What You Must Know Before Learning Chinese

Is Chinese really difficult?

Although Chinese is gaining importance, many are still hesitant to learn it. They are kept away because of the unfamiliarity. The wield-looking characters and the elusive tones and sounds -- they are daunting!

So if this is what you think, you are not alone.

The solace is that there are 1.4 billion people in this world who can speak the language without any problem. This does not mean that the language has to be easy to learn because of this. It does, however, show that whatever difficulties that you are facing need not be insurmountable.

As a matter of fact, Chinese is easier than languages like English in several aspects. I'm going to talk about one of the most interesting ones: the ways to build vocabulary.

You may be surprised. But you donýt have to learn many words in order to read and write Chinese.

ýBut Chinese characters are so complicated!ý you may wonder.

In the first place, you may skip the Chinese characters at the beginning, by using the Chinese phonetic system to learn to speak. Of course, you will have to learn the characters in the process, but don't be intimidated by them -- especially at the beginning.

Second, you must understand how the Chinese words are structured.

You don't have to learn many words in order to speak and write Chinese because Chinese words are like building blocks, a character you learn will help you to multiply your vocabulary.

Every word in Chinese is made up of characters. So if you have masted a freqently-used one, you will get to see it appear again and again, although not always in the same contexts, and could be in combination with other characters. In most cases, the meanings of the words are somehow related to the character's.

As a result, although a Chinese character may be more difficult to learn than an English word, which is made up of alphabet, the moment you master one, you can multiply the vocabulary by learning the related ones quickly.

The character can be an anchor to form words with other characters. So the modifying effect can be far bigger than an English word.

Let me use an example to illustrate.

When the character ren is used independently, it is a single-syllable word that could mean people.

It can also be used in conjunction with other characters to form dual or multiple-syllable words. daren would mean adult; gongren would mean worker, bieren would mean others; and renren that means everybody, and so on and so forth. When you learn one character, you learn the seed for many other words. Even if you don't know what exactly the new words mean, you would know that it usually somehow has to do with the original character.

As a result, if you can have working knowledge of the right key characters, you would be able to become conversant in the language pretty fast.

Over the years, many studies have been conducted to find out the frequency of the words used. It has been found that the most frequently-used Chinese character, ýdeý, for example, is being used in 4% of the text. In other words, in every 100 Chinese words you read, chances are that you would see the word ýdeý appears four times.

It could sound astounding to you, but the 10 most frequently used Chinese characters appears in about 15% of the texts you read. In other words, in every 100 words you read, one or more of these characters would appear 15 times.

You may be delighted to know that by knowing the most frequently-used 500 Chinese characters, you get to see them appear in 75% of the text. You may not know exactly the meaning, because the combination of characters may have the meaning changed when used together with other characters, but you would be able to guess the meaning is somehow.

Learning 500 characters does not sound that difficult, right?

It is important to know the peculiarity of Chinese when you learn it. It would help you to find a better strategy to learn the language, and make the process less painful and more rewarding.

What we say here about vocabulary building is definitely one that you cannot afford to overlook.

Tekson Teo, writer and speaker specializes in Chinese language and culture, also a highly regarded business consultant. He was a Chinese broadcaster, bilingual journalist, translator and interpreter. He graduated from University of London with BSc (Econ) Hon and MBA, and DIC from Imperial College London. Visit http://www.ChineseOnTheGo.com!