The Challenges of Mandarin

A recent article on LiveMint.com talks about the challenges of learning Mandarin.

The author, V.R. Narayanaswami, writes about some of the differences between Mandarin and English: sentence structure, grammar, tones, and measure words. These are the stumbling blocks for Westerners learning Mandarin.

However, as Mr. Narayanaswami shows, continued practice and study of the language allows the student to integrate the rules of Mandarin into increasingly fluent speech.

So don't get discouraged with your Mandarin studies. In many ways, Mandarin is a lot simpler than Western languages - no verb conjugations, no plurals, no tenses, unchanging pronouns and a straight-forward numbering system.