Many foreigners find that Chinese is difficult, but it is not difficult in fact. This article writes out the difficulties of Chinese. I hope you don’t worry about these difficulties when you learn Chinese. If you think it’s difficult, just skip it, time will let you know everything about Chinese.
Chinese is the only word in the world that still uses ideograms, which means using graphic symbols to represent language instead of syllables. The meaning of a word is expressed by shape, while the words of other countries are expressed by pronunciation.
For example, the reason why we can read a poem thousands of years ago is because we can understand its meaning, not its pronunciation.
It is not easy to learn, which means it is difficult at the beginning. Since Chinese characters are ideographic characters, every word has a very deep meaning.
Unlike English and other phonetic characters, they are actually integrated through reading and writing. If you can write, you can read, and you can read and write. Chinese characters are separated from Chinese, and you must master thousands of individual characters, while English is not.
Chinese characters actually only need to master two thousand Chinese characters (that is, the sixth grade level of elementary school), especially the most commonly used 997 Chinese characters can read 97% of newspaper articles. If you are British, the usual newspaper readings do not have a high school degree or above. Many vocabularies are I don’t understand at all.
The core foundation of Chinese learning is a single Chinese character. When forming words in different contexts or with different Chinese characters, the corresponding meanings will be given.
The pronunciation of Chinese is very special. It has four tones. It is very difficult for people in other countries to master the four tones. Sometimes you may not be able to accurately interpret these after practicing for a long time. The tone came out.
And even if it is the same Chinese character, if its tones are different, the meanings it represents will often be very different, which makes the process of learning Chinese characters more difficult for everyone.
There are also a lot of poems and classical Chinese in Chinese. Even for people whose mother tongue is Chinese, it is very difficult to fully understand and master these contents, not to mention those foreigners who don’t know much about Chinese history. It is not easy to master this knowledge.
In addition, there are a lot of idioms. Some idioms are easier to understand and can be inferred from their literal meanings. However, some idioms are very difficult to understand. If you don’t have a thorough understanding of the source of these idioms, then you want to combine these The explanation of idioms is also very difficult to memorize.
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Chinese is easier to learn than English