Chinese class in Gandhi Nagar

Learning Chinese has many benefits across the spectrum, from gaining cultural insight to better  business opportunities, from making lifelong friendships to travelling. In fact, there has never been a better time to learn Chinese than today! Here are our 10 reasons to learn Chinese:

Travel to China

The biggest benefit of learning Mandarin is that allows you to uncover the mesmerising country of China on your own. If you are not the typical tourist, then take the chance to learn Mandarin, and you will find that on your travels you will unearth the “real China”. Even with limited speaking skills, locals will value the effort and will make a special considerations to welcome you.

Discover Chinese culture

China’s vast history and culture is incredibly well-known, with its impact being seen by its appreciation globally. A Chinese language ability will allow you to delve deeper into China’s cultural riches, by being able to explore renowned Chinese novels, short stories, poetry, film, TV and music.

Enter the Chinese business world

Over the last 35 years, China has transformed itself to become arguably the largest global economy, with China’s boom and its status as a rising global superpower allowing Western Mandarin-speaking businessmen to thrive off the nations riches.

Work in China

Through opening itself up to the world, China has welcomed foreign investment and economic cooperation. As such, there is a massive demand for people who are able to bridge the gap between this new China and the greater world.

Boost your CV

Through learning Chinese, you can transform yourself into somebody invaluable to the success of a project in China and demonstrate great intellectual capacity, making yourself stand out from the crowd.

It’s easy to pick up

Although Chinese is considered a difficult language to pick up, it is easier to get started than you might think. Students of the language are often able to start speaking basic Chinese in as little as a few weeks of beginning their studies.

More ways to learn Chinese than ever

Previously, Mandarin learning could be considered an arduous process involving huge dictionaries, endless character lists and poorly recorded audio tapes. Luckily, there are now much better ways you can learn Chinese. TCB and other platforms, including Pleco, have revolutionised the way students study Chinese, encouraging the little and often approach, with greater proven benefits.

Communicate with a billion people

Only through speaking Chinese can someone really experience everything that China and its millennia-old civilisation has to offer. Chinese language skills open up just over 1.3 billion people across China!

Make friends

Learning Mandarin gives you access to communicate with many people and connect on a deeper level, not just in Asia but across the world!

Good brain exercise

Studies suggest that learning Chinese uses more parts of the brain than are required for other languages. As there are numerous differences between learning Chinese when compared with the English language, including tones and characters, it is believed that learning Chinese takes more brain power! Whereas English speakers only use the left temporal lobe, speakers of Mandarin use both. Furthermore, learning to write characters can help with motor skills and visual recognition will keep the mind sharp.

Mandarin Chinese is often described as a difficult language, sometimes one of the most difficult ones. This is not hard to understand. There are thousands of characters and strange tones! It must surely be impossible to learn for an adult foreigner!

You can learn Mandarin Chinese

That’s nonsense of course. Naturally, if you’re aiming for a very high level, it will take time, but I have met many learners who have studied for just a few months (albeit very diligently), and have been able to converse rather freely in Mandarin after that time. Continue such a project for a year and you will probably reach what most people would call fluent.

If you want more encouragement and factors that make Chinese easy to learn, you should stop reading this article right away and check this one instead:

Chinese is actually quite hard

Does that mean that all the talk about Chinese being difficult is just hot air? No, it doesn’t. While the student in the article linked to above reached a decent conversational level in just 100 days (I spoke to him in person close to the end of his project), he has said himself that reaching the same level in Spanish took just a few weeks.

Another way of looking at it is that Chinese isn’t more difficult per step you have to take, it’s just that there are so many more steps than in any other language, especially compared to a language close to your own. I’ve written more about this way of looking at difficult as having a vertical and a horizontal component here.

But why? What makes it so hard? in this article, I will outline some of the main reasons why learning Chinese is significantly harder than learning any European language. Before we do that, though, we need to answer some basic questions:

Difficult for whom?

The first thing we must get straight is difficult for whom? It’s meaningless to say how difficult such and such a language is to learn in comparison to other languages unless you specific who the learner is. The reason for this is not difficult to understand. Most of the time spent learning a new language is used to expand vocabulary, getting used to the grammar, mastering pronunciation and so on. If you study a language which is close to your own, this task will be much easier.

For example, English shares a lot of vocabulary with other European languages, especially French. If you compare other languages that are even closer, such as Italian and Spanish or Swedish and German, the overlap is much bigger.

My native language is Swedish and even though I have never studied German either formally or informally, I can still make sense of simple, written German and often understand parts of spoken German if slow and clear. This is without even having studied the language!

Exactly how big an advantage this is doesn’t become clear for most people until they learn a language that has zero or almost zero overlap with your native language. Mandarin Chinese is a good example of this. There is almost no overlap with English vocabulary.

This is okay at first, because common words in related language are sometimes also different, but it adds up. When you get to an advanced level and there’s still no overlap between your own language and Mandarin, the sheer amount of words becomes an issue. We’re talking about tens of thousands of words that all have to be learnt, not just changed a little bit from your native language.

After all, it’s not hard for me to learn many advanced words in English:

Some of these are very logical in Chinese and in that sense, learning them in Chinese is actually easier if done from scratch compared with English or Swedish. However, that somewhat misses the point. I already know these words in Swedish, so learning them in English is really, really easy. Even if I only knew them in one language, I would automatically be able to understand them in the other. Sometimes I would even be able to say them. Guessing will sometimes do the trick!

It will never do the trick in Chinese.

So, for the purpose of this discussion, let’s discuss how difficult Chinese is to learn for a native speaker of English, who may or may not have learnt one other language to some extent, such as French or Spanish. The situation will be almost the same for people in Europe who have learnt English apart from their native languages.

What does “learn Mandarin” mean? Conversational fluency? Near-native mastery?

We also need to discuss what we mean by “learn Mandarin”. Do we mean to a level where you can ask for directions, book train tickets and discuss everyday topics with native speakers in China? Do we include reading and writing, and if so, do we include handwriting? Or do we perhaps mean some kind of near-native educated level of competency, perhaps something similar to my level of English?

In the other article, I discuss why learning Chinese is actually not that hard if you aim for a basic level in the spoken language. To really flip the coin here, I will lookt at more advanced proficiency and include the written language. Some of the points here are relevant for beginners and the spoken language too, of course:

• • Characters and words – Don’t believe people who say you need only 2000 characters to become literate in Chinese, including some truly ridiculous claims that you can read most texts with less than that. With 2000 characters, you will not be able to read anything written for adult native speakers. Double the number and you come closer. Still, knowing characters is not enough, you need to know the words they make up and the grammar that governs the order in which they appear. Learning 4000 characters is not easy! In the beginning, you might think that learning characters is hard, but when you’ve learnt a few thousand, keeping them separate, knowing how to use them and remembering how to write theme becomes a real problem (including for native speakers I should say). Learning to write takes several times longer than learning to write a language like French.
  • Speaking and writing – As if learning thousands of characters isn’t enough, you also need to know how to pronounce them, which is largely separate or just indirectly related to how they are written. If you can pronounce Spanish as a native speaker of English, you can sort of write it too, at least if you learn some spelling conventions. Not so in Chinese. Knowing how to say something tells you very little about how it’s written and vice versa. It’s not true that Chinese is not phonetic at all, though, and you can make use of that, but it still makes learning much harder.

• • Nothing for free – I have already written about this above. If you haven’t learnt Chinese or any other language completely unrelated to your own, you don’t know how much you have for free when your learn closely related languages. It’s of course very hard to make estimates, but let’s just say that there is a very big overlap between academic, medical an technical terms in European languages. You have to learn all that from scratch in Chinese.
  • Language variation – Chinese has several dialects and is spoken over a huge area by more than a billion people. Mandarin is the standard dialect, but there are many variations within that dialect, regional and otherwise. It’s not uncommon to have several words for the same thing (look up the word “Sunday” for instance). We also have a very big difference between formal and colloquial vocabulary. Then we have classical Chinese, which is almost like a language within the language that often spills into modern written Chinese. Even if you’re just focusing on modern Mandarin, all these other variations keep interfering and mixing things up for you.

• Pronunciation and tones – While basic pronunciation is relatively easy to get down if you have the right teacher and spend the necessary time, tones are really hard to master for most learners. In isolation, yes; in words, yes; but in natural speech without thinking too much about it, no. It’s really hard to feel the difference between syllables said with the same initial and final but with another tone. Unless you are terribly talented, you will probably keep making tone mistakes for the rest of your life. After a while, they won’t really disturb communication that much, but it takes a while and most students never get there.
• Listening and reading – In the article about why Chinese is easy to learn, I listed several things that make it easier to speak, such as no verb inflections, no gender, no tenses and so on. However, this information is still present when you communicate, it’s just not encoded in the written or spoken language. The words look and sound the same. This means that it’s easier to speak because you don’t need to bother that much, but it makes listening and reading harder because you have less information and need to do much more interpreting yourself. This is a result of Chinese being an isolating language. Listening is further complicated by the fact that Mandarin has a very limited number of sounds, even including the tones, which makes it easy to mix things up and the number of homophones or near-homophones (words that sound the same or almost the same) is very large compared to English.
• Culture and mentality – One of the major obstacles for reaching an educated native level in Chinese is the huge amount of culture you don’t know about. If you study French, you share most of the cultural history and knowledge about the world with the native speakers, and even though you need to fill in the gaps that are particular to France, the general framework is the same. When most people start learning Chinese, they know almost nothing about the Chinese speaking world. Can you imagine how long it takes as an adult to learn everything about the world that you know now through years and years of schooling, living in the country, reading newspapers, books and so on? Added to this, the underlying thinking or mentality is sometimes very different. Humour doesn’t always work the same way, what a Chinese person thinks is logical might not be logical to you, cultural values, norms and customs are different.

Does it really matter how difficult it is?

​Now you might think that learning Chinese is really impossible, but as I said in the introduction, that’s not really the case. However, as is the case with many other tasks, achieving mastery takes a long time. If you want to approach the level of an educated native speaker, we’re talking about a life-long commitment and a life situation that allows you to either work with the language or socialise in it.

I’ve studied Chinese for almost nine years and I daily come into contact with things I don’t know. I expect this will never stop to be the case. Of course, I have learnt the language well enough to be able to listen, speak, read and write about almost anything I want, including specialised and technical areas I’m familiar with.

Almost all learners would have settled for much, much less. And rightly so, perhaps. You don’t need to spend ten years or become an advanced learner for your studies to pay off. Even studying just a few months and being able to say a few things to people in China in their own language can make all the difference. Languages are not binary; they don’t suddenly become useful at a certain level. Yes, they become gradually more useful the more you know, but exactly how far you want to go is up to you. It’s also up to you to define what “learning Mandarin” means. Personally, I also think that the amount of things I don’t know about the language makes learning more interesting and fun!

Get to know French along with English and it will provide you with an edge and advantage in the international job market.

It will open new doors for you to French companies in France and other French-speaking parts of the world. It’s world’s one of the most important economies and a favoured destination for foreign investment.

Knowing French can help you gain a richer and well-rounded education. Some of world’s top universities are in France and knowing French helps to overcome the challenges of studying in France. Knowledge of a foreign language helps in a not so familiar environment and will make you stand out when you begin applying for jobs .

The impressive line-up of organisations where French is used officially is known to the world. French is a working as well as an official language of the United Nations, the European Union, UNESCO, NATO, the International Olympic Committee, the International Red Cross and international courts.

HSK is the abbreviation of Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi and is an international standard skill test for persons who are not native Chinese Language speakers.  HSK is the official Chinese exam for foreigners, similar to Cambridge for English. The test was introduced in 2010 by the Chinese government. The HSK exam consists of two separate sections: a written and oral examination. The written exam consists of six levels from HSK level 1 to HSK level 6, and the oral exam is sub-divided into three stages of HSK Basic, HSK intermediate to HSK advanced. As you apply to study in China, this is one of the requirements for Chinese taught Master’s and Bachelor’s DegreesThe correspondence between the HSK levels and the International Chinese Competence Standard is shown in the table below:

• Candidates on HSK (level 1) can understand and use some simple Chinese words and sentences to meet specific communication needs, with the ability to further learn Chinese.
• On HSK (level 2), candidates can use Chinese on the familiar daily topics for direct and straightforward communication, to achieve the junior Chinese excellence level.
• On HSK (level 3), candidates can use Chinese to complete the basic communication tasks in life, study, work, and so on, when traveling in China, can cope with most of the communicative tasks encountered.
• Candidates on HSK (Level 4) can talk in Chinese on a wide range of topics and communicate more fluently with native speakers of Chinese.
• Candidates on HSK (Level 5) can read Chinese newspapers and magazines, enjoy Chinese film and television programs, and give more complete speeches in Chinese.
• Candidates on HSK (Level 6) can easily understand what they hear or read in Chinese and express their views fluently in Chinese, either verbally or in writing.

The Youth Chinese Test (YCT) is an international standardised Chinese language test, which is directed at examining non-native primary and secondary school students’ ability to apply Chinese language in their studies and daily lives.

Youth Chinese Test (YCT) | 中小学生汉语考试

YCT consists of two independent parts: written test and oral test.

The written test is made up of four levels from YCT Level 1 to Level 4.

YCT Level 1: for children who have mastered a vocabulary of about 80. Passed examinees can understand and use very basic Chinese words and sentences, and able to study further Chinese.

YCT Level 2: for children who have mastered a vocabulary of about 150. Passed examinees can understand and use very basic Chinese words and sentences, capable of very basic communication needs.

YCT Level 3: for children who have mastered a vocabulary of about 300. Passed examinees can produce simple and direct communication of their familiar day to day topic, reach the primary merit level of Chinese.

YCT Level 4: for children who have mastered a vocabulary of about 600 and above. Passed examinees can carry out basic communication tasks of life, study and work. They can answer most communication tasks during a travel in China.

Our courses last from 4 weeks upwards and you can tailor them to fit in a number of hours to suit you. Not everyone can spend a month or longer studying in France so we also offer an online and offline course  in Navi Mumbai 

Our courses last from 4 weeks upwards and you can tailor them to fit in a number of hours to suit you. We provide online and offline training. 

The Chinese language is often considered one of the world’s most difficult languages to learn, but this sentiment is a major oversimplification. Like any language, learning Chinese has its challenges. As a language learner, placing yourself in an ideal learning environment is key to learning Chinese. Let’s have a look at both the difficult and easy aspects of Chinese.

Simpler Aspects of Learning Chinese

1. Grammar

Chinese has relatively few grammar patterns—most of which are straightforward. Moreover, there are no tenses in Chinese language. Chinese words do not change forms, or conjugate, like English verbs. This is something Chinese learners can be grateful for. Below is the notoriously unpredictable English “to be” verb next to it’s perfectly consistent Chinese counterpart:

• I am——我是 (wǒ shì)
• He is——他是 (tā shì)
• They are——他们是 (tāmen shì)

The comparative simplicity of Chinese grammar, especially verb conjugation, is clear:

• Am, Is, Are vs. 是 (shì), 是 (shì), 是 (shì),

2. Pinyin

Pinyin is the standard system of romanized transliteration of Chinese characters. It is an enormous help for Chinese learners. One great thing about pinyin in this digital age is that, you can type pinyin into your computer and they will give you character suggestions. This means that you can text or write emails in Chinese without needing to know each stroke of the character.

As long as you know the pinyin and recognise the character you are looking for, you can type in Chinese.

3. Construction/Structure

The common idea that learning Chinese means having to memorize three to four thousand completely unrelated characters makes the language seem completely impossible, fortunately this idea is also completely untrue. Learning one character opens up a whole world of other logically interrelated characters.

For example, perhaps you already know the character for fire, 火 (huǒ), and the character for mountain, 山 (shān), but you’re trying to figure out how to say “volcano”. After looking up the Chinese word for volcano on your online dictionary, you realize it’s incredibly straightforward: merely add fire (火) to mountain (山) and you get fire-mountain, 火山 (huǒshān), or volcano!

A whole host of Chinese words are constructed in this way. If you know the Chinese character for electricity (电, diàn) you will immediately have easier access to large variety of words:

• “Electric Picture” (电影, diànyǐng) = Movie/Film
• “Electric Car” (电车, diànchē) = Tram/Trolley
• “Electric Speech” (电话, diànhuà) = Phone

4. Welcoming Culture

In a sense, the difficulty and inaccessibility of the Chinese language is an advantage: upon discovering that you are trying to learn their language Chinese people are almost always eager to help you in your learning journey.

Chinese culture instills a deep sense of pride about China’s millennia-old culture and its distinctive language. In addition, there are relatively few foreigners who ever try to learn the language because of its perceived difficulty, so having even a few basic phrases and simple words under your belt will make a powerful difference in your relationships.

If you mutter a few simple greetings in Chinese upon entering a restaurant or a shop it will almost unfailingly be answered by a surprised, slightly confused face that immediately transforms into a welcoming smile. By using Chinese, making friends in China is easy. Since chatting with friends is one of the best ways to attain Chinese fluency, this is another way learning Chinese is simple.

Difficult Aspects of Learning Chinese

1. Chinese Characters

Beautiful, mysterious, ancient and tremendously hard to learn. Reading and writing Chinese characters is perhaps the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese. The Chinese written script, called 汉字 (hànzì) in Chinese, is based on the use of “logograms”—single characters that can represent an entire word.

Logographic writing stands in stark contrast to the phonetic scripts (alphabets) utilized by virtually all Western languages. In most phonetic scripts, roughly two dozen symbols are used to represent all the sounds and words in the language. This makes memorizing and verbalizing words much easier.

On the other hand, Chinese is more closely related to a pictographic script (think Egyptian hieroglyphics), which means that there are a huge number of characters to memorize. In fact, to be considered literate one should be able to recognize about 3,500 simplified characters, not to mention traditional Chinese characters. In English, if you come across a word that you have never heard of, you will at least know how to pronounce the word.

In Chinese, if you come across a word that you have never heard of, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to guess exactly what it sounds like. However, this is not always the case, clusters of Chinese characters with similar meanings often have similar patterns, these recurring elements are called radicals. Words having to do with trees, forests or wood often utilize the character 木 (mù, tree; timber), for example:

• 木头 (mùtou) – log
• 木工 (mùgōng) – carpentry
• 木屋 (mùwū) – log cabin

Other times the 木 character (symbolizing wood) will be incorporated into a character:

• 树 (shù) – tree; plant

Or even more conspicuously:

• 森林 (sēnlín) – forest

By learning to recognize these patterns, learning to read and write Chinese becomes substantially easier.

2. Tonal Language

Another major difficulty for foreigners in learning the language are the tones. English is a non-tonal language which means that trying to master adding tones to the Chinese words your trying to pronounce involves learning a completely new skill. For English-speakers (and speakers of other non-tonal languages like French, German or Russian) the learning curve is quite steep and the learning period can be very strange.

There are four tones in Chinese, five if you consider the neutral tone as well. Simply learning how to detect the difference between these pronunciations is the first challenge. Furthermore, there are many words that sound exactly the same except for an added tonal change which alters the meaning entirely. This means that the same syllables with different tones can have two completely different things.

Most beginners struggle with tones when starting to learn Chinese, but it is very important that you get a good grasp of tones. Here examples of  two potentially very awkward tonal mistakes:

• mā (妈, mother) vs mǎ (马, horse)
• wèn (问, ask) vs wěn (吻, kiss)

Other words have the same tone but have different characters. A particularly notorious example of how this feature can cause headaches for foreigners trying to get the hang of Chinese is found in the words pronounced as “Tā.” This can either mean “He” (他, Tā), “She” (她, Tā) or “It” (它, Tā). Luckily, as your Chinese level advances, you will discover that the spoken language is full of context clues which help one to distinguish between “He”, “Her” and “It” during a conversation.

3. Regional Accents and Dialects

Despite being widely portrayed as having a single language, China is in fact an astonishingly diverse country when it comes to accents and dialects. In addition to the languages of the 55 recognized ethnic minorities who call China home, there is also a stunning amount of regional linguistic differences.

Almost all regions of China have a unique dialect called a 方言 (fāngyán). These dialects are sometimes simply a slight accent similar to the differences between American, British and Australian English. More often, however, there are substantial and easily identifiable differences between the various local dialects, so much so that some would classify them as being different languages entirely.

Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Fujianese are all local dialects that are so radically different from one another that most Chinese people would not be able to understand someone using their dialect if they did not also come from that part of the country.

All mainland Chinese people who attend school are taught Standard Chinese (普通话 Pǔtōnghuà or Common Tongue/Speech) and this has helped to linguistically unify the country.

This common education has not however extinguished the strong regional accents and dialects; many older Chinese citizens are not fluent in Standard Chinese or can understand it but cannot themselves speak it. This enormous variety adds an additional challenging layer to learning Chinese.

So, Is Chinese Hard to Learn?

We have good news for you! Chinese is not as hard as you may think. Many non-native speakers, at first glance Chinese seems like one of the world’s most difficult languages to learn. One reason for this common misconception stems from the fact that Chinese is based upon a character system.

Another reason is that the most common language constructs and vocabulary are quite different from those with which Westerners are generally familiar; rarely when studying Chinese do students stumble upon words or grammar points that simultaneously occur in English or other European languages.