Before Starting: Advantages of Learning Chinese

Before Starting

An advantage for people who find it difficult to learn languages or have a bad memory is that Chinese is a very easy language to learn because verbs do not conjugate. There is no need to learn plural words. It has no gender, so you don’t have to memorize whether a word is feminine or masculine.

There are no conjugations, verbs do not change tense. Therefore, there are no irregular verbs like in other languages. There are no verb tenses. There are no articles, like “the” in English, “le/la” in French, or “der/die/das” in German.

There is no gender, there are no masculine, feminine, or neutral words. There are no declensions of adjectives, numbers, or gender; like words, adjectives never change. Chinese vocabulary makes a lot of sense.

In general, Chinese is structured in a very logical way. Once you know some basic words, your learning process will accelerate in a very short time. As you progress, you will realize that many of the new words you learn are simply creative combinations of other basic words you have learned.

Examples of Word Combinations

• 电脑 (diànnăo): Electricity + brain = Computer 🔊
• 电话 (diànhuà): Electricity + speech = Telephone 🔊
• 电视 (diànshì): Electricity + see = Television 🔊

All the words above are examples of how the Chinese language uses known concepts of a single character to form new words. As you can see, the Chinese language builds new words by combining basic meanings of characters that already exist, which usually have more than 2000 years of history.

Learning Chinese may seem challenging at first, but with its logical structure and lack of grammatical complexities, you will find that it is an accessible and fascinating language to learn.