh? That's the second tone. When you reject something with a falling pitch. No, no, no! No, that's the fourth tone. See, you're already doing it without noticing. Mandarin Chinese has four different tones and I've made a series to help you master them. Make sure to check them out if you wanna learn more about tones. Fact number three. Chinese characters are not random images. Sure, when you don't know Chinese, the characters might look random and arbitrary, but once you get to know them, you'll find characters actually make a lot of sense. Imagine characters as Legos. We put different parts together to build something bigger and these parts are not random. They actually carry the meaning or sound of a word. And there are some basic building components which you'll see very often. For example, can you find the common component in these characters? Yes, they all share the common component kou, which means mouth. And guess what these characters mean? Chi, to eat. He, to drink. Jiao, to call. And chang, to sing. All of them are actions to do with the mouth. Now I'll have to admit, when you first start learning Chinese characters, they can be a little challenging. We as kids also had to write them over and over again until they stick in the memory. But the good news is the more words you know, the easier it gets. After you have the most frequently used 800 characters, you'll come to a stage where you can deduce meaning from contexts or make sense of new words based on the old ones you already know. Some people would argue English is much easier because there are only 26 letters. But that's not fair and it's not true. If I only know 26 letters, I wouldn't be considered to know English. I'll also have to know how the letters are arranged in each word, which also takes a lot of memorization. To give you an idea, as an English learner, you need about 7,000 words to take the International English Proficiency Test. 7,000 English words versus 800 characters. Hard to say which one is harder. And when it comes to vocabulary, I'll have to say Chinese word formation is so logical. So much more logical than English. We should say Chinese use different parts to build characters. Actually, Chinese vocabulary works the same way, only this time we take different characters to build words. For example, breakfast is 早饭, morning meal. Lunch is 午饭, noon meal. And dinner is 晚饭, you got it already, evening meal. Makes sense, right? To give you another example, in English, 12 months are 12 different words. But in Chinese, you only need one word, 月, and combine them with numbers one to 12. And then you'll get 一月,二月,三月,四月, 五月,六月,七月, and so on. It just makes so much sense and so easy. As an English learner, sometimes I'm really jealous of you. Fact number five, Chinese pronouns are super simple. In English, there are eight different pronouns. I, you, he, she, it, a, we, you plural, and they. And when put in different positions, the pronouns need to change accordingly. For example, in object position, we have me, you, him, her. And to show possession, we have my, your, his, her, or mine, yours, his, hers. I remember having to memorize this big chart in middle school. Just the pronouns alone gave me a lot of headache. But in Chinese, we have 我,你,他, yes. In spoken Chinese, he, she, it sounds exactly the same. 他, for plural, simply add 们, so you have 我们,你们,他们. And that's it, guys. That's all you need to know about Chinese pronouns because they stay the same no matter where you put them in a sentence. For example, 我饿了。 I'm hungry. 这是我的书。 This is my book. 照片里的人是我。 The person in the picture is me. As you can see, no matter in what position, 我 stays the same. And to make Chinese even easier, we don't have verb conjugations. If you have been tortured by verb conjugations like me, you'll love this one. Chinese verbs don't change with pronouns or time or anything else. 我是, I am. 你是, you are. 他是, he, she, it is. As you can see, when paired with different pronouns, the verb remains the same. Also, no matter if it's past, present, or future, our verb stays the same. For example, 我以前是学生。 现在是老师。 In this sentence, the verb 是 is the same both in the past and the present because we don't express tense through verb conjugations. Instead, we use time words to signal the tense. In this sentence, 以前 means before, 现在 is now. That's how we know if it's in the past or present. Come on, how awesome is that? Fact number seven. Yeah, this is how we do seven in Chinese. Chinese nouns don't have singular or plural. One mandarin, 一个橘子. Many mandarins, 很多橘子. The noun 橘子 doesn't change. We simply use numerals or quantifiers such as 一个 or 很多 to express the amount of things. You should take a break. I'm sweating right now. Fact number eight. There is no feminine or masculine in Chinese. If you ever studied a foreign language, you'll know that in many foreign languages, nouns or even inanimate objects have grammatical gender. In French, somehow table and chair are feminine. Wine and chocolate are masculine. Why though? I really don't get it. Chinese nouns do not have this problem. Sun is sun, moon is moon. Table is table, chair is chair. Simple and clear. There's no grammatical gender and all the hassle that comes with it. Fact number nine. There's no formal, informal speech rules. Unlike our neighbors, Japanese and Korean, which has a strict hierarchy and code politeness and formality into their language system, Chinese language does not have formal, informal speech rules. In this aspect, Chinese is more like English. Being polite and respectful is more about choice of words and of course, your attitude. So one less thing to worry about. Fact number 10. Easy to master sentence structure. The most basic sentence structure in Chinese is SVO, subject, verb, object. If you speak English, you should already be very familiar with this sentence structure. For example, 我喜欢你. I like you. Same order. And wait, it gets better. Forming questions in Chinese is much easier than English because there's no need to change the sentence order. To make a yes or no question, we simply add the question word ma to the end of a statement. 你喜欢我. You like me is a statement. 你喜欢我吗? Becomes a question. Do you like me? Just like that. Even when making content-related questions, the sentence order remains the same. We simply replace the content with a question word. Still the same sentence. 你喜欢我? If we replace the object 我 here with a question word 谁, who, whom, it becomes a question. 你喜欢谁? Who do you like? That's it. We both made it to the end of the video. Hopefully by now you're thinking, Chinese is not that hard. Maybe I can do it too. Then my mission is accomplished. This is my first ever YouTube video and it is my goal to make Chinese learning simple and fun for you. If today's video is helpful to you, please like, comment, and share. Most importantly, please subscribe and turn on the notification bell. Because there will be new content every Monday and Thursday. And while you're waiting for my next video, make sure to check out my shorts to learn some useful Chinese expressions. Alright everyone, I'll see you next time.