Is Mandarin THAT Hard?

Much is made of how difficult it is for non-Asians to learn Mandarin. And the evidence is not just anecdotal: Mandarin Chinese is one of only five languages that fall into Category 5 of the FSI ratings, which empirically estimate how long it takes to reach "Professional Working Proficiency" in a language. Only Arabic, Japanese, Cantonese and Korean match it.

I won't disagree with them. I found Chinese very difficult when I started, even though I have a university education and had already reached C1 level in a European language.

However, I also want to explore the opposite view. Mandarin undoubtedly has its easy points, and once you get into mid-intermediate level, it becomes fairly easy, and I've reached this level mostly through self-study.

Let's start with what makes Mandarin uniquely difficult. Here are four main points:

• The Characters: there's no avoiding it. When you begin studying Mandarin, the characters are incredibly strange. Even recognising the basic ones takes a while. And when you see characters with 10+ strokes, you wonder how on earth anyone could learn such mind-boggling symbols. For basic literacy you need to be able to recognise 3000, and to fluently read standard novels, that number rises to 4500. It's daunting.
  
  
• No Exposure: most English speakers, especially Europeans, know a little bit of Spanish, French, Italian and German. Not only do we learn the basics of several European languages at school, we're exposed to it through media, food and drink, social media, and so on. Not so with Chinese: we start from absolute ground zero. I didn't even know how to say hello or goodbye when I started.
  
  
• The Tones: oh, the famous tones of Mandarin Chinese. To be blunt, tones are an alien concept to us English speakers. Sure, we do use tones to express emotion and structure sentences, but words themselves are toneless. You can use no tone or any tone, and the word remains the same. Not so in Mandarin. Each character has a specific tone. Words, which are combinations of characters, use a specific combination of the 5 Mandarin tones. Mess them up, and you might say something REALLY wrong, even inappropriate or offensive. What's more, characters sometimes take multiple tones, which makes learning them even more challenging.
  
  
• Very Few Loan Words: lastly, Chinese has few loan words from English. When you learn a European language, you inevitably come across lots of words that have been adopted from English or that have a common root. This is also true of Japanese. But Chinese is different. They say "Hallo", "Bye bye" and "shafa" (for sofa), and the names of countries and cities are usually similar, but that's about it. This only makes it more difficult to learn new vocab.

This might seem daunting, but you must face these realities and learn how to overcome them if you're to reach fluency.

And in any case, there are certain things that make Chinese easier than you think:

• No Verb Endings: in English, verbs have six or seven different forms. In heavily inflected languages, verbs can have 50 or more. But in Chinese, there are no verb endings, no matter what tense you're in. Sure, there are tense markers, but the infinitive never changes. For new verbs, all you have to learn is the character, syllables, tones and usage. No inflections or complicated endings. Thank goodness.
  
  
• Grammar is Simple: I've heard Chinese described as caveman language because of its lack of tense markers, grammar particles and verb endings. If you literally translated Chinese sentences into English, they would indeed sound primitive. But I'm not complaining. It's one less thing to learn! And in studying Spanish, I've realised that European languages are often unnecessary complicated, what with all the tenses and subjunctives. Why not speak as concisely and efficiently as possible?
  
  
• Characters Accumulate: characters are pretty horrible to begin with. It's a real struggle to learn the first 1000. Every one seems so different from the next, it's a struggle to learn the syllables and tones, and similar characters confuse you. But once you get over the initial hump, they actually become quite easy. There comes a time when new characters are just a new arrangement of components you already know. AND most characters are composed of a meaning part and a pronunciation part, so you have a good idea of what a new character means and how to pronounce it.
  
  

And finally, I think you endure much of the difficulty in the beginner to low-intermediate phase. Once you know how tones work, have mastered 1000+ characters, and can listen and read to a reasonable level, it becomes so much easier. You've done most of the hard work, and you realise it's just about hours of practice and immersion. Keep this in mind as you're crawling through the trenches in the land of Beginnerville.