Difficult Aspects of Learning Chinese

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The Chinese language is often considered one of the world's most difficult languages to learn, but this sentiment is a major oversimplification. Like any language, learning Chinese has its challenges. As a language learner, placing yourself in an ideal learning environment is key to learning Chinese. Let’s have a look the more difficult aspects of Chinese.

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1. Chinese Characters

Beautiful, mysterious, ancient and tremendously hard to learn. Reading and writing Chinese characters is perhaps the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese. The Chinese written script, called 汉字 (hànzì) in Chinese, is based on the use of "logograms"—single characters that can represent an entire word.

Logographic writing stands in stark contrast to the phonetic scripts (alphabets) utilized by virtually all Western languages. In most phonetic scripts, roughly two dozen symbols are used to represent all the sounds and words in the language. This makes memorizing and verbalizing words much easier.

On the other hand, Chinese is more closely related to a pictographic script (think Egyptian hieroglyphics), which means that there are a huge number of characters to memorize. In fact, to be considered literate one should be able to recognize about 3,500 simplified characters, not to mention traditional Chinese characters. In English, if you come across a word that you have never heard of, you will at least know how to pronounce the word.

In Chinese, if you come across a word that you have never heard of, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to guess exactly what it sounds like. However, this is not always the case, clusters of Chinese characters with similar meanings often have similar patterns, these recurring elements are called radicals. 

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2. Tonal Language

Another major difficulty for foreigners in learning the language are the tones. English is a non-tonal language which means that trying to master adding tones to the Chinese words your trying to pronounce involves learning a completely new skill.

There are four tones in Chinese, five if you consider the neutral tone as well. Simply learning how to detect the difference between these pronunciations is the first challenge. Furthermore, there are many words that sound exactly the same except for an added tonal change which alters the meaning entirely. This means that the same syllables with different tones can have two completely different things.

Most beginners struggle with tones when starting to learn Chinese, but it is very important that you get a good grasp of tones. Here examples of two potentially very awkward tonal mistakes:

mā (妈, mother) vs mǎ (马, horse)

wèn (问, ask) vs wěn (吻, kiss)

Other words have the same tone but have different characters. A particularly notorious example of how this feature can cause headaches for foreigners trying to get the hang of Chinese is found in the words pronounced as "Tā." This can either mean "He" (他, Tā), "She" (她, Tā) or "It" (它, Tā). Luckily, as your Chinese level advances, you will discover that the spoken language is full of context clues which help one to distinguish between "He", "Her" and "It" during a conversation.

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3. Regional Accents and Dialects

Despite being widely portrayed as having a single language, China is in fact an astonishingly diverse country when it comes to accents and dialects. In addition to the languages of the 55 recognized ethnic minorities who call China home, there is also a stunning amount of regional linguistic differences.

Almost all regions of China have a unique dialect called a 方言 (fāngyán). These dialects are sometimes simply a slight accent similar to the differences between American, British and Australian English. More often, however, there are substantial and easily identifiable differences between the various local dialects, so much so that some would classify them as being different languages entirely.

All Chinese people who attend school are taught Standard Chinese (普通话 Pǔtōnghuà or Common Tongue/Speech) and this has helped to linguistically unify the country.

This common education has not however extinguished the strong regional accents and dialects; many older Chinese citizens are not fluent in Standard Chinese or can understand it but cannot themselves speak it. This enormous variety adds an additional challenging layer to learning Chinese.

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