Is Mandarin Hard?
According to the Interagency Language Roundtable (a US Federal interagency organization), Mandarin is one of the most difficult languages for native English speakers. Mandarin Chinese, along with Arabic, Japanese, and Korean, can take 2200 hours of classroom instruction, plus an equal number of hours of private study, to reach native-level proficiency.
Compare that with Category I languages (languages closely cognate with English) like French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. These languages take about 600 hours of classroom instruction to reach native-level proficiency, a task which can be achieved within 24 weeks.
These figures are for highly motivated students who intend to enter the Foreign Service. They must acquire a high level of competence in all 4 language areas - speaking, listening, reading, and writing.
So is Mandarin really that hard? Sure, the written language is very difficult, but the spoken language is not too bad. The grammar is very easy, and once the concept of tones has been absorbed, vocabulary starts to fall into place.
So don't get discouraged by the idea that Mandarin is "too hard." Learn the spoken language first, and once you have a usable vocabulary, start learning Chinese characters. It will be much easier to learn to read Chinese when you can already speak it, and a knowledge of just 2,000 characters is enough to read a Chinese newspaper.
Chinese is a fun and interesting language. 2200 hours of classroom instruction = 132000 minutes.
Just spend 10 minutes a day to Learn Chinese online for Free at my website, I think you will be able to get native-level proficiency after 1 year.
Good luck.
I’m thrilled that you have a website that teaches Chinese, and it looks quite good … but please don’t over-promise. It could give teaching Chinese a bad name.
I am a little concerned that by over-promising how easy it is to learn Chinese, we are at risk of (a) having people scared away after a short period of time, (b) attracting people who are unlikely to invest much time to study Chinese in the long run.
Native-level proficiency in a year? 10 minutes a day?
At the end of high school, people know roughly 4-5000 words. If we assume it’s exactly 3650 words (to make the maths easy), this means they have to learn 10 words every day for a year. And if they’re learning 10 minutes at your site, then it’s 1 minute a word.
This assumes they never forget any words, and that they don’t have to learn grammar, sentence construction, expressions & phrases, etc.
Most people take years to get proficient, and not yet at the native level – taking hours a week to get there. In my article on learning Chinese, one of the key points is about creating a “study habit” – and what I like about your site is it supports that.
But let’s aim for conversational Chinese first before promising native-level proficiency.
I think I should not use “native-level proficiency”, but “basic-level after 1 year” instead.
However, thanks for your comments and suggestions. I am looking ways to improve my website.
oh my God, that’s easy for ya but not for me! i’m studying chinese right now and this is the craziest language i’ve ever studied! Just look at those shengdiao-s on the pinyin text, they turn me crazy. I hope that native chinese CAN (not could) magically understand my OMG-so-bad chinese *sob*
I’ve been learning Chinese for 4 months (I know, not too much), and really do not have time everyday, to learn it. But if I don’t see the problems with the tones (I just can’t pronounce them correctly, but hope that after a time I can feel it perhaps a little bit better, than now. ^^”) it seems to be quite easy. One thing is sure, one can’t learn so fast because of the hanzi-s. If I can learn 10 French words in a given time, it’s only 2-3 in Mandarin Chinese.
I have been studying Chinese very hard for about 2 years. I average at least one or two hours per day studying. I feel like I am making good progress but I am still not at a level where I could sustain a useful everyday conversation, let alone fluency. The notion that anyone can make any sort of progress with Chinese with only 10 minutes per day is absolutely laughable, and it makes me really annoyed to hear such absurd misrepresentation. I hope that I will be fluent enough to read a newspaper and sustain a useful conversations in about another three years.
If you only have ten minutes available per day then don’t bother trying to learn, and certainly don’t waste your time visiting web sites that make ridiculous claims.
BTW, I’m married to a native Chinese speaker and I hold a masters degree and work in a senior technical role in the computer industry, so I’m not by any means a slow learner and I have plenty of help available.
I never say that Chinese is hard. It’s actually easy, but the process is very slow. I’ve also learned German which I think is more difficult but quicker to learn.
Is Mandarin hard? Extremely. You face five major obstacles: (1) hard pronunciation and the tones (two different problems) (2) aural comprehension is very difficult due to homonyms and widespread use of very divergent dialecta (3) massive vocabulary learning burdenp–nothing is easy or memorable (4) massive character learning burden and (5) the ‘easy’ grammar. Sure, it’s easy to order a beer in Mandarin. It’s not so easy to read an analysis of economic trends when the language has no plurals, often no tenses, no articles and a tendency to abbreviate everything. This sounds like a minor issue but for an English speaker the vagueness of Chinese, due to its ’simplicity,’ is a bigger obstacle to reading comprehension than the characters. Twenty years experience talking here.