Is Mandarin Chinese Hard to Learn?

🇨🇳 Many people say that Mandarin Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world. And it certainly DOES have its challenges (characters, tones, etc.).

But what if I told you it has some refreshingly easy parts, too? In this video, I dive into hard and easy aspects of learning Mandarin from an English speaker's perspective. 加油！

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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 - Intro
0:25 - The “Alphabet”
1:01 - The Monsters
1:02 - #1: Writing
3:06 - #2: Speaking
5:23 - #3: Tones: Ignore at Your Own Risk!
7:42 - The Angels
7:53 - #1: Word Order Is Very Consistent
8:15 - #2: No Verb Conjugation
8:29 - #3: No Different Tenses
9:17 - #4: Questions Are Simple
9:50 - The Trickster
10:43 - The Verdict

📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:

Classic quotes said by Chinese teachers.

Chinese Pronunciation Guide – Tones (The Basics)

How to say "Elephant" in Chinese | Mandarin MadeEz by ChinesePod

What If You Fell Into a Piranha Pool?

How to say Shark in Chinese | 鲨鱼 sha yu | say chinese real human voice

Ultimate Tones & Pitch Accent FREE Masterclass PREVIEW 中 Chinese ไทย Thai 日 Japanese ລາວ Lao Việt

How to Pronounce The Four Mandarin Tones | Learn Chinese Pinyin Tones | Lesson 1

Chinese Measure Word | tiao, pi, tou, measure words for animals

[izzamga]

I'm learning both Korean and Mandarin. Korean is easy at first because the characters are simple but it gets harder because of the grammar. Mandarin is hard at first because of the characters but gets easier because the grammar is more simple compare to Korean.

[pnksmigge]

Chinese isn't easy, but easier than you'd expect if you're motivated to learn.

[kennywong]

As Mandarin words are unchanged for at least 2000 years since the start of the Li script (隶书）, learning Mandarin opens a door to have quick access to ancient literatures. Chinese primary students can easily recite poems from Tang dynasty, some 1300 years ago. This is an advantage that I don't think many other languages have. By the way, if your knowledge of Chinese words is good enough, you can even read the old literature from Japan, Korea and Vietnam, as they are mainly written in Chinese characters.

[sraddhapadharmacari]

I've been studying Chinese fairly intensively for the last 3-4 years, and living in Taiwan for most of that time. For me the hardest thing (apart from listening comprehension) is the number of synonyms and near-synonyms. It's a bit like English, where you will often find a group of words that have basically the same meaning, but slightly different nuances or usages (e.g. "change", "alter", "amend", "adjust" etc.). Chinese has the same issue, but it's so much worse than English. The amount of vocabulary you need to learn to become really fluent and literate is massive...

[thorsday]

食人鱼(piñaha) is more like "people-eating fish" because although 食 is generally paired with "物" (noun indicator) to form the word 食物(food), the ancient meaning for 食 is "eat", usually used as a verb

[vangmx]

I’ve been learning Chinese for more than 25 years, studied abroad in China, and married into a Chinese family. I think the learning curve at the beginning can be quite difficult with the tones and writing. However, I’ve seen many of my friends mastering oral Chinese very well and far faster than reading/writing. For me as someone who’s studied for such a long time, Chinese gets ridiculously difficult as a non-native learner is when you reached the native Chinese level where you’re slammed with idioms, ancient poetic references, ancient sayings, slangs, couplets and what not. In other words, you’ve caught up to the level where you’re supposed to understand Chinese as a native Chinese speaker which can be extremely difficult. Even for Chinese speakers, they may find it difficult to understand. Also, writing at a native Chinese level is also difficult and almost requires you to re-think how you learned Chinese as a non-native speaker, otherwise your writing will sound like it was written by a foreigner.

[Truthshallsetyufree]

I'm fluent in Mandarin. I work in the language. I can guarantee it is difficult and worlds apart from learning a romantic language. The grammar is not hard but if you want to become fully fluent and not be continuously frustrated because your level of Chinese is limited, you'll need 7-10myears living in China, learning and using everyday.

[yuyuan]

Chinese is a difficult language to get started with, but its ceiling can be very high. Once you're in the door, you can talk to almost anyone about anything without obstacles. In English, to get into a major, you have to learn more specialized vocabulary. In college, if a professor speaks English and you know nothing about a certain subject, you will have no idea what he is saying. If the professor is speaking Chinese, it's gonna be a totally different story.
I'm learning the forest science and one lesson was about "mor" and "mull". If you didn't learn anyting about it, you will not know the meaning of these two word.
"Mor" means "粗腐殖质". "粗" means "coarse" or "something that hasn't been processed"; "腐" means "decay" or "decompose"; "殖" means "produce" or "breed"; "质" means "matter" or "thing". Then you can get the meaning of "mor", which is "The coarse mater or things which produce by decomposition".
Also, "细" means "fine". So, "mull", which is "细腐殖质" in Chinese, means "The fine mater or things which produce by decomposition".
If you learn nothing about Chinese, you may not get what I'm trying to say. But I can tell you, if you've already got the rudiments of Chinese, you will easily know the meaning of each Chinese common character at the moment you see the character (Chinese primary school students can basically do this).
This shows that the primary school students can easily understand what "mor" and "mull" is, even they know nothing about edaphology (soil science). And people cannot do things like this in English environment.

[dalubwikaan]

I wish to learn Mandarin and Cantonese. Thank you for this video

[amj.composer]

I'm not saying Chinese is easy, but as someone who has been learning Japanese for a couple years and is basically fluent in it, Chinese seems like a breath of fresh air

[rongwu-sjws]

I am an English learner, and Chinese is my native language. In my opinion, the most challenging aspect of Chinese is the abundance of idioms and ancient allusions. With over 3, 000 years of written civilization history, a multitude of ancient stories and fables have become deeply ingrained in the Chinese language and cannot be separated. Foreign friends learning Chinese may find it very challenging (perhaps Japanese or Korean speakers might find it somewhat easier). When I was learning English, I found that references to ancient Greek or Roman stories, for example, did not frequently appear in the writings of ordinary people. In contrast, in Chinese, similar allusions not only appear in the works of intellectuals but also abound in the colloquial conversations of the illiterate. This is what I mean by internalization into the Chinese language.

[philgainey]

I first studied Mandarin in 1974 at DLIFLC in Monterey California, before it was popular. We started out reading dialogue in Wade-Giles romanization, then gradually added characters into the text. Midway text was over half characters. By the end of the 47-week course it was all in characters.

[Nath_davey]

I self learnt Chinese mandarin over lockdown from mid June 2019 using apps and youtube then I met my now Chinese wife because of that now im pretty much fluent because of lots of hard work and dedication.

[jc]

being a foreign chinese but grew up in other country...the hardest part for learning chinese is the use of tones....tones must be accurate or else the meaning will turn out differently....and you need quite a good memorization cause a character + character not all the time have the relevant meaning ....the usage sometimes is different as well

[Tehui]

Chinese culture looks really interesting. Trying to learn the tones doesn't put me off, however the thought of having to learn a new writing system does. If I was to rank languages that I want to learn next, Chinese comes third on list. I might give it a go later in life, after I've explored other languages first.

[waterunderthebridge]

6:27 食人鱼 actually more accurately translates lit. to eat-human-fish (or man-eating fish). The use of 食 as a verb is actually an archaic use not often seen in modern Mandarin anymore but very much present in archaic idioms and terms, such as e.g. 天狗食日 (lit. heavenly dog eats the sun) for solar eclipse but also in some modernly used words, e.g. 肉食动物 (lit. meat eating animal) for carnivore.
This verb usage of 食 is still maintained in e.g. Japanese which uses characters (Kanji) derived from ancient Chinese where 食べる is the infinitive for (to) eat.

[ekiners]

I am a Chinese and I think one of the harder thing to grasp is the arrangement of characters, especially shortened headlines. They swop the characters around very flexibly and you can easily misread it. I saw quite a number before but I can't think of an example now lol.

[xxxxx]

I have HSK 5 level of Chinese, which is pretty fluent for day to day usage. I would say that in my experience the speaking and listening is not hard- the grammar is relatively simple. Characters are strictly memorization for reading, hand writing is crazy hard, by far my weakest skill. Typing is okay if you know pinyin well and can recognize the characters. For my tones is a little overblown for the difficulty. I never bothered to memorize which tones words are, you simply learn them in the correct tone by the sound and hearing the difference the way native speaking talk within each tone.

[tayaholic]

As a languages learning enthusiast when i started to learn mandarin gradually deeply, there are actually also lots of other difficulties coming out besides tones and characters, the endless homophones, deep idioms tons of which are used daily, subtle grammar, well yes chinese grammar is morphologically really simple with no inflections but that also makes its structure rules very subtle and highly contextual with many unclear rules than are hard to predict because they are not strict, and so on. I thought chinese would be easier when you learn more and more just like many say, in basic parts yes but there are too a lot of foreign new concepts gradually emerging and then you realized the learning won't have an end. So i would say if notbeing the hardest, this language is still definitely, if not one of, the most time-consuming you'll ever encounter.

[CouchPolyglot]

I prefer learning Indo-European languages, I love finding similarities between languages and I think I would struggle with tones and with the Chinese writting system. I think it is doable to learn it, but it is like "how long will it take? Will it be worth it?". If you have a connection to the language or a strong reason to learn it, it might definetly be. But I feel like it is not the case for me.