Chinese (including its dialects) is the native language of almost 1.5 billion people. There are nearly four times more native Chinese-speakers in the world than English-speakers. English, for the time being, remains the most widely-spoken language in the world because it's the international language of business, technology, air travel, etc. However, with the rise of China as a new global economic, political, and cultural power, Chinese language skill has become an increasingly valuable asset. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to learn Chinese--it's time-consuming, repetitive, often frustrating, and, quite literally, never-ending. I love it and I hate it at the same time.
For me, the biggest challenge is learning to read and write characters. Scholarly estimates on the total number of Chinese characters vary depending on the inclusion/exclusion of historical character forms, but most experts place the total number somewhere around 40,000 (I've seen estimates as high as 50,000 and down to 30,000). One of my Chinese instructors at the Defense Language Institute said a college-educated Chinese person will have writing and reading mastery of somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-7,000 characters. The Communists on mainland China simplified most of the basic character radicals in the 1950's to make learning easier for the masses of illiterate Chinese. Taiwan still uses the complex/traditional characters which can be quite different in appearance from the simplified versions of the same character. Add to this the tonal nature of the language (where one syllable differs widely in it's meaning based on the spoken tone in which it is pronounced), and the challenges of learning Chinese are even greater. Grammatically, it's a relatively simple and flexible language--it doesn't have the tenses, conjugations, etc. that often trip up learners of English for example.
I should also clarify a common misperception about Chinese. Saying you can speak 'Chinese' is sort of the equivalent of saying you can speak 'European.' Chinese includes a tremendous number of mutually-unintelligible local dialects. Mandarin ('Putonghua'--literally meaning 'common language'), is the official language of China and the dialect spoken (with varying regional accents) by everyone in China. Mandarin originated in the Northeast area of the country around Beijing, Tianjin, etc. Outside of these areas, the day-to-day language of most people is conducted in the local dialects--Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakkanese, and so on. In most of the country, travel between larger cities results in exposure to a completely new dialect. Someone from Beijing cannot understand someone from Shanghai speaking Shanghainese or someone in Guangzhou speaking Cantonese. It's about the same as an American travelling across Europe and going from Spain to France to Germany to Italy. The really amazing thing is that even with the huge variations in spoken dialects, written Chinese stays the same everywhere. For my purposes on this page, when I say 'Chinese' I mean Mandarin.
On this page, I plan to include some of the Chinese-learning resources that I've found most useful--from text books and dictionaries to software and web-sites. As always, feel free to contact me to add to what is posted here, or to ask for more info on what isn't.
祝你们成功! |
