I need help with deciding whether to learn Chinese

[Yannbane]

I'm really sorry if these types of threads are not welcome.

Basically, I've found some interest for the Chinese (Mandarin) language and culture, but I'm still not sure whether dedicating myself to studying Mandarin is a good idea, and I need some help with it.

I have no previous experience with Chinese at all; I know my own native language, English, and I'm currently studying Latin (which is mandatory in my country), but I have read some entry-level explanations of basics of Mandarin grammar and I generally like the concept very much.

On the other hand, I have read a few articles, and I've got the general picture that it's pretty freakin' hard to learn even the essential set of characters, and that it probably will require quite a lot of work to get anything useful done.

So, if you'd be kind enough, would you tell me which benefits could I have from learing Mandarin, i.e., should I learn it? I know it's impossible to be certain, but just some speculations might be helpful.

Other information that is probably relevant:

I'm still in high school.

I plan to be a programmer.

I'm willing to spend some money on this.

I have a genuine interest in linguistics.

Mostly no one here knows Chinese, and I personally know no one who does.

[Erbse]

would you tell me which benefits could I have from learing Mandarin

Mandarin allows you to exchange ideas and emotions with more than 1 billion people.

I plan to be a programmer.

I'm a software engineer myself and the only natural languages that really count are the language of my home country and English.

Having said this, there are a few job opportunities in international project coordination, as a consultant, etc. which do require language skills.

I have a genuine interest in linguistics.

Chinese is hard. So unless you are some kind of genius it helps to be stubborn and bullheaded. It might take some decades to prove to other people that you can in fact be fluent in Chinese.

Chinese is a all or nothing language. You can give it a try for one year and then decide if you want to go all the way.

Mostly no one here knows Chinese, and I personally know no one who does.

Doesn't matter. Sooner or later you can move to another place.

You shall be rewarded with a language with the highest coolness factor.

[johnk]

There are no real answers to your questions. Only you can decide if you want to study Chinese or not. There are lots of threads on here with advice for beginners. To get a good perpective of how Chinese study looks to someone who has already followed the road try this post.

So, if you'd be kind enough, would you tell me which benefits could I have from learing Mandarin, i.e., should I learn it? I know it's impossible to be certain, but just some speculations might be helpful.

The stock answers are:

* you can communicate with one fifth of the worlds population

* China is going to be the world' next super power and everyone will have to speak Chinese in 20 years. (Though the same thing was said about Japan in the 1980's)

* China has a wonderful and rich culture, which is worth studying in its own right.

The benefits I found are:

* It is a mental challenge. My degree and various work related study programs were all much easier, although I maybe just getting old and slow.

* Chinese is fundamentally different from English and the romance languages. So I gain a new perspective on both English and Chinese. eg. the Chinese word for vacuum cleaner is 吸尘机, which means 'suck' 'dust' 'machine'. I read this in a text and understood it. Well it is blindingly obvious. But it is interesting to see how Chinese forms new words compared to how English does.

* Chinese may actually be useful for computer work in the future.

This is a peculiar one-off example, but over the Christmas break one of the Oracle databases at work stopped working. There were lots of panic and a support calls etc before the issue was resolved.. I don't do Oracle, so I was not directly involved. But after the holiday was over, I put the error message that was being generated into a search engine. On the first page of results returned, about half were in Chinese and half in English. That in itself is something that has only started happening over the past few years - getting search results for computer related questions in Chinese. The English language results on the first page all said 'contact Oracle support', or something to that effect. The first Chinese answer actually said what the problem was. If my database colleagues had done the same and could read Chinese, they could have fixed the problem about 6 hours quicker.

For someone in high school, it is a very difficult choice, deciding what to invest time and money in for study. It is easier for us oldies, to me Chinese is just a hobby or an indulgence.

I wish you luck.

[li3wei1]

Mostly no one here knows Chinese, and I personally know no one who does.

I bet if you look, you'll find some.

[Shelley]

I have to agree with all that has been said already.

I have been learning Chinese for the last twenty years or so because i love it. I have no need to learn it, for health reasons

i will never be able to go to China, and I don't use it at work.

I think there are two groups, those that need to and those that want to.

It is hard to advise you but why not try it for a while, you may find that can't get enough and really enjoy it, or if the worst comes to the worst you will find its not for you and you can stop. Its not wrong to stop

Good luck

Shelley

[thechamp]

I think a lot of people who really enjoy studying Chinese enjoyed doodling or sketching or something when they were younger. If you like that kind of thing, then practicing characters is quite a pleasant activity. Think about what you enjoy doing now, and see if any of those things relate to studying chinese

[athens33]

In order to learn chinese you must invest money and time.

let s say you have the money to spend...I dont know about dollars but 800 euros per year are ok in class lessons (not private)

Time 3+3 hours (2 lessons each week ) and 5 hours of study by yourself + extra time for revision = 12 + hours per week

If you don t speak french or german.....which are basic languages in Europe....don t try it.

Invest your time in easier languages....you may learn 3 or 4 .....of them...

People who invest time in Chinese are...according to my experience....

1) military people....that want to go to embassies abrod..

2) translators

3) business people that export and import things from China

4) people that work for shipping companies. They talk with china 24 per day...Although they use english and not chinese

But shipping companies send people to china to check on the chinese people who built their ships....These men (if they stay in

china over a year they meet a chinese woman and through here....learn chinese....They also send her do the shopping because natives

give other prices to foreigners )

5) students that find scholarships from the chinese government....history students...etc.

6)people who are interested in martial arts...in their medicine....etc....

I think that the top people in programming come from India....but i am not sure about that.

Making friends with chinese or japanese people , in my opinion, is very difficult.

[Scoobyqueen]

You shall be rewarded with a language with the highest coolness factor.

• 
  

Does this mean other people admire you for being able to speak Mandarin? :-)

I think it is just as admirable when Chinese people come to Europe and they are able to achieve fluency within a year or two or a high level of written fluency. I presume it is just as hard for them to learn, say German or French.

• 
  

[陳德聰]

If you're into linguistics, Mandarin regularly stumps western-centric linguistic theory and has lots of room for exploration.

[Yannbane]

Thanks a lot for all the suggestions and information.

I have decided to give Mandarin a go. I just need to resolve some of my current issues, and then I'll see where can I fit it into my schedule.

In the meantime, I have a real question... Everyone keeps saying that it is very hard to learn Mandarin. Where exactly does this difficulty arise from? E.g. the grammar of my native tongue seems more complex and much harder to learn to me, even though I am a native speaker. There's no definite order of words in a sentence (like SVO), and a lot of information is relayed with heavy use of inflection, which Mandarin doesn't have. Are the characters the biggest issue here? Or the size of the needed vocabulary?

I could be wrong, though, I've gathered this information on Mandarin in half an hour of browsing the web.

[imron]

If you count being able to read when you say 'learn' Mandarin (and I believe this is a reasonable thing to assume), then IMO the major difficulty comes from the fact that you simply have to memorise thousands of characters just to achieve basic competency, and there's no way around this.

This is actually not such a difficult thing (and certain tools such as flashcard software can make it easier), but it does take continued and sustained effort over a number of years, and that's just to achieve *basic* competency. It can be very easy to get disillusioned along the way, and it's quite common for people to give up because it can feel like you aren't making any progress when you still can't read a newspaper even though you've been learning the language for 2 years.

[Lu]

What I initially found very difficult in learning Mandarin was the fact that it's totally different from European languages. I speak Dutch and learned English, French, German and some Latin and Greek in secondary school, all of which have a vocabulary that is at least a little bit related to Dutch or to each other. For Chinese, nothing can be guessed and learning vocabulary at the beginning is just rote memorisation.

Then there is the characters vs. words thing: supposedly you can read the newspaper when you know 2000 characters, but what they don't tell you (although by now you can read it in many places) is that you need to learn words too.

And when you do know the words, there is still the matter of grammar: I was 'done' learning Chinese grammar after one year in university, which is to say we had finished the entire textbook, leaving huge parts of the language that you don't know the rules for because quite possibly nobody has written them down yet and if you ask a Chinese person why xyz is wrong and zyx is right, they'll say Well, we just don't say it like that.

So these are some things that make Chinese difficult to learn for me. On the other hand, in week two or so at university I was practising my characters and was so damn happy at the thought that this was what I would get to do for the next four years. I still enjoy it and I'm still happy that Chinese enables me to enjoy all kinds of things I'd never have found without it (although that goes for every big but weird language).

You mention you have money to spend on this, that is helpful, but time is a bigger issue. Especially at the beginning you'll need to put many hours into it. Do you have that time? Studying only one or two hours a week is not going to advance you much. If you don't have time, you may want to pick up another language and/or learn Chinese at some later point.

Good luck!

[dwq]

Another difficulty mentioned in threads similar to this is the linguistic distance between your native tongue and the one you'll be learning. e.g. If you're learning French and forgot a word but you know the English one, it might be similar and reminds you of the correct French word. This is not the case for English and Chinese so it'll take more effort before you can start carrying out basic tasks in Chinese.

[querido]

"Where exactly does this difficulty arise from?"

Would you like to hear how I experienced it?

In the beginning, that "thousands of characters/words" prerequisite looked almost impossible.

Then it was a thrill to realize that with the flashcard program I really could do it.

After about three years (I took some wrong turns; it need not take you that long) I found myself knowing thousands of words without having any useable language skills in real life. This dawned on me slowly, and with some reluctance that thrill was replaced by the realization that, for me, learning those words was not the hard part; it was the easy part.

It was the easy part for me because learning words can be like a mechanical process; I can force them in and I know that with the flashcard program I can make them stick. I can do this "all by myself", and that suits my personality. But to be useable in real life, each word needs an additional spark that can't be forced (and that I experience as sort of magical): in conversation I know I know some word and I dredge it up with some effort and use it, and -sometimes- it comes to life and thereafter serves as one of the words that I can really use on the fly. I can't force this to happen. I can make it more likely, and I can accumulate a large number of these little miracles, by working hard for many hours in real conversation (or pseudo-real as in a tutorial session).

And so, reluctantly, I found a tutor, and I was lucky that the tutor and her family became my friends. So, in the last two years I have spent many hours trying to converse and have exchanged thousands of texts. During this period my most important progress has not been so measurable (because I supposedly already knew these words), but it has been for me absolutely essential.

So, when you said that you were willing to spend some money, I thought I would advise you to try to find such friends (who might at least at first be doing it for money).

It turns out that these friendships serve as my reward for all of this study, and so I'm very lucky to be able to say that it has been worth it for me.

[renzhe]

Everyone keeps saying that it is very hard to learn Mandarin. Where exactly does this difficulty arise from? E.g. the grammar of my native tongue seems more complex and much harder to learn to me, even though I am a native speaker. There's no definite order of words in a sentence (like SVO), and a lot of information is relayed with heavy use of inflection, which Mandarin doesn't have. Are the characters the biggest issue here? Or the size of the needed vocabulary?

There are several things that are tricky:

1) writing system

2) lack of cognates

3) listening is hard due to weak stress, short words, and the fact that much of the information is in tones

4) instead of learning rules of inflection (which is hard), you learn thousands of different grammar patterns (which is also hard)

5) unlike most languages, the more you study, the harder it seems to get

Compared to a European language, you must spend several years on characters, you must learn many more words (no Latin, no Greek, very few loanwords), and you have to fight your way through listening for a few years, one word at a time.

It's a very cool language, though.

[Silent]

Where exactly does this difficulty arise from?

Personally I think intrinsicly Chinese is not that hard compared to other languages. A lot of the difficulties in other languages are not present in Chinese. At the same time Chinese gives difficulties where other languages don't.

IMHO the two major reasons Chinese is often perceived as difficult are:

- The Chinese language is lingistically distant from western languages.

- A relatively large disconnect between the spoken and written language.

[Erbse]

Everyone keeps saying that it is very hard to learn Mandarin.

I see 3 challenges (plus one extra for you):

Have you ever thought about learning Spanish. Have a look at these Spanish words: "aeropuerto", "disastre", ... If you decide to learn Spanish, you get roughly 1000 words for free from day 1 of your studies.

And while you are trying out your newly learned Spanish skills, you might talk about South America, Tapas and Santa Clause. You have a lot of common cultural background with Spanish speaking people. But to talk to Chinese also means to learn the basics of the Chinese cultural heritage.

While Chinese characters are beautiful, they are not very phonetic. By hearing a word, you most probably won't know how to write it. And when you read a character, you often don't know how to pronounce it. Basically you learn two languages, one spoken, one written.

Depending on where you live, speaking practice can be difficult when there are only few native speakers available. The internet and money can help, but overall the situation for Spanish learners is better in the western world.

[Yannbane]

Wow this forum seems to be really active...

Thanks a lot for all your clarifications.

However, they're putting me off from learning Chinese, for now.

I think that at this point in life, focusing on my mandatory studies is a priority, and that I simply wont have the time that is needed to make any progress.

However, once I find myself in a more relaxed situation, this will definitely become of interest again. Probably when I'm out of high school (although, after that, there's university etc).

[Zhao Hanqing]

China is going forward, and in 20 years will probably supersede US as the sole superpower, so learning Chinese can be very rewarding. It will enrich your life and even change your way of thinking.