Learn Chinese

Learning Chinese has got to be one of the most difficult things a person can do and I honestly have no idea how I will accomplish the task. I have tried learning Chinese through podcasts, I have tried to learn Chinese by speaking Chinese to locals, I have even tried to learn to speak Chinese by reading a ‘Learn Chinese for dummies’ book that my friend recommended me after 2 years of not mastering the language.

There is really no way around it, learning Chinese is not easy. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to learn Chinese then you’re just tricking yourself. You need to remember that to master the Chinese language you will have to learn over 400 sounds, you will need to be able to remember the meaning of most of these 400 sounds under the 4 different tones in the Chinese language. Then you will need to associate the pinyin sound and specific tone to a Chinese character. That Chinese character will have several different meanings depending on how you use it in a sentence. Also putting different characters next to each other will also naturally derive totally new mearning. There are over 3000 chinese characters that you will need to remember. Yes, learning Chinese is definitely no easy task.

And this, this is all to learn a popular Chinese dialect called Mandarin. It is the official dialect supported by the Chinese government and spoken widely across China, but by no means does it cover everything. In Shanghai for examples, locals like to speak the Shanghai dialect which is completely different from the official Mandarin. To learn to speak Shanghainese would require me to practically learn a new language. If you decide to go to Hong Kong for example, they have a completely different language called Cantonese which in fact has 9 tones!

Learning Pinyin, learning the tones, learning the han characters, learning the Chinese phrases that sometimes don’t make sense, learning chinese words that could mean totally opposite things, and learning all the Chinese exception in grammar and vocabulary is a real pain. I’m not sure if I will ever learn Chinese Mandarin properly. Sometimes it’s easy to get discouraged when you muster all the effor to learn to speak Chinese and then you go out to practice speaking Chinese only to find out that the locals don’t understand a word you say and laugh at your puny attempts.