Challenges With Learning Chinese

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The Challenges of Learning the Chinese Language “The Four Tones” Chinese is a language, or a group of languages, spoken by 1.3 billion people worldwide. If you believe Chinese to be one language, rather than a grouping, it is the single most commonly spoken language on the planet. It is spoken in countries like China, Taiwan Singapore. For people interested in becoming fluent in Chinese, it can be intimidating and challenging. For example the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, Mandarin is one of the five most difficult languages in the world for native English speakers to learn[1]. The Institute quotes 2,200 hours as the minimum number of class hours required for attaining fluency in Mandarin[2]. That would mean you would have to attend Chinese class 10 hours per week for four and a half years in order to be fluent. When you look at it that way learning Chinese can be a daunting task for anybody. The most challenging thing that I have experienced while trying to learn Chinese is being able to process and articulate the four different tones correctly. What typically happens to me is that when I am listening to someone speak Chinese I have a hard time differentiating words that are spelled the same but have a different tone. I often get the feeling that my ears aren’t trained to detect some of the subtle nuances that are necessary to fully understand Chinese. A perfect example of this would be the phrase “Wǒ yào kàn shū” which means I want to read a book. But if I change the tones the same phrase “Wǒ yào kǎn shù” now means I want to cut trees. Along with having trouble differentiating between the different tones in the Chinese language, many people have trouble correctly articulating the four different tones. I sometimes get the feeling that my mouth just wasn’t built to work like this. Usually I either get tongue tied trying to pronounce the
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