Speaking of Chinese Mandarin learning, many people will regard it as a super difficult task. It’s always hard to clearly understand the complicated Pinyin, four tones, not to mention the tens of thousands of characters with mass of squiggles and strokes. We all want to make it easy to learn Chinese. Then the big question arises: how? So let’s try to find the answer.

1.     First and foremost, forget all your fears about learning Chinese for a moment, and try to find the easier parts: spelling in Pinyin is phonetic; there are no verb conjugations in Chinese; Chinese do not change for different tenses; there are no complex plurals or gender to nouns in Chinese. Besides, it is said that you only need to know about 1,000 Chinese characters to be able to read 90 percent of current Chinese publications. Knowing these in mind, learning Mandarin Chinese may now seems not that hard, right?

2.     Choose different learning method for different purpose. For example, if you focus more on spoken Chinese rather than written Chinese, then maybe you can just learn Chinese online: pick up an online Chinese learning school, and find a native speaker as a partner for practice. Or more easily, just find some online videos/audios about mandarin Chinese learning lessons or some Chinese movies and repeated after the native speakers again and again. But things would be completely different if you’re learning on written Chinese. To learn that, you need to systematically study the language grammar, and start from making short sentences.  

3.     Always start from easy words and phrases, and adopt a progressive approach to learn the Chinese language. For instance, before learning the word “好 hǎo”, you start from the words “女 nǚ” and “子 zǐ”. After knowing the word “好hǎo”, you then learn the phrase “好人hǎo rén”, “好看hǎo kàn” and “好事hǎo shì” etc. And finally, you may know what Chinese means by “她长得很好看, 而且是个好人, 经常做好事” (She looks pretty, and she’s a great person who always does good.).

4.     Learn the basics well and gradually get a natural sense of the language (语感 yǔ gǎn). As we all know, the 4 tones are very important in the Chinese language, especially when it’s for a single word or sentence without any context. A slight change in the tone may cause a completely changed meaning of a word. And for grammar, for example, most Chinese sentences can always be formed with Time + Subject + Verb + Object. But you can gradually add other parts to that, such as attribute, adverbials and so on. After mastering the basics, you will then internalized them and get a natural sense of the Chinese language.

In addition to all the above-mentioned aspects, every Chinese learner may develop their own ways to make the learning progress easier. However, no matter what the way is, bear in mind that making it easy to learn Chinese do not means that it requires less effort. We always need to worker harder so as to master the Chinese language.