Chinese language is one of the language families in the world with its various variations. Chinese language is on the Sino-Tibetan family and over 1 billion people over the world is speaking Chinese. Mandarin is the most spoken Chinese Language variation today with 850 million people. Also Wu, Min and Cantonese variations are spoken by over 50 million people. Mandarin Chinese is today also known as Standard Chinese. In China, People call Mandarin Chinese as “Beijing dialect”. It was using by China’s upper class in 19th century and today Mandarin Chinese is one of the official languages in United States. How many days a person needs to learn Chinese?
Before trade ways changed in World War 2, learning Chinese was not a preferred thing in the world. But East Asia’s and especially China’s development in recent century started to took high attention to Chinese Language. This attraction also affected Taiwan and country accepted Mandarin Chinese as official language.
Learning Chinese is commonly known as one of the hardest works in the world. Beside native language is very important for the learning period of Chinese, it’s known that native English speaking people have to work hard to learn Chinese language. Also Arabic, Korean and Japanese are known hard to learn languages.
Learning Chinese depends on lots of factors. But the main factor is student’s patience. Firstly a student has to know that Chinese is not English or Italian. Chinese doesn’t have any alphabet. It has characters only. There’s not a definite number but scientists say they are over 60.000.
Secondly, a student has to know that tone is one of the most important things in Chinese Language. A wrong tone of a word may change the meaning to a different word. Chinese schools categories tones to 4 and half. Lots of students give up after learning tonal system. Westerners mostly use 4th tone category as a sharp and no up-down accent.
But there are today also some serious helpers than 1900s to learn Chinese. One of them is “Pinyin”. Pinyin is a system used for making transliterations between Basic Chinese and Latin. Pinyin is making to learn Chinese easier than ever.
Other helper to learn Chinese Language is Mandarin’s grammar. It’s easier than Western languages and a person can learn it in two or three months easily.
Toning is very important in Chinese Language and a student may choose to learn Mandarin or Cantonese as Chinese variant if he wants to learn main Chinese.
After some months with patience to learn general rules of Chinese language, you will start listening to conversations. So it’s possible to see that spoken Chinese is like a melody. It’s very interesting and melodic.
One of the main problems for students needs to learn Chinese to take some diploma is exam system. There are lots of works for a good exam system on Chinese language students but it’s still problematic. So a student may develop on Chinese language but it will be very hard to pass the exams.
Even it depends on a student’s ability, need and resistance to learn Chinese Language, when he attended to a Chinese school and work hard, it’s possible to understand Chinese Languages’ key points perfectly in two years. A student also must know that learning Chinese is hard for Chinese people.
Today in England there are over 100 schools teaching Mandarin Chinese. Also there are hundreds of schools in America. Chinese is one of the leading economy today in the world and it will be one of the most important countries in the close future.
