Is it really hard to learn Chinese as a foreign language?Is it true Chinese is difficult language to learn as a foreign language? Frankly speaking, there is no truth in it. As compared to the grammar of European languages , Chinese grammar is much simpler. It is the complaint of English speakers at times that foreign languages like Spanish are filled with complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc) , however Chinese language has no bound morphology and grammatical paradigms are not there to learn. There is a fixed and single form in each word: there are no prefixes or suffixes to verbs which show the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject. Nouns do not take prefixes or suffixes showing their number or their case. I'm not trying to tell you that Chinese has no grammar; what I mean is that due to the lack of inflectional morphology, Chinese grammar is mainly concerned with how words are arranged to form meaningful sentences. Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that's why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle. Perhaps, you would tell that you are not too convinced with the above. Alright, there is another encouraging and definitive proof with me for you. I fortunately encountered a piece of animating news in Beijing Times two days ago. Less than 1,000 Chinese characters allow you to read 90% of the current Chinese publication, according to a survey conducted by the Education Ministry and Language Commission of China. The basis of the claim of this survey is on 900 million characters used in more than 8.9 million files chosen from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and television. You are required to know about 900 of around 50,000 individual characters that are made up of Written Chinese to under 90 percent of the content of the publications, as the Chinese media is using fewer characters these days. On the other hand, how many words are there in English? Almost 100,000 and it's still on the rise. Chinese characters represent chiefly meaning, not pronunciation like English words, and that is why a lot of characters are antiquated and many found only once in the entire history of the written language . What is known to an average Chinese graduate may be only 6,000. Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this. It is never my intention to convince you that Chinese is a simple language to learn and other languages like English are much difficult. What I mean is that Chinese is not as difficult as you imagined or heard about, but different from your mother tongue, but difference does not mean tough necessarily, Isn’t it?What it means is that Chinese is certainly simpler than you imagined or heard about, it’s just very dissimilar from your mother tongue, but dissimilar does not mean difficult necessarily, Doesn’t it? And that hard Chinese idea won't be of any help in your study. Be confident of yourself and once you overcome that fear factor, you would actually find Chinese language to be easy to learn. Wish you good luck with your Chinese language study.
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