Learning Mandarin

Every Chinese person will tell you that Chinese is incredibly difficult to learn and are totally in shock when they meet a foreigner who is fluent in their own language! Granted, to actually learn to read Chinese – you need to memorize at least 2000 characters – and this will take approximately 2 years of full time study. But to learn Mandarin, to be fluent in the language – I met many foreigners who picked up the language in a year – while studying Mandarin at a local language school and living in China.

I worked with a young British fellow who’s goal was to learn Mandarin during his one year stay in China. He hired some personal tutors for himself and spent many hours teaching himself the language. And, at the end of his year in China, was able to give a speech to the local townspeople – in Mandarin – explaining the differences he found between their local dialect and Mandarin. Pretty impressive! The townspeople were shocked!

Don’t let learning Mandarin scare you. Yes, some of the sounds are unusual and it takes some tongue and jaw practice to get it right. Yes, there are 4 tones to learn in Mandarin and 8 tones to master in Cantonese – but overall – I believe it is much easier to learn to speak Mandarin than it is to learn to speak English. There are no tenses! That cuts out thousands of words and grammar rules you never need to master. And there are no articles (a, the, etc.). And no feminine and masculine to worry about!