My son's high school recently announced it was going to offer evening classes for adult beginners, who wanted to learn the Mandarin Chinese language. My first reaction was, "That's impossible! How could a native English speaker like me, really expect to learn a language as difficult as Chinese?".
I was going to dismiss the idea, but being curious and also very interested in China's growing importance in the World, I thought I should find out more.
So I enquired and shortly afterwards, I enrolled into the 12 week course. Now after nine lessons, I have found to my huge surprise that learning to speak Chinese Mandarin is actually a lot easier than you might think...
There are three big factors I have found, that make learning Mandarin so much easier than I imagined. These are alphabet, grammar and sentence construction.
1. Alphabet
When most people think of Chinese, they think of those intricate pictogram characters used for writing the Chinese language. I certainly did. And my first reaction was that I just would not be able to get to grips with an alphabet that was so different from English. The problem is that the pictograms give no indication as to how the Chinese words should sound.
Well, my breakthrough discovery was that you don't have to learn the pictograms, if you mainly just want to speak Chinese in conversation. Instead, you can use the phonetic system called "Pinyin".
This was invented in the 1950's by the Chinese themselves and has now been adopted as a standard. It is based on the Western a,b,c alphabet, just like English. This makes it much easier to learn to speak Mandarin words. You can just say the words as they are written phonetically in Pinyin - you don't have to learn and read the pictograms.
2. Grammar
Then there is the grammar - this is also much easier than you might imagine. There are no tenses to struggle with. No past tense and no future tense, just the present tense!
Anyone who has struggled with a European language like French or Italian, will realise immediately how much this simplifies the learning. In order to refer to events in the past or the future, in Mandarin you have to put a reference to time into the sentence, for example "yesterday" or "next week".
Also, spoken words are not masculine or feminine, so you don't have to learn this complexity either.
3. Sentence Construction
Thirdly, there is the sentence construction in Mandarin. This is must simpler than English. Mandarin is almost spoken in "keywords".
It is concise and to the point, with very few words inserted for "padding". For example, in English we might say, "Would you like something to eat?". In Mandarin the equivalent is literally, "You eat what?".
Mandarin sentences are usually very direct. If you said the equivalent in English, it would often be considered as very rude. But it sure makes Mandarin Chinese easier to learn!
So in conclusion, if you are thinking about learning to speak Mandarin Chinese but are hesitating, then I would suggest you just give it a go. You might be as surprised as I am, by how fast you can pick it up.
Nick Radford's writing has been published extensively on the internet and in hardcopy print. He is now writing for [http://www.countrylandowner.com] and [http://www.InternetMarketingArticleDirectory.com]
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