Chinese language: to learn or not?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In this article, we will give you practical advice on whether to learn Chinese and what considerations you need to consider before starting to learn Chinese.

The decision to start learning a new language can be motivated by both professional necessity and a desire to keep up with the trends of the times. If in the past or two centuries, possession of French or German was the standard for an educated person, then today English is confidently holding the palm. But a new player appeared in the arena, who began to gradually push back his competitors. His name is Chinese.

The Chinese language, despite all its complexity, has steadily increased the number of its "subscribers" in recent years. Every year more and more foreigners move to China to live, work, learn the language. This is connected, of course, not with the great culture or eventful history of China, but with its economy. China's new economic miracle, which became a magnet for laid-off workers around the world in the crisis year of 2008, made many inquisitive minds turn their eyes to it and ask the question: "Should I learn Chinese?"

In order to understand whether it is worth taking on Chinese or not, you need to answer yourself to two questions:

1. Why do I need Chinese?

2. How much time am I willing to spend on it?

There are many different motives for learning Chinese

1. Broaden your horizons, learn something new.
2. Learn another foreign language (for a tick, for a resume, to raise self-esteem).
3. Learn the culture of China, read philosophical treatises and ancient Chinese poetry in the original language.
4. Watch the films of Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee in the original voice acting.
5. Do business with China.
6. Enter a Chinese university.
7. Emigrate with my family to China.
8. I would like to learn some language, but somehow I am not attracted to European ones.
9. I would like to learn how to communicate at an everyday level with my fellow Chinese students.

At this stage, the most important thing is to determine your motives for yourself. Their understanding will change the content of the formulation "learn Chinese". All of the above reasons for learning Chinese will require several different preparation methods and a different amount of time from you, so it is worth clarifying the picture in advance.

Setting our goals in learning Chinese

1. In the case of learning Chinese "for fun", it will be enough to sign up for some courses and listen to podcasts, ask your friends Chinese to teach hieroglyphs. At this level, a peppy dialogue with a Chinese person in the spirit of "Hello, how are you?" may even be considered a finishing point for learning Chinese.
2. If a person wants to learn a language for a tick or to feel cooler, here everything is somehow very blurry. How do you define a ceiling and a goal? Free reading of the morning papers? Reading fiction without a dictionary? Or understanding TV news and having casual conversations with a Chinese political scientist? If you don't define your goal in learning Chinese, you will never feel full and complete. With this approach, you can learn a language all your life, but you will never achieve your goal (after all, there is none!).
3. If a person wants, for example, to read in the original the Nobel laureate Mo Yan or other Chinese literature, then the emphasis should be on written Chinese. If the goal is to read, then spoken Chinese, with its pronunciation and listening, can be safely relegated to the background, freeing up time for sayings, phraseological units, artsy literary words and Chinese history.
4. In order to watch Chinese films in their original language, good listening and language skills are required. Conversational Chinese will still be important, especially pronunciation, because good listening is only possible if the person speaks well. Watching movies requires a thorough training of an adept of the Chinese language, and the only relief he gives is that the movie can be stopped and an unfamiliar word can be watched (which cannot be done during a conversation). For those who want to watch Chinese films in their original language, it is also advisable to decide on the genre of cinema. For laconic action films, a more everyday vocabulary is suitable, which can be mastered in a relatively short time, while in historical epics you will have to sip such fanciful constructions and archaic words that you will have to spend several years to understand at least half of the film.
5. It's pretty straightforward for businessmen. Here you need good spoken Chinese (albeit even with a relatively bad pronunciation), the ability to understand and operate with Chinese numbers, knowledge of terminology in the field of logistics and an understanding of the specifics of doing business with China. Even if you are not going to negotiate with the Chinese on your own, but plan to hire a professional translator for these purposes, it still makes sense to learn Chinese. Firstly, you will in general terms understand the essence of what your translator and partner are talking about, and secondly, you will calmly do without the services of an interpreter in China, which is not very adapted for the life of foreigners.
6. If you are planning to enter a university in China, then the scope will need to be taken on the delivery HSK (TOEFL analogue for Chinese). To do this, you will need to train yourself in the HSK delivery, which can take a relatively short time. Two of my clever girlfriends took HSK levels 8–9 (out of 12) without even going to the Celestial Empire. But going to university after passing HSK at levels 4–6 is one thing, but studying there on a par with the Chinese is quite another. In order to read handwritten hieroglyphs on the board and understand the non-standard pronunciation of Chinese teachers, one passed HSK will not be enough. This is why many applicants sign up for preparatory courses lasting 1–2 years. And even this preparation is often not enough. So it is worth realizing that higher education in China is a long-term epic that will require the full commitment of time and effort over several years.
7. In the case of emigration to the Celestial Empire, everything is quite simple. Your task is to master the basics of Chinese, which will make your comfortable life possible. The good news is that when you learn Chinese at some level, you no longer need to spend time maintaining it - your level will be consistently low.
8. If you just want to learn a foreign language, for example, to develop memory, then Chinese is not the best choice, because this language requires much more time and effort than, for example, Spanish or even German. You can't take it at once: for a minimum advancement in Chinese, a minimum of 3-4 hours of classes per day will be required. If you practice less, you will not feel progress, which means that the desire to learn the language will gradually disappear.
9. To interact with your Chinese friends, you still have to work hard and invest at least months of intensive training. As I said, there is no quick start in Chinese, so the naive "How to say this in Chinese?" nothing sensible to master will not work.

Once you've decided your motive for learning Chinese, it's time to answer your second question (about timing).

The main difficulty of Chinese lies in the hieroglyphs, of which there are thousands. And not all of them are as simple and logical to memorize as, for example, 人 (rén - person), where you can see a long-legged walking man. Or, for example, 口 (kǒu - mouth)which looks like a mouth. Having learned these two hieroglyphs, the student will be pleasantly surprised to learn that these two hieroglyphs together - 人口 (rénkǒu) - means "population". How logical it is!

But these simple characters, which Chinese children begin to understand even before they master the skill of walking, are like a drop in the ocean that you drink in the very first months of learning Chinese. I will not talk about tone, pronunciation, vocabulary and other pitfalls in learning Chinese - this is a topic for a separate article.

Pitfalls in learning Chinese

The main trap of Chinese is that, having overcome the first threshold in the form of basic hieroglyphs, a slightest tonal pronunciation and at the very least poor listening, a person, with due diligence and provided that he lives in China, will show tangible progress in learning Chinese. and it will seem to him that it will always be so. This first take-off period can last a year or two. Every next six months it will seem that there is a little pressure left, that another six months - and your Chinese. But somewhere in the third year, for some reason, it turns out that learning Chinese is becoming more and more difficult.

Usually, after 3-5 years, Sinologists begin to mow the awareness of their position. Someone goes into a binge, realizing that the burden turned out to be too heavy, someone leaves the Celestial Empire in tears, someone is looking for new meanings of their stay in China, and someone pumps themselves up with a horse dose of optimism and continues this unequal battle. Only the most persistent survive, and they become half Chinese with their oriental thinking and traditions.

Another "nice" surprise in Chinese is that while in China, you will very rarely hear good, high-quality Mandarin (the official language of the Celestial Empire). In huge and densely populated China, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of local dialects that leave their mark on the pronunciation of the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom. In all 5 years that I have spent in China, I have met at most a dozen Chinese people who speak pure Chinese, and they worked on TV. Even my Chinese teacher was not without sin: she uttered the sound th where the sound s should have been.

A good illustration of how different Mandarin can sound is an episode from one show, where even the host speaks, albeit in good, but not quite standard Mandarin with a southern flavor, every now and then using the sound "dz" instead of "j".

In the time that you spend to reach a good level in Chinese (by the way, a very vague concept), you could master 2-3 European languages at a high level. Therefore, before diving into Chinese, you should first weigh the pros and cons and consider whether the game is worth the candle.