If you are a native English speaker then you are probably a victim of the same predisposed idea that I was once a believer of, that is that Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn. It was only after I decided to start learning Mandarin for fun that I realised this was completely untrue. Initially I completely believed I was biting off way more than I could chew, but since I was doing this only as a hobby with no expectations or exams to prepare for I thought "why not". I thought it would be fun to be able to say a few things in Mandarin and impress my friends with a few expressions. Little did I know that I was starting a journey that would change my life.
After only a few months, native Chinese speakers were complementing me on my accuracy of pronunciation. I will admit that the pronunciation of this language does require a bit of natural talent. However the incredibly simple grammar is what really blew me away and gave me the confidence I needed to believe that I could indeed one day master this language completely.
If you are reading this, hopefully you know nothing about Chinese, but do know a little about other languages for example Spanish or French. Before starting to learn Mandarin I was already forced to learn French at school. One of the things I dreaded about French was the endless verb conjugations that I had to learn. Each Pronoun (I, You, We, He, She, They) had their own unique verb conjugation. Which of course changed again for past or present tense. Therefore each verb could potentially have 20 or 30 different conjugations. Then multiply that by all the verbs in the language and there are a lot of words to memorize.
Of course we do have a little bit of help when it comes to regular verbs in that they follow a fixed pattern. However there are at least 100 irregular verbs in any language and those must be simply memorized.
Here is where Chinese becomes the simplest language of all. Mandarin has no verb conjugations at all! I never imagined such a language could exist because I had only been exposed to English, French and a little German, all of which had endless verb conjugations. I guess I just took it for granted that all languages had similar structures.
But one day when talking to a Chinese person "I saw the light". The logic of Mandarin is incomparable. The infinitive of the verbs never change, and to make past and future tense it's a simple rule that applies to all verbs without exceptions, for me a language learning dream come true.
For example the English verb "to be"
I am
You are
He/She/It is
Here we have 4 versions of the same verb. First the infinitive "to be" and then "am, are & is".
In Mandarin it's the same every time, kinda like :
I to be
You to be
He/She/It to be
Except the verb in Chinese is only one word/syllable (in pinyin romanized Mandarin it is written as "shi"). Using "shi" the table goes as follows:
I shi
You shi
He/She/It shi
For future and past tense it doesn't change either. All verbs in Mandarin have no future or past tense versions, unlike the Latin languages. Mandarin just uses logic and context to depict future and past. If you are discussing events in the past then logic dictates that all verbs are past tense verbs, no need to actually change their tense as we have already established that we are talking about the past. The same goes for the future, once you establish we are talking about tomorrow the listener knows that all verbs are referring to the future even though the tense of the verbs hasn't changed.
There are of course modifiers that one can use to indicate the future. For example in English we can say "I will go", where the word "will" changes the verb "go" into a future event. Mandarin has the word "hui" that acts in the same way. Just put "hui" in front of any verb and you have future tense. So easy !
Past tense also has some simple modifiers like "le" and "guo". Those words however go after the verb in Chinese. For example in English "I go" becomes "I went". "go" and "went" have absolutely no relationship with each other, not even a single common letter between them. These 2 versions of the verb must simply be memorized. Whereas Mandarin Chinese is much easier in that you can just add "le" to any verb to make it past tense eg. "I go le" (for this example I just used the English to demonstrate).
So there you have it. Hopefully you have been enlightened as to how easy Mandarin Chinese is. Don't let the endless picture words put you off because you don't need to learn how to read Chinese (I admit the reading aspect of the language is probably the hardest of all languages) in order to be able to speak it. When it comes to speaking, Chinese in my opinion is one of the easiest languages to learn as it is so logical. Easier than French if you ask me. So why not give it a go? You may be surprised too!
The author has been learning Mandarin for 6 years and moved to China 2.5 years ago in order to improve his language ability. He has started a learning Chinese blog as a hobby http://howtolearnchineseonline.com
