Learning Chinese

Chinese is fast becoming a popular language to learn, but there is debate over how useful it is. Some schools are reluctant to timetable Chinese, as they argue it is too difficult a language for non-natives to master.

The script is the most difficult aspect of the language. There is no alphabet, but instead thousands of characters. No one knows exactly how many characters there are, but it is believed that there are around 60,000. The characters are pictorial, so they are based on pictures which have evolved over thousands of years, and are mostly unrecognisable now. It is common for a character to be made up of two parts,called radicals. Usually one radical is the pictorial part of the character, and tells us what kind of thing the word represents. For example, the words for cat, dog and other animals all have one common radical. The second radical in a character usually tells us how the word is pronounced.

There is no easy way to learn characters, which means that a lot of memory work is required. Though no one in China knows 60,000 characters, language experts say that a person needs to know about 5,000 to be literate.

The tonal system is also a challenge for foreigners endeavouring to learn Chinese, as the meaning of certain words change dramatically depending on their tone. There are four tones in Chinese. The first tone is a high, even tone. The second is a rising tone, the third falls and then rises, and the fourth is a sharp falling tone.

But learning Chinese isn't all hard. There is virtually no grammar involved in the language, and the absence of verb tenses, irregular verbs and relative clauses, which make languages like French and German difficult to grasp, means that Chinese is refreshingly simple in this aspect.

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