China is an inexhaustible topic. Stories about various aspects.

What is your first association when you hear “Chinese language”? Can I guess? For most people, it will be “Chinese characters,” right? And under that, they imply something complex and difficult to understand. Moreover, most people usually remember that the Chinese language is considered the most difficult in the world, but – by the way, don’t believe it! Chinese is very logical and basic, and overall very simple. And also, the popularity of this language has been rapidly growing worldwide lately, even in the USA, where foreign languages are generally not favored, many schools have started teaching Chinese.

I am a professional Chinese language teacher and translator, and I’ve decided to share my love for Chinese with you. I hope you can learn something new.

“Fear not the Chinese script – don’t miss out on the modern world.”

Sorry for the liberty – I rephrased an old saying, but the Chinese language indeed breaks all popularity records in the modern world. However, many people are simply afraid to start learning Chinese. And some people only try to learn Chinese because it is so different from other languages and is considered so difficult.

Is it really scary? I have 2 pieces of news for you!

Scary news:

According to the Institute of Diplomatic Service of the US Department of State, the Chinese language is the first on the list of the most difficult languages in the world. There are several reasons for this.

The characters used in writing are very complex. Each word (or more precisely, each significant syllable) has its own character, and there is almost no way to accurately guess the meaning and pronunciation (reading) of the character if you don’t know it.

Chinese is a tonal language (I’ll tell you more about it later). And this does not make learning easier, but rather complicates it – there are 4 tones plus a fifth neutral one.

Chinese has a huge number of homophones (words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings). For example, there are about 30 homophones for the word “shi.”

Good news:

I want to assure you that the difficulty of the Chinese language is a stereotype.

If it weren’t for the characters and tones, Chinese would be one of the simplest languages. All words are very short – usually consisting of one or two syllables;

Chinese has very simple grammar – no cases, conjugations, declensions, no genders for nouns (except for the words “man” and “woman” to indicate gender, if necessary);

In Chinese grammar, marking the future and past tenses is very simple (very often, the understanding of time comes from the context).

All sentences are very well structured, and rearranging sentence elements is not allowed. But this doesn’t complicate things; on the contrary, it simplifies the learning of Chinese – you can assemble sentences like Lego, simply putting words in the right order and not worrying about verb agreement and cases.

If you’ve decided to learn Chinese to communicate – knowing about 1000 commonly used words is enough; if you want not only to speak but also to read signs, names, restaurant menus, understand train and plane schedules – then you need to master about 1500 characters. With the right approach to memorization, it’s not as difficult as it may seem at first. All characters consist of certain elements (there is a separate article about this), memorizing characters for reading and writing (or typing – if you want) is an excellent exercise for memory development, training for associative memory, and an excellent prevention against Alzheimer’s disease.