I've been learning it for a while now, it's a mixed bag for me as a native German speaker.
The grammar is piss easy, it's almost nonexistant. The pronunciation is a bitch, but it's something that you'll eventually get the hang of, even though you'll maybe never get to a native level.
The characters are the worst thing by far. There's some basic rules to make them easier to remember but it's just plain memorizing for the most part. It's shit, but still very doable.
What has been invaluable for me so far is my language partner. I used HelloTalk to find a native Chinese speaker who's teaching me Mandarin and I'm teaching her German (and a bit of English), and I really think that without a native speaker correcting you every 0,5 seconds learning the pronunciation is a fool's errand. The intonation is obviously confusing as hell at first and Pinyin (romanization of the words) can be really misleading.
Basically, it's hard as far as languages go, but very doable. Try HelloTalk, luckily for you and me there are a lot of Chinese people who want to learn English, probably more than there are English speakers who want to learn Chinese.
Find someone, talk to them, get corrected a gazillion times when you try to pronounce anything, and learn.
Edit: Recently my language partner has complimented my pronunciation a lot and ngl being able to say those intonations correctly and to read some basic Chinese sentences feels like magic it's really fun. It's just a fun language to speak.
A language app that lets me nitpick every little mistake and have someone else nitpick my mistakes? Sounds pretty good.
But it requires talking to people :sadness:
I mean if you're concerned about privacy then the main language of Mainland China might not be of much use to you
i mean, its a surveillance state
we like to circlejerk about how good china is, and while it does do some things better than our western governments, the level of control it has over its citizens compared to ours is quite drastic from what i gathered talking to my language partner
something's always gotta give, and if you value freedom and privacy, you're probably better off elsewhere
freedom to what? You couldn't claim we have more of either than they do. how many people have you heared about getting arrested or fired for facebook comments?
an example that left an impression of me was when i asked her some stuff about her government and she said she has to be careful what she types because certain words about the topic might get her wechat account frozen
thats not that big of a deal on its own but it still made me go "oh damn"
i like china, the reason im learning the language is that i wanna go there, but i would not call it as "free" as western countries, for better and for worse
keep in mind, this control it has allowed it to contain the pandemic much better too
again, i was banned from facebook for posting the all men are trash meme. We have no more freedom than them. we are just accustomed to the ways in which we are unfree
even though you’ll maybe never get to a native level.
why not?
Try out the HelloChinese app, it breaks things down by topic and difficulty and gradually builds up your knowledge so it doesn’t seem so daunting.
It's free and it starts from the basics.
You can choose whether it uses pinyin (romanization), hanzi (characters) or both and can change at anytime.
It's fucking hard. The first year mandarin class I took in university was among the hardest classes I took in a biochemistry degree, no joke.
I've never worked so hard for a B+ before.
The US State Department (yeah yeah, I know) classifies it as a category IV language for native English speakers, meaning on average it takes learners 90 weeks or 2200 class hours to reach a "professional working proficiency" score on their language exam. The other category IV languages are Japanese, Arabic, and Korean.
nah, you'll work just as hard to get good at Spanish if you do. You just gotta decide which you will be emotionally able to stick with and put in the work to learn. If it is Chinese you are more interested in doing twenty minutes of practice a day for the rest of your life, than it will be easier. Spanish might only take ten minutes a day, but if you don't have the heart to do it, it will be harder anyway.
watch a bunch of movies and see what clicks with you. Read up a bit, have some fun with it. You are gonna need as much dopamine as you can get to get through it. Otherwise mandarin is a better long term investment. Spanish is a better short term investment. It is up to your material conditions you see as being more useful.
Oh, err. Fixed that. Spanish. You probably already live where speaking spanish will let you go more places and meet new people and it an increasingly important job skill.
However learning mandarin and leaving the sinking ship that is america will eventually be a better option. Assuming we are too late for white monkey jobs, you would still end up in a country that is coming up in the world.
Whatever you pick to learn, the most important thing is using it with people in your daily life. If you know a lot of Spanish speakers or live in a town with a lot of Hispanic immigrants, you'll learn Spanish much more quickly by using it with people daily and you'll keep what you learned for longer. Doesn't matter if you fuck up grammar or vocabulary, in fact most likely the single greatest block you'll find is just getting over the fear and shame of making mistakes. You already learned at least 1 language and one of the reasons you did so well despite being like 2 or 5 years old is because you weren't ashamed to make silly mistakes.
Hi everyone, I think the valuable discussion has been had and I want to curtail the china struggle session. Can y'all stop arguing for once? Smdh. Locked cause y'all can't behave.
just do it lmao hanzi are way cooler than the latin alphabet.
in all seriousness, i would imagine it is quite difficult if english is your only native language HOWEVER basically any language becomes quite learnable if you have an appreciation for its culture and history. this appreciation has to come from somewhere - for me, it was the realisation of how much japanese stuff is owed to the chinese. another example is that i know a lot of people want to learn japanese because they watch our cartoons which is kind of :cringe: but if it keeps u motivated sure i guess?
language difficulty is also highly subjective - french is considered somewhat easy or intermediate but that language gives me nightmares.
tldr it wont be hard if you have a reason to learn that comes from within
This. My girlfriend is teaching me Chinese and I am so much more motivated for this than I've been for any other language I've looked at. All about your motivation.
lmao I remember trying to learn Japanese. I got that and korean confused all the fucking time when it came to speaking it. Thank god it's easy for me to differentiate Japanese Hira/Katagana, from korean Hangul.
Only thing I need to work on now is differentiating Japanese Kanji from simplified Chinese Hanzi, and I'll be golden. I can't read literally any of them for the life of me, but I enjoy being able to spot the differences whenever I come across them in multimedia.
It's hard. It's even harder to speak it too. Luckily enough there are apps and textbooks about it. With enough work, you're going to be able to recognize patterns and the more common characters+motifs. But, I've found, at least with my attempts to learn a language, you'll hit a barrier unless you have people to speak to, media to consume, and reasons to synthesize the language into writing.
If you can afford a tutor, it’s much easier, especially when it comes to learning tones. Start by working on everyday conversation. Practice writing basic words. The more you study, the more you’ll learn.
I speak some Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. I found Korean to be by far the hardest of all.
I love Spanish. Way way easier than Chinese, and if you live in the USA it’s so much more practical. Half the words are almost the same as English. Compared to Korean the grammar is only slightly different. So many great novels and poems were originally written in Spanish too. Incredibly rich etymology as well. Lots of the words that aren’t similar to English have Arabic or Greek roots. I would live and breathe Spanish all day every day if I could.
Spanish is way easier. Learning a language as an adult is still difficult for almost anyone, but ones in the same linguistic family are easier for a lot of obvious reasons. You can only really cement it by actually speaking it with people though, once you're at that level.
I learned Japanese, which is only slightly harder as a language, but easier to write, using a smaller set of Chinese characters. (2000 to be literate vs 8000 or so in simplified Chinese).
I studied it for many years, and then I studied Italian for one year and knew more Italian.
it's not hard. This is a thing a billion people learn a child. It is a language, it is organized to be useful if you take my meaning. It will be a fair amount of work though.
fair point, but it is an elementally doable task. I meant in comparison to learning quantum physics which is fundamentally alien to the human brain.
