Chinese Language - Its Grammar Is Concerned With Sentence Formation

Is it really hard to learn Chinese as a foreign language?Is it true Chinese is difficult language to learn as a foreign language?


Actually, I don't think so.  Comparatively grammar in Chinese is much simpler than that of the European languages.  According to complaints heard sometimes from English speakers, Chinese is a smooth language with no problems whatsoever with grammar  whereas there is problem with the grammar of other languages like Spanish (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc).  Each word has a fixed and single form: verbs do not take prefixes or suffixes showing the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject.  To show their number or their case, nouns do not take prefixes or suffixes.  It is not my intention to say that Chinese has no grammar; what I am trying to tell you that Chinese grammar is mainly concentrated on how meaningful sentences can be formed by arrangement of words without inflectional morphology.  Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that's why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle.


Probably, you would say that the above is far from enough to convince you.   Okay, I've got one more encouraging and authoritative evidence for you.  Luckily I came across a couple of days ago while reading Beijing Times a piece of inspiring news.  Now you can be allowed to read 90% of the current Chinese publication with less than 1,000 Chinese characters as per the survey  conducted by the Education Ministry and Language Commission of China.  The survey’s claim is based on 900 million characters used in more than 8.9 million files selected from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and television.  Nowadays, the Chinese media is using fewer characters, and to understand 90 percent of the content in publications, you need only to know about 900 of around 50,000 individual characters that are made up of Written Chinese.  On the other hand, how many words are there in English? Virtually 100,000 and still going up.  Chinese characters represent chiefly meaning, not pronunciation like English words, and that is why a lot of characters are antiquated and many found only once in the entire history of the written language .  An average Chinese university graduate may know only about 6,000.
 

Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this.  I do not intend to convince you that Chinese is an easy language to learn or other languages like English are tougher.   What I mean is that Chinese is really not that difficult as you imagined or heard about, it's just very different from your mother tongue, but difference does not necessarily mean difficulty, right?  And that hard Chinese idea won't be of any help in your study.  Once that fear factor is surmounted, the language is actually not that hard to learn,  have faith in you.  Good luck with your Chinese language study.

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