Chinese is a hard language to learn, but there are some elements that are in your favor if you're considering it. These are some quick thoughts on the easy and difficult aspects of learning Chinese as an English speaker. # No verb conjugations This is huge. In Chinese verbs simply do not change. It doesn't matter who is being discussed or when it happened, a verb is a verb. Here are some examples. The Chinglish version is my own take on what the literal sentence in Chinese would sound sound like. | Chinglish | English | | ---------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------- | | Where you **go** last night? | Where **did** you go last night? | | Yesterday with friends **go** restaurant | Yesterday I **want** to a restaurant with some friends. | | In the past I am doctor. | I used to be a doctor. | This is pretty great. Chinese-style grammar sounds completely horrible in English, but learning it makes one realize how superfluous much of our language is. If I was designing a language from scratch, I'd choose Chinese grammer as the model. Verb conjugations are a tremendous burden on language learners of so many languages. It was very refreshing to get to skip that. # Numbering System ## Counting There are very few special cases in the numbering system, the way we have in English. For example, 11, 12, and 13 in Chinese are simply "ten-one", "ten-two", "ten-three" and this pattern is consistent. 70 is "seven-five" and 75 is "seven-ten-five". 823 is "eight-hundred-two-ten-three". There is a special case when the last two digits are in the teen, such as 112, but this is the only special case I can think of in the numbering system. ## 1st, 2nd, 3rd... Likewise describing ordering is straight forward. 1st is "order-one", 8th is "order-eight", etc. ## Weeks In Chinese you don't have to memorize the days of the week, they are simply numbered with the exception of Sunday. - Monday: "weekday-1" - Tuesday: "weekday-2" - etc Sunday (星期天) is indeed an exception, but having 6/7 days follow the pattern is still pretty good. Much more friendly to language learners than specific names for each day of the week like we have in English (and many other languages). ## Months Months are even simpler than weeks, because there is no exception. They are simply numbered 1-12. - January: "month-1" - December: "month-12" Everything in between follows the same pattern, no exceptions. ## Years Years have multiple systems, but the most commonly used one is very simple. - 2025 - "two-zero-two-five-year" - 1982 - "one-nine-eight-two" - etc Where years can get more complex is with the Lunar calendar. However, I myself don't know the lunar system and have lived in Taiwan for more than 8 years. Consider it optional. In Taiwan there's also a nearly naming schema indexed at founding of the nation. To give an example in an American context, its as if we had a yearly naming scheme that started in 1776 with the declaration of independence. Under this scheme 2025 would be "Year 250" or something like that. This system is only used in official documents, and of course only used in Taiwan, so you don't encounter it much and when you do it's simple enough to convert it to the more familiar system. --- Of course, while some aspects of Chinese are "easy" the language itself, taken as a whole, is quite difficult for English speakers to master. I myself have not mastered it, even having lived in Taiwan for 8 years. I have more thought on language mastery in [[The Path to Language Mastery]]. At the risk of state the obvious, here are the aspects of Chinese that are decidedly difficult. # The Writing System Learning Chinese characters is hard—there are thousands of them. I've heard that you need about 2000 characters in your repetoir for basic literacy. Anecdotally, I think its more like 2500. Its also estimated that native speakers know about 4-6k characters well. There are many more characters than that, but after about the five-thousandth character by frequency you're really in the long-tail and will be getting greatly diminished returns on your study effort. All that said, the reason the writing system _is really difficult_ may not be obvious. ## Getting the Reps The reason Chinese characters are truly nasty to a language learner is that each character has its own repetition cycle and its own familiarity to the reader. To be able to read at native speed you need a very high degree of familiarity with both characters and words. Native speakers don't read by processing individual characters, they process words and clusters, similar to how English speakers don't read a character-at-a-time. This requires a high degree of familiarity, but each time you learn a new character you are starting fresh, building up your ability to recognize that character at a subconscious level. Put another way, the student who is intimately familiar with 2000 characters can be stopped cold in their tracks while reading a paragraph that includes character 2001. All that practice on the other 2000 means nothing for that next character you've never seen. With each new character you learn you are at square one. Compare this to a phonetic language like English, Greek, Korean, Thai, etc. In all these languages, despite using different scripts, you can relatively easily master the written language because the basic building blocks are very few. Even Thai with its outlandish vowel-consonant system only requires learning about 100 different things, after that point its just repetition. Not so with Chinese! It's a never-ending journey of adding new unfamiliar characters. Of course it is definitely possible to gain literacy at the level of a native speaker, its just that it takes work. So much more work than equivalent literacy in another language that uses a phonetic system. # The Tones Chinese words have specific tones. To miss-pronounce the tone is to say something nonsensical, or even completely different in meaning. This is undoubtedly difficult for speakers of non-tonal languages (i.e. most of the world). However, I'd like to tell you it's not as difficult as you might think. What makes tonal mastery a highly tractible problem is that there are only a few tones. Once you've mastered all 5 of them in different situations then you're done. This is entirely different than the written system, as described above. With the tones, your up-front time invested in learning them will pay off for as long as you speak the langauge. So it's just a matter of getting enough reps speaking. Furthermore, mis-pronouncing the tones often makes you unintelligible, which means there are no shortcuts. This is a good thing. Without any shortcuts you will have to learn the tones, and once you do you will feel great. # The Historical Language The Chinese spoken at various periods in Chinese history sounds quite different from modern Chinese. An analogy would be Shakespearian English vs modern English. In the English-speaking world historical English is a very niche topic, and doesn't not make its way into much contemporary media. This is not the case with Chinese. All sorts of movies and shows are set in historical periods and if you want to master Chinese you'll be expected to understand the dialogue. However, there's little incentive to understand this Chinese unless you enjoy historical dramas in their own right. You can't start talking like the dialogue you hear because you will sound ridiculous. No one talks like that. So, my current take on this is actually just to skip it, or learn what you need on a case-by-case basis. For example, watch [My Fair Princess (還珠格格)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Princess) and learn what ou need to understand it, but don't specifically go study historical Chinese unless you're particularly interested. # Formal and Abbreviated Chinese I'll lump formal and abbreviated together since that's what you need to understand the news. A feature of the Chinese written system is that since all words are compounds of individual characters with meaning, anything can be abbreviated. Here's a simple example that works in English too: Subway - could be expanded as "subterranean railway", but why say something so long when the contraction will do? In Chinese 地鐵 (subway) is the same. It could be expanded to 地下鐵路 (subterranean railway). Notice the first and third characters are the two characters from 地鐵. In English these contractions aren't all that common, but in Chinese they are everywhere, because with only two characters the meaning is still very clear. This doesn't mean you can make up new abbreviations that people will understand, but you will have to be able to decipher abbreviations all over the place if you read news media in Chinese. ## Formal Chinese In Chinese there are _at least_ two ways to say anything. I don't mean in the sense of there being multiple ways to express the same idea, which would be true in any language, but rather there are _at least_ two words for every concept[^1]. Here are some examples: | English | Informal | Formal | | ------- | -------- | ------ | | and | 和 / 跟 | 與 | | yet | 還 | 尚 | | not | 不 / 沒 | 未 / 否 | | so | 所以 | 因此 | | think | 覺得 | 認為 | | don't | 別 | 勿 | This list is very much not complete, but hopefully it gives you an idea that learning one way to say something isn't enough. As mentioned above, learning the written system is difficult. This is exacerbated by having these disparate ways to communicate ideas, since each way has different characters. # Relative Difficulty Chinese is definitely difficult for English-speakers relative to lots of other languages. Without being overly specific, I think it's safe to say languages with similar roots and an identical alphabet are going to be relatively easy. To overly generalize, European languages fall into this category. Then there are languages that have a different alphabet but share some common vocab. Greek and Russian come to mind. Lots of words are immediately identifiable once you know the alphabet. Then there are the languages that are very, very different. Languages from the Middle East, Africa and Asia come to mind. Chinese is in this category. No shared roots, shared vocab or shared alphabet. Non-phonetic, very difficult to learn. That being said, is learning Chinese harder than learning Japanese? Thai? Korean? It's hard to say. Korean and Japanese both have grammatical difficulty as well as much more fine grained levels of formality and politeness than Chinese. However, Korean has a phonetic alphabet, as does Thai. Thai also has similar grammar to Chinese, based on my one month of Thai study I'd suggest Thai is easier to learn than Chinese due to the alphabet. Korean and Japanese I'd both wager are harder, but of course its hard to say. It likely depends on how you weight the difficulty of Chinese tonality. [^1]: Well, perhaps not every single concept, but so many concepts that it rounds to being the rule rather than the exception. Also, it may well be literally every concept. My own knowledge of the language is not complete enough to make a claim one way or the other.