The Best Beginners' Guide to Learning Chinese Language

A Quick ROADMAP for Your Chinese Language Learning Journey

 

Fundamental Knowledge About the Chinese Language

Chinese is a TONAL language using tones to express different meanings English and most European languages do not have any tones, while the Chinese Mandarin has four tones to differentiate the meanings of the syllables / words in same pronunciations. Being a tonal language is one of the biggest differences that the Chinese has from the European languages you are familiar with. Worth to note that the tonal feature isn't unique to the Chinese Mandarin. Many other languages also use tones to express different meanings on same syllables. Vietnamese, Thai & Kampuchean are also tonal, which may not surprise you as these languages were categorized into the big lingo family of sino-tibet languages. What may indeed amaze you is that there two European languages which are also tonal - they Swedish and Norwegian, though they basically use two different tones compared to the complex four in Chinese mandarin.   Chinese characters, an ideographic, instead of an alphabetic, writing system English text is a typical alphabetic and phonetic writing system, with a total of only 26 Roman letters from A-Z. You combine a few of these letters and get a "word", and the virtually infinite ways of combinations allow us to cover everything in our universe by using just these 26 "core elements" - No we all understand the things aren't so simple and easy, and every native English-speaking kid still needs to take years to practice and accumulate their vocabulary. Chinese text isn't alphabetic. It doesn't have a few dozens of letters you can use to combine and make words like we can do in most of the European languages. The smallest meaningful element in the Chinese writing system is the characters, each can be viewed as a "word" if you are looking forward a comparable concept in English language. Consider each Chinese character as a small piece of abstract drawing - actually it was exactly how it came into being at the very beginning thousands of years ago. Before the Chinese characters were gradually normalized and standardized into the regular square forms we see today, they used to appear more "representational" and each of them directly conveys a specific description of a subject / action / event / scene. "Hieroglyphic" could be an even more appropriate or vivid term than "ideographic" to define the ancient Chinese characters. How many characters are there in total? There isn't a precise or officially confirmed statistics about that, but it's said that the average vocabulary of ordinary native Chinese people is about 3,500 - 5,000 characters. Sounds like an impossible mission for you? Don't panic - being able to recognize 800-1,200 frequently-used characters is already sufficient for you to handle most of your daily life activities comfortably. Good news is that most of the dedicated learners can develop that literacy in just one or two years. Feel confident now? And yet we have a even better news: you don't have to really learn even these 800-1,200 characters if your goal is only to obtain basic verbal communication ability - Pinyin might be adequate enough to do that job for you.   Cantonese vs. Mandarin, Simplified vs. Traditional You have probably heard that there are some "different versions" of the Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese being the two most popular ones. Technically, these are just two spoken dialects of Chinese language - let me tell you that there are over hundreds of local dialects spoken in China, each differing in accents slightly or significantly from the others, while all of them sharing the same writing system of course.   So Mandarin and Cantonese, which one should you choose to learn? Consider this fact when making your decision: Mandarin is the "official" spoken language for Mainland China, Singapore, and Taiwan Province of P.R.C., and it's spoken by 1.3 billion people nowadays. To make things easier for the beginners, we suggest you to choose Mandarin and stick with it for a few years. OH another unavoidable topic is the Traditional Chinese vs. Simplified Chinese. Why are there two writing systems? Traditional Chinese, as its name indicates, is a traditional version of text/scripts that had been written by Chinese people and continuously evolved for thousands of years. Its characters often appear to be more complex and contain more strokes. Nowadays, it's the WRITING system mainly used in Hong Kong & Taiwan. Simplified Chinese is a writing system containing characters with fewer strokes and simpler structures (compared to the Traditional version). It was adopted and standardized as the nationally official written text by the Chinese government in 1950's. People in Mainland China & Singapore write / read in this version of Chinese text. So Traditional vs. Simplified, which one should you choose to learn? As a beginner, we suggest you go for the Simplified, as it's the official written text used by over 1.3 billion people nowadays, and most importantly, saves you enormous effort from learning the very complicated strokes of the Traditional Chinese characters.   Pin-Yin Previously we mentioned that Pinyin is a great tool for you to start your Chinese learning journey, and itself (without studying the difficult characters) could even be sufficient for you to obtain some basic verbal communication ability in Chinese. So what is exactly Pinyin? PINYIN (or Pin-Yin) is a unique spelling system that uses Roman letters in combinations to indicate the sound of Chinese characters, so they come in a form similar to English words with tonal indicators. For foreign language speakers who wish to learn Chinese, Pin-Yin not only serves as a "short-cut" to quickly obtain some basic ability to read or speak Chinese, but also is an essential cornerstone that will build up your absolute foundation for proper and accurate pronunciation of the Chinese lingua franca of Mandarin. For anyone who is seriously considering to take on the journey of learning Chinese, we suggest them to start that by learning the Pinyin first. [Mainland China - Most People speak Mandarin]

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MOTIVATIONS first - Why do you want to learn Chinese?

A study plan without a strong "mission statement" won't take you far. Think carefully and think twice why you want to learn the Chinese. Being clear with your objective will help set right directions, choose appropriate resources, pace yourself for efficient progress, and stick to your plan when there is a difficulty. Common motivations we observe among Chinese language learners include:

I want to do business with Chinese people, or to find a job in China
As the 2nd largest booming economy on our earth, China and Chinese speaking communities present enormous opportunities for those who seek to build business ties with the far-east market or consider to secure a decent job in this fast-developing country. However, while English is the lingua franca for most cases of international interactions everywhere in the world, the truth turns out that the dominant majority of China's population still DON'T speak English. This means that if you are able to grasp this new language or even manage to become proficient to some degree, you are well-equipped with the essential tool and edge to tap into this huge market of opportunities.

Going too deep to analyze the China's economic performance isn't the purpose of this article, but a few quick facts might help you easily feel about the potential opportunities behind them:

GDP: Nearly 100 trillion RMB (or about 14.5 trillion if converted into USD) by the end of year 2019. For the same fiscal year, United States, the world's No.1 economy, recorded a GDP of 21.44 trillion USD.
International Trade: the first half of year 2019, when the Sino-US trade war started by Mr. Trump is in a heated stage, China's total import and export value (six months) was reported at 14,667 billion RMB (about 2,300 billion USD), still seeing a growth of 3.9% compared to the same period of 2018.
Foreigners working in China: Over 336,000 foreigner work permits had been issue in 2018 only, and currently there are over 960,000 foreign nationals working and living in China.
Fortune 500 companies: 129 Chinese companies (like Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Sinopec, to name a few) had made themselves into this global list, putting China on No.1 in term of the number of companies included.
Outbound Chinese tourists: In the year 2019, China Customs Service recorded 15,000,000 times of exit/entries of Chinese citizens crossing the borders.

If you've managed to learn how to write / speak in this market language, won't that naturally put you in a better positioned to leverage the opportunities behinds these big numbers? 

[Q1& 2 of 2019, China's total import and export value (six months) was reported at 2,300 billion USD)]

 

Chinese characters look just cool and Chinese culture is unique and fascinating.

Yes we all agree that. That's why we can see many guys put this oriental language scripts in their tattoos - though not all of them seem quite appropriate in the eyes of native Chinese speakers.

As an excellent representative of graphic text, the Chinese scripts use characters originated from drawings, each of which is intended to visually depict a vivid scene - I mean, it's how it was at least at the beginning of its emerging over 3,000 years ago. The modern day Chinese characters have been significantly simplified and standardized as it needs to be, they still carry the beauty and essence of this language and culture.

The Chinese speaking community has created and is still creating a full array of wisdoms and other "spiritual treasures" - from the traditional legacies dated thousands years ago like the lunar calendars, zodiac systems, poems, water-ink paintings and calligraphy works, Feng-Shui, Kung Fu, to the modern day entertainment products like the TV series, movies, novels, popular songs and dramas. To appreciate and enjoy all these contents, reading or watching them in its original language will surely allow you to feel more of its true connotation than merely relying translators - some subtle but important nuances would inevitably be lost in the translation.

 

I want to see this world from a totally different perspective.

"The way you speak is the way you think" - this is one of the important concept in the modern cognitive linguistics theories. The different ways of thinking in different cultures are inevitably reflected in their unique languages, and vice versa, the differences between languages actually indicate some variations in the ideologies of different cultures. This conclusion is brought to us by the classical Principle of Linguistic Relativity, or in another name, Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Edward Sapir (1884-1939, one of the foremost American linguists and anthropologists of his time, founder of the ethnolinguistics) had stated with clear certainty that: the language we use can, to a large extent, determine / influence our thoughts, including our perception about this world and the perspective from which we view it.

On this beautiful human planet of diversity, we've identified an immensity of over 7,000 different languages spoken by people from varied corners of the globe. We have not created just one single perceived world in our mind, but over 7,000 different universes. It's a pity for us to see only one but also impossible to see too many (some truly gifted multilingual genius can master up to 6-9 languages). If you are looking for a different language / world to learn into, the Chinese could make an outstanding choice, as it's "another world" that resides far on the other side of the earth, boasts over 4,000 years long history, is shared by 1.3 billion people, and enables fast technical development and rapid economic growth.

To have a second language is to have a second soul.
-- By Charles the Great, the Imperator Rome

I want to get smarter by activating more functional areas in my brain

Smarter?? Are you indicating that speaking Chinese makes people "intellectually superior"?

NO that's NOT the point. Test statistics show that people with similar education levels, no matter speaking Chinese or English, demonstrate basically same IQ results. So, no one is intellectually superior than the other here.

What I mean is that - learning a foreign language does make people "clever" by some certain points, and any foreign language would deliver that similar benefit to you. With that said, picking up the Chinese language, which is an ideogram, brings up something extra by leveraging a certain special part within our brain that most other languages won't involve.

Humans have two main functional areas within brain that deals with our lingua communication functions. One is the Broca-Area in the front part, which is closely adjacent to the motorium area, and another called Wernicke-Area in the back, adjoining the hearing area. If you are a speaker of an alphabetic language like English, Spanish, German or Russian, your language processing center is at the Wernicke-Area, largely leaving the Broca-Area in the front untapped. However, when the Chinese people are speaking their native tongue, their Broca-Areas are found super busy while less activities are observed within their Wernicke-Area. Yes, Chinese speakers and English speakers are using different brain areas when processing their speeches. This means a Chinese-speaking person can also benefit significantly by learning an phonetic alphabetic language.

Literally speaking, all ideogram or logogram languages have the same feature of processing their lingua elements in the Broca-Area, but considering that Chinese is the only one of them that is still in modern-day use and spoken by over 1.3 billion people nowadays, I assume that, if giving your brain a more intense exercise is one of your purpose, it might be a wise legit choice to go Chinese instead of spending precious hours into other fancy and rare options.  

 

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Is Chinese very difficult to learn? How long does it take to achieve proficiency?

When you encounter something that is totally foreign/incomprehensible, you had probably personally mumbled these words - It's Chinese to me!    

By claiming that, some of you may have already been assuming that Chinese is one of the most difficult language to learn on earth. But actually, this proverb only indicates that Chinese is a very "alien lingo" to ears of European natives, not necessarily a one that proves super tough to grasp for learners equipped with right methods and efficient tools.

So, how long does it take to learn chinese? We've seen many cases where the students, after studying the Chinese for a few months, can manage to handle their daily-life activities such as shopping in supermarket, ordering food in a restaurant, checking in for a hotel room, making introduction about themselves, asking for help, etc., all in Chinese with confidence. Some of the more inspiring examples can be seen on certain local Chinese TV programs, where there are a few hosts / entertainers from Europe / US who speak just perfect mandarin - of course they had been in China for two or three years, but what that suggests is that it's possible for an European language speaker with strong motivation and efficient method to achieve a near native level of Chinese proficiency in a reasonable time frame.

If your plan is just to obtain some basic verbal communication ability and be able to buy transportation tickets, tell the taxi driver where you want to go, and make orders in local restaurants, so that you can move around with ease next time you visit the inland area of China, this should be a pretty easy task and you're going to make it after spending about 100-200 dedicated hours in any professional Chinese language training schools.

If your motivation is in getting a job or for business communication that requires Chinese language skills, you would need to plan for longer hours of dedicated studying. If acquiring very basic verbal communication ability takes you about 200 hours, be ready to set aside another 1,000 hours, either self-teaching or follow a teacher in a school, before you can write a professional-look personal resume for job application or negotiate about business terms in emails with another Chinese company. By this time, you should be able to identify about 2,000 Chinese characters and write (or we may say "type") 800 of them.

The HSK (Hanyu Shuipin Kaoshi) sets out great benchmarks for you to evaluate your Chinese Mandarin language skills. The goal of HSK-1 level is: the students shall be able to understand and use some very simple Chinese Mandarin words, phrases and sentences to meet the basic communication needs and demonstrate their ability to further study this language. How long will the students take to study before they can take HSK-1 test? According to the guideline, they are supposed to invest 2-3 hours a week for a continuous 24 months, in order to familiarize themselves to 150 frequently used words and relevant grammar concepts. How difficult is that for you? Not really a big challenge I guess, considering that you have had your mind set up for a long tough journey to study this oriental foreign language.

Of course I am not saying that this is a journey with only "pieces of cakes" along the way for you to pick up. Naturally, the situation will "escalate" when you begin to "step into the deeper water". As this article is specifically for beginners and my purpose is only to open the gate and help you stride out first a few steps, let's leave those difficult tricky parts in another article that you might not need to read until several years later.    

All I want to say is that - Don't be daunted. Chinese isn't a super difficult language to learn. Over 1.3 billion people have already learnt that with ease, why can't you also succeed?

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Make a Language Learning Plan that Suits Yourself

Once you've been clear about your motivation / ambition for learning Chinese, and learnt some basic meta knowledge about this language, you have probably made up your mind to embark on a challenging adventure of lingo quest. Then it's time for you to draw up a plan - eventually, good intentions amount to nothing without a plan of action.

What is your motivation / ambition for learning Chinese? Do you have mission statement on that? How many hours per week do you plan to spent on language study? Are you going to attend a local language training school, or sign up for Web-based training programs, or you have other options in mind? Interested in taking in HSK tests and get certified? Is there any possibility to travel to China and immerse in the Mandarin speaking environment for a period of time? Or find some Chinese speaking friends from your local town for easy lingo exposure?

A good solid long-term plan drawn up with all your personal factors considered will boost your learning efficiency, help you find best resources that suits your own situation, give you strength to carry on instead of dropping out when you inevitably encounter difficulty or frustration somewhere along the way as everyone would, and finally largely increase your success rate in your quest to become a fluent Mandarin speaker or even a Chinese linguistic expert.  

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"Learning Chinese" has been a buzzword these days. You may have been considering to include "learning Chinese language" in your personal development plan, or might have already embarked on this challenging yet rewarding journey with some bitter or sweet experience? This post is specifically about "Beginner Chinese".

Being in the language business for over a decade, ACE CHINESE TRANSLATION is run by a team of professional linguists. As you can imagine, everyone of us had personally gone through every step of learning different foreign languages, from a total beginner right up to proficient translators after years of investment of time and efforts. Some of our team members are able to speak and write perfect Chinese text now, while they were actually born and raised without any Chinese language or cultural backgrounds until they started taking their language lessons.

 

Related Reading: How to Learn Chinese Language in a Fast & Efficient Way