Chinese Language Has No Complications In So Far As Grammar Is Concerned

By Author: JOHN ABRAHAM
Total Articles: 57
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Is it really hard to learn Chinese as a foreign language?Is it true Chinese is difficult language to learn as a foreign language?

Actually, I don't think so. Chinese grammar, if compared with the grammar of European languages, is much simpler. It is the complaint of English speakers at times that foreign languages like Spanish are filled with complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc) , however Chinese language has no bound morphology and grammatical paradigms are not there to learn. Form of each word is fixed and single: no prefixes and suffixes are there to verbs to show the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject. Nouns do not take prefixes or suffixes showing their number or their case. It doesn't mean that Chinese has no grammar; in the absence of inflectional morphology, Chinese grammar is chiefly concerned with how to arrange words to form a meaningful sentence. Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that's why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle.

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... You would probably say that you are far from convinced by the above. Fine, I have another supportive and authoritative evident for you. Luckily I came across a couple of days ago while reading Beijing Times a piece of inspiring news. According to a survey conducted by the Education Ministry and Language Commission of China, 90% of the present Chinese publication are allowed to be read by less than 1,000 Chinese characters. It is on 900 million characters used in more than 8.9 million files chosen from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and television, the claim of the findings of this survey is based on . All you need to know is only 900 of around 50,000 individual characters that are made up of Written Chinese to understand 90% of the material in publications of Chinese print media as they are using presently fewer characters. On the other hand, how many words are there in English? Nearly 100,000 and still increasing. Many characters in Chinese language are archaic and some of them are found only once in the whole history of the written language, as these represent chiefly the meaning and not pronunciation, unlike English words . What is known to an average Chinese graduate may be only 6,000.

Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this. I do not intend to convince you that Chinese is very easy to learn or other languages like English are much harder. What I mean is that Chinese is not as difficult as you imagined or heard about, but different from your mother tongue, but difference does not mean tough necessarily, Isn't it?What it means is that Chinese is certainly simpler than you imagined or heard about, it's just very dissimilar from your mother tongue, but dissimilar does not mean difficult necessarily, Doesn't it? And that hard Chinese idea won't be of any help in your study. Trust yourself, once that fear factor is overcome, the language is actually not that hard to learn. Wish you good luck with your Chinese language study.