Question

Chinese characters, pronunciation, and classifiers, what would be some key obstacles for a beginning Chinese language learner?

Answer 1

• 1.The Writing System Is Complicated-For an alphabet-based language studying it begins with memorizing letters – usually no more than two or three dozens. In Chinese, there are more than 50,000 characters, of which an educated person is supposed to know about 8,000. The process of acquiring them is going to take years of regular, daily memorization even in immersive environments, and you won’t be able to read even the simplest texts for a long, long while.
• 2. It Is a Tonal Language-One of the difficulties you will encounter once you start to speak Chinese is that it is a tonal language. It means that every word has an additional component, besides vowels and consonants, that you have to memorize.
• It is complicated because intonation patterns are hard to shake off – what is used in English to emphasize parts of the sentence is used in Chinese to modify their meaning. This means that every time you use intonation in the way you are used to, your speech is going to become incomprehensible.
• 3.The Writing System Is Mostly not Phonetic-When you read a word in English, even if you don’t know its pronunciation, you can make an educated guess based on your previous experience, and in difficult cases, you can use a dictionary. In Chinese, you can repeat a word as long as you want without getting any idea as to how it is written. There are certain rules and patterns, but they are much less obvious than in English.