Learning Mandarin

Some people say that learning Mandarin is extremely hard. Every time I hear that or read it on the internet I think "No it isn't." and I have an incredulous look on my face.
BUT! I do see where people are coming from. For one thing Mandarin doesn't use the alphabet that we, native English speakers, are familiar with. Instead there are characters and there are over 2,000 of them as if learning characters wasn't daunting enough.
So here is a bullet list of reasons why people found the language hard and my responses

• The characters are hard to learn

First off, the characters aren't really that hard to learn. It is your mindset that makes it seem hard. If you go into learning the language thinking that learning the characters will be hard, well guess what? It will be. When I started learning Mandarin I was excited and even when I looked at characters and thought "How in the world can I do this!", I took it all in stride. Beside's characters, the Chinese people have created Pinyin, Chinese pronunciation of Chinese words using the Latin Alphabet. Using the Pinyin and the characters side by side helps. For me when I started my first online course, courtesy of Florida Virtual School, I printed out the vocabulary words from the lesson and then I hand wrote everything once with the Pinyin, the characters, and the English translation. Afterwards, I printed out a paper that had like boxes on them where I can practice writing the characters. Doing that a couple times a week even if 10 minutes in the morning or before I went to bed helped me to memorize the characters. I also made flash cards with the characters on one side and the Pinyin and English translation on the other to help me memorize the meaning of the characters. It takes time to learnt he characters just as it took time for us to learn how to "fluently" speak, read, write, and understand English. We didn't learn everything in one year. It took many, many, many years.

• The writing system

Another reason why learning Chinese sounds hard is because it does not follow any set rules in the case of phonetics. With English we can sound out words to learn how to spell them and the majority of the time we get it right. That is not the case with Chinese. Even if the words sound a-like and you would logically think that they would be written a-like, it doesn't work that way. In my experience the only thing that I could think of is that the only time where characters looked similar is when they have some-what the same meaning. The thing is characters are made up of radicals and each radical has a meaning much like words do. Chinese words are made up of many radicals and the meaning of the word can be guessed albeit not to the "T". For instance the word for "good" is 好（hǎo). It is made up of two characters 女(nǚ) and 子(zi). Nǚ means "woman" and Zi means "child". In the minds eye a mother is supposed to be loving and caring towards her child thus far 好 means "good". It becomes frustrating because while learning the meanings of the radicals as way to learn the meaning of characters is good, the frustrating part is learning the meanings of all the radicals, though it certainly does help to know at least a few it does not tell you how to pronounce the word. Also in my experience, looking up a word in a Chinese dictionary is a chore in itself. Fort my birthday a good friend of mine gave me a hand-held dictionary because I've been using an online dictionary and I was so happy I was smiling ear-to-ear... until I tried looking up a word. For a little while my world came crashing down because it was hard. For the majority of the time if I am near my computer I just search up a word on my favorite internet dictionaries. I have not yet mustered up the courage, and yes courage, to consult my Chinese dictionary when I stumble across a word I don't know which is frequently. I only browse through the dictionary for the fun of doing so to pick out a random word to learn. 

• The tones

Chinese is a tonal language and there are, essentially, 5 tones. Many places will tell you that there are only 4 because the 5th tone just passes by. The first tone is level, mā (mama/妈). The second tone is entering, má (hemp/麻). The third tone is rising, mǎ (horse/吗). The fourth tone is departing, mà (scold/骂). Now the fifth tone is neutral, ma. As you can see all four  words are pronounced the same, but are written differently and depending on how you say it, will have a different meaning. This is a frustrating problem with people learning Chinese, getting a hang of the tones and the exceptions to pronouncing the tones depending on where it is placed  preceding or after another tone. When I first started taking Mandarin classes last September I was a bit skeptical as to whether or not I would be hindered because I didn't think that I would be able to get the tones right, but practice makes perfect. Luckily I was able to take a course which involved many speaking activities and normally this would be a negative, but my teacher was not the easiest teacher whence it came to grading my orals and looking back I thank her for it. There are just some things that you don't learn in the classroom that my teacher taught me like those exceptions with the third tone. ^.^


These were the main problems that people had with Chinese that made them thick that it was hard. I grouped some topics together so that you would have to read a novel of an answer to find what you were looking for.