How Hard is Learning Chinese?

If you’re considering Chinese as a potential language to learn for school or on your own, you might be wondering exactly how hard it is to learn Chinese.
Long considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, Mandarin Chinese truly does have some major differences that make it problematic for Western learners. The written Chinese language, for one, can take far longer to learn than a language based on an alphabet, since every word has a different, unique character associated with it. Since Chinese has an estimated 60,000 written characters, that can make for a lot of rote memorization. Thankfully, only about 5000 characters are necessary to function in day-to-day life, including reading the newspaper.

In the Chinese spoken language alone, new learners have to cope with sounds that don’t exist in English and the tonal system, which can cause each word to have up to four different possible meanings, depending on the tone used when speaking the word.

Once learners get past the Mandarin sounds and tones, however, basic Chinese grammar turns out to be far simpler than European languages, since there are no conjugations and verb tenses.

In general, Mandarin Chinese is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, but with over a billion native speakers in the fastest growing economy in the world, the effort may be well worth it.