If you ever came across that tacky playground joke about Chinese parents choosing baby names through dropping silverware in the sink, or heard your exasperated father grunt that the assembly instructions for your family's new dining table "might as well be written in Chinese", then you have experienced a stereotype that most every non-Chinese encounters in their cultural upbringing. Simply put, we foreigners have been taught to believe Chinese is super hard, super confusing, and
nearly impossible to learn!
Given, it doesn't help that published research from agencies such as the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. Department of State have ranked Mandarin and Cantonese among the hardest languages for English speakers to study. Nor is our discomfort with Chinese's unfamiliarity aided by the complex and boxy characters used in its writing system. Overemphasized deterrents such as these were the very reason my own parents, in fact, were originally opposed to me studying Chinese. All that talk about Chinese comprising of cryptic "chings" and "chongs"with no alphabet had my well meaning parents convinced that taking a Mandarin course would be too demanding and negatively impact my grades in other classes. But once my stubborn, teenage desire to prove I was capable won over, I discovered that Chinese turned out to have a number of learning advantages rarely ever talked about. That is why, in order to shed a more objective light on Chinese language structure, I am putting to death this impossibility myth Western society has created and sharing five key ways Chinese is easier than the statistics make it out to be:
1. Can't stand verb conjugation? Try Chinese--it has none!
Eat, eating, ate, eaten...why does an action as basic as chewing popcorn have to come with all these fancy, time-specific breeds of verb? Those of you who've spent many an hour poring over conjugation flashcards for your Spanish class may be shocked to know a language exists that circumvents it all--Chinese! Instead of each verb containing a portfolio of name variants to cater each time circumstance, Chinese verbs keep it simple with one name for any and every tense. Readers raised on Indo-European linguistics may at this point protest; "But that doesn't make sense! How are you supposed to know when actions are taking place without conjugation?" Fear not, Chinese has an easy fix to this contextual issue: universal tense structures. Take the character 了, for example. One of 了's key functions is to indicate an action has already been completed. Thus, once you know how to use 了，you know how to express every verb in the Chinese language in the past tense.
2. Months of the year, and other number systems, make MUCH more sense!
I don't know about you all, but I can still remember the whimsical songs I was drilled on in kindergarten to memorize the English names of months and days of the week in their proper order! Fortunately, for us and Chinese kindergartners alike, there are no such convoluted labels in the Chinese calendar. Each month (月) and day of the week (星期) are simply denoted by the number they appear in sequence. Under this system, "October" is just "tenth month" (十月) and "Wednesday" is "third day of the week"(星期三). Even counting is a piece of cake compared to Latin-based languages; the Chinese equivalent of "twenty, thirty, forty" can be literally translated to "two-tens, three-tens, four-tens" (二十，三十，四十), "fifteen" as "ten five"(十五), and "thirty five" as "three-tens five"(三十五). With this pattern, you only need to know the characters for one through ten to count to 99!
3. There is none of that "feminine" "masculine" nonsense in Chinese grammar!
From my very limited experience with romance languages, I recall being supremely frustrated with the concept of inanimate objects being assigned grammar genders. Moreover, I hated how these gender assignments seemed completely random and illogical. I mean, why on earth is a pencil "male" but an eraser "female" in French? And if the separation was meant to demonstrate a pencil and eraser's complimentary nature, why is salt and pepper both "male"? Regardless of the answer, I have great news for anyone interested in learning Chinese--its grammar is gender-free!
4. "Pinyin"-- the ultimate Chinese pronunciation cheat for Western learners!
Yes, I concede that Chinese has no alphabet and that the pronunciation of each character is only loosely, if at all, influenced by the way it's written. Contrary to popular belief, however, one who wishes to be literate in Chinese does not need to associate a unique sound with thousands of different symbols. Thanks to genius linguist Zhou Youguang in the 1950s, foreign learners everywhere have been gifted a streamlined pronunciation guide that uses letters of the Latin alphabet to represent any character's sound. This nifty tool, called Pinyin, combines one of a set list of consonants called "initials" with a vowel or vowel-combo called a "final"and adds one of four accents to the vowel to represent the "tone" [i.e. the inflection needed to pronounce the character such as rising or falling in pitch. Chinese is a tonal language and the inflection of a word affects its meaning.] As a result, you could technically learn oral Chinese without having to memorize a single character (but I don't recommend it)! To see a full pinyin chart and hear its wide range of sounds, click here. Take note that it consists of much more than chings and chongs!
5. The Beauty of Ideograms simplifies vocabulary learning!
One of my favorite characteristics of Chinese is the fact that it's an ideogram based language. What in the world are ideograms, you may ask, exotic crackers?? Not quite! The term "ideogram" refers to how each character stands for an idea, which in turn makes each multi-character word a compound of ideas. Vocabulary acquisition becomes exponentially easier because of this structure! As you learn the meanings of individual characters, you are able to recognize and build more complex words with them. Cellphone, for example, is just a fusion of the characters "hand" and "machine" (手机). Shampoo is the compound "wash-hair-liquid" (洗发水). Even medical terms like laryngitis become simplified into a fusion of "throat" and "inflamed" (喉炎) through the magic of ideograms! I openly admit to looking up English words that I don't understand in Chinese to learn the definition by its character composition--that's just how easy ideograms make things!
While I'm not going to suggest that learning Chinese is for everyone, nor refute that it has obvious challenges, the facts prove it truly isn't the brain-melting monster that decades of rumors have built it to be! Much like an exotic food, you will never know whether you like a foreign language until you try it, and I hope this post has given you the courage to taste something new!