Jump to content
OneHallyu Will Be Closing End Of 2023 ×
OneHallyu

Should I learn Chinese?


GodYezi

  

12 members have voted

  1. 1. Should I learn Chinese?

    • Yes
      12
    • No
      0


Recommended Posts

If you want to, you should do it. I started about a month and a half ago and it isn't nearly as hard as everyone says it is (in my humble opinion, of course). When I compare it to one of the other languages I'm trying to learn, Korean, the grammar is a breeze.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My friend is Chinese and learning Japanese, so it's the other way around for her. She says it's really beneficial already knowing how to read the characters, and most of the time the meaning is same but pronunciation is different. 

 

Learning a language is fun, and can be beneficial. DO IT ~ 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I started to learn it more than a month ago. I think I am bit too old lol so I learn really slow but I actually recognize a lot of characters which is..surprising. I always have my notebook or phone app ready because as I said, I learn slow, forget fast. Grammar is easy so far and I guess because you already speak Japanese, you will learn million times faster than me. I think you should try it because it is a beautiful language.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have been studying Chinese for about 10 years. There are parts of it that are difficult (for me, understanding spoken Chinese is the hardest part of learning it), and parts that aren't so difficult (reading it, surprisingly, is the easiest part for me). The *basic* Chinese grammar is relatively easy, and is pretty much the same as English. But some of the grammar is not at all easy and is really strange for native English speakers.

 

Although there are different opinions, many people think that Chinese is the hardest language to learn. It may or may not be the absolute hardest, but it's one of the hardest for sure (along with Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc.) You have to learn *thousands* of characters to be considered fluent (around 3000, maybe more). For some people, pronunciation is really hard. Mastering the tones can be difficult when speaking, and distinguishing the tones when listening can really be a problem.

 

Chinese has only about 250 sounds that are used when speaking (compared to over 1000 in English). That might seem like it would make learning Chinese easier, but it's actually yet another problem for understanding spoken Chinese, because it means that Chinese has tons of homonyms. Which leads to another problem in learning Chinese - measure words. One of the ways that you know which homonym is which is that Chinese has a lot of different measure words - like a flock of sheep. English has measure words also, but they're almost always optional, and not used all that often. In Chinese they're often required to make the intended meaning clear. If you use the wrong measure word, the entire meaning of what you are saying changes - even if every other word in the sentence sounds the same! Using the wrong measure word can lead to very embarrassing or even offensive misunderstandings!

 

Even after studying Chinese for about 10 years (not always that intensively), I still wouldn't consider myself fluent, by any means. If you study really hard for maybe 3-4 years (like multiple hours per day, every day), you can probably get pretty fluent, depending on your language-learning talent. Knowing Japanese or Korean is maybe a bit of advantage, as there are enough similarities in vocabulary (and for Japanese, in the writing) that it probably would help some.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.

Back to Top