130 Flash Cards

No this isn't some form of modern art, it is the number of Chinese characters I have learned so far. This is the start of the 4th week of an 11 week course. Supposedly we'll learn almost 500 characters by the end of it. It's not as hard as I had thought it would be recognizing the characters, the really hard part is remembering how to write them. I can recognize and read at least 100, but can probably only write 5o of them (have you seen how similar they can look!!!). I doubt I'll be writing Chinese characters ever in my life, but it's pretty crazy to be reading entire sentences in Chinese.

Some people say learning Chinese isn't too difficult and others say it is really difficult. I studied Spanish for two years in high school and have to say Spanish is an easy language to start learning and gets more difficult later with verb conjugations. Chinese is very, very, VERY hard to learn in the beginning. My analogy is probably the guitar and piano. Learning Spanish (piano) is very easy in the beginning, what you read is what you say, and there's only one way to say it. Later it gets more difficult, but most people can do it. Chinese (guitar) is very, very difficult at first, but after the initial monster learning curve, it gets a little easier (no verb conjugation, standard sentence structures, etc).

Why is Chinese so difficult? Four reasons that I can come up with:

1). You have to learn new words for everything. Nothing special here, that is the same with learning any new language. Some words are interesting and are made to model English words. "guitar" in Chinese is "ji ta", pretty cool.

2). There are 37 sounds (BoPoMoFo - MPS) that you must learn. Some are quite easy: ah, aye, e, oh, u, etc. Some are insanely difficult and put your mouth and tongue in places never seen before: zhe, qi, si, ui, etc.

3). There are 5 tones to each word. 4 distinct tones and a neutral tone. "What is a tone?" you ask? Take the word "ma": sing it high pitched, and it means "mother"; say it in a dipping mid-low-high way and it means "horse", use it at the end of a phrase in a neutral "normal" tone and it turns the sentence into a question. So every, EVERY word you learn, you must also learn the proper tone, or people will not understand what you're saying (a very common thing unfortunately).

4). For every word there is a unique Chinese character. Many, many words are homophones (words that sound exactly the same like: to, too, two) but each word only has one Chinese character. One thing that is pretty cool about the Chinese characters is that almost all Chinese in the world can read the same characters and communicate through writing, but can't through speaking. Cantonese (Hong Kong), Mandarin (China, Taiwan, etc) and other dialects sound nothing alike. They all use the same characters though I think. Even Japanese shares many of the same characters with Chinese.

OK, so why is learning Chinese hard then? Because you need to learn 3 things for each new word, not just one thing. Dog is "perro" in Spanish, that's it. Dog in Chinese is "gou" using the third tone, and a Chinese character that looks nothing like a dog.

Jim