Mandarin is currently one of the three most spoken languages in the world. Learning it allowed me to discover a new culture and a new country. It makes me feel like I am now able to talk with more than one billion people and enhanced my ability to work in China.
Do you know there are thousands of Chinese dialects and only two ways of writting in Chinese?
For writting, both simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese are commonly used. Traditional one is mainly used by Hongkongese and Taiwanese people, or those early immigrants in Southeast Asia, while simplified one is mostly used by mainlanders.
The main difference is that traditional Chinese is more complex to write.
Chinese people, no matter which one they use to write, have the intuition to recognize the other. For instance, my wife Rally is from the mainland and writes simplified Chinese. She has never learned traditional Chinese but has no trouble reading it. However she can hardly write it.
For speaking, there are many dialects that are different from province to province (in northern China), or even village to village (in southern China). No matter how different they sound, the characters are the same.
For example, Hongkongese, writing traditional Chinese, speak Cantonese which is also spoken in Guangdong province in Mainland; people in Northeast speak northeast dialect (东北话) which is almost the same as Mandarin only with some featured words that don't exist in Mandarin. In South China, a dialect is a new language, only local people understand.
What reasons lead me to learn this Mandarin language?
People heading to Hong Kong for a job or study would generally learn Cantonese and the ones to Taiwan learn Mandarin (Taiwan version, different tone from Beijing version) and write traditional chinese. I chose Mandarin and simplified Chinese.
My reasons are simple:
. This is the only official language in China
. This is the one to know when working in China
. Simplified Chinese is the easiest to learn
. There are tons of learning material online and many teachers all around the world
. Out of Taiwan and Hong Kong, people mostly use simplified one
. Most Chinese people who have emmigrated around the world understand simplified Chinese
. Many people in Mainland China only speak Mandarin
. Out of main cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Taipei, Hong Kong and Macau, the further you go into the countryside, the less you’ll find other tourists to help you
. Most applications and websites used in mainland China are fully and only writen in simplified chinese (Google, facebook and instagram are banned inside China)
. Rally and her family being Chinese obviously helped with my decision
I will focus on simplified Chinese also called Mandarin for the rest of this article.
How to apprehend the complexity of it and then improve
This language, like most others, takes a lot of time and efforts. So find some strong motivation before starting.
Chinese is made up of characters. All of them are unique, and each word is composed of one or many characters, mostly in pairs of two.
Each character has been designed in a different way. In some cases, its representation will give you a hint on the meaning. Some are combination of other characters. But overall, it is almost impossible to know the meaning and pronounciation by just looking at it. The only way to read and understand Chinese is actually to learn all of its characters.
However as for many languages, you will find that some words are more common than others. The main objective is therefore to focus on these regular words.
A list of those to be known has been created to help you learn the basics and rank your Chinese level. These are called HSK: starting from HSK1 (250 words) to HSK6 (5000 words). This is quite easy to find these lists online. Usually it is known that HSK4 and above will allow you to have a regular conversation. From HSK6 you can consider yourself fluent.
It is also commonly known that as long as you know most of the characters in one sentence, you will understand the full meaning. In addition, no grammar is required in Chinese. In consequence, the main objective is to focus initially on learning basic words.
Finally, as described before, Chinese is using characters from which prononciation is impossible to detect. In order to learn it fast and properly, but also to allow a fast keyboard tapping, China invented the « pinyin ». You can understand it as an alphabet in which prononciation and writing is close to English. This is nothing more than the transcription of the sound.
Every character has its own pinyin translation, and by extention its own pronunciation.
I would also add that learning the pinyin is essential for foreigners. Even it is not seen anywhere outside, it is used to type Chinese characters quick on the phone or computer.
It is very complex to memorize all chinese characters and the proper way of writing them, which you will forget in no time without regular practice. So if you don’t want to do calligraphy or handwriting, learn pinyin.Your computer will do the automatic translation to Chinese characters. Do remember what a character means when you see it. It will help check if the automatic translation is the proper one.
I personally can’t write much Chinese by hand. But I manage it quite well over the phone!
After long hours of learning it, now I understand what's the most important in this language is to vaguely remember how characters look like, their meaning, and their pinyin. The rest will come quickly with regular exercise! 😉
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It already took me some years to learn it so the best advice I can give is to practice every days and find different ways and tools to improve.
I have discovered many tricks and online sources to learn it, I will detail the most of it in a future article. So stay tuned if you are interested!
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