Frequently I’ve heard my students or anyone who is interested in learning Mandarin complaining: “Learning Oriental is so hard, I can’t even pronounce properly and the characters are complicated compare to English.” Yes I concur that Chinese is hard, but the hardest thing I found is to obtain the learning process started effectively, and achieve a good foundation of basic knowledge and skills. Then once students is on the right track, learning Chinese becomes much easier the more you study.
CAN I suggest some key suggestions to make things easier for the first time learners?
First of all, for the fundamentals, you can find 4 tones in Mandarin Chinese, and each character must pronounce with 1 of these 4 tones. Without knowing this, pronouncing Chinese can be quite difficult. To be able to master the pronunciations of Chinese characters, then learning and practicing the tones is probably the keys.
Second, the pronunciations of Mandarin Oriental are represented with alphabets written in Latin, to create Pinyin. That’s why so many people find Chinese names written in English hard to pronounce, as you need to pronounce them as Latin instead. So the hard part is actually to keep in mind the Latin pronunciations of English letters, and use them to pronounce just about every Chinese character with the tones, when they are written in Pinyin.
The Chinese characters themselves cannot be pronounced directly, since they were evolved into a language from ancient drawings within the last 5000 years. To pronounce a Chinese character, you need to know its Pinyin – alphabets written in Latin letters, together with its tones. And then when you memorize a Chinese character, you must remember what it appears like, so how exactly does it pronounce with the right tone, and what does it mean. This may sound hard in the beginning, but with practice, it is simple to raise the speed to 10 characters per day. I recommend learning the characters by means of words and sentences, so as to relate and practice what you have learned immediately, even though you are learning at the speed of just one 1 sentence per day. In the event that you persist the training process long enough, eventually you will be able to master more than 2000 Chinese characters in a year’s time, or quite simply, 300 sentences, that is enough for basic everyday conversations.
With regards to writing Chinese characters, I would recommend never to pursuit this skill in the beginning. The reason being that: unless this skill is completely needed, it is possible to type Chinese characters on some type of computer using Pinyin, which is much easier. However, to learn the writing skills, you need to study the components and the structures of Chinese characters first, and then practice the hand writing in writing. This can increase your efforts of learning Chinese tremendously, and can take years of dedication to understand the skill. While we are living in a digital age now, understanding how to type Chinese characters is much easier and more effective.
Assuming you have gone this far and spend all of the efforts to learn and practice Oriental, then things become easier for you. learn Chinese in 5 minutes have to to do is find out more Chinese characters every day, and practice them once you have the opportunity. The grammar in Mandarin is a lot simpler compare to English; all you have to is to put the characters together in a proper solution to form a sentence. Finally, I wish you have a great experience learning Chinese language, and maintain an extended term substantial passion and efforts for the study.