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Michael
Community Tutor
Chinese for English learners
Hello everyone! I'm Russian and I've been studying Chinese for 2.5 years. Now I'm curious: what is the most difficult in studying Chinese for English people? What do you consider to be the hardest part of it? Characters? Maybe some particular sounds? Please, share it in the comments :) And if you're not an English person but used to learn Chinese or still learning it, share your experience too!
May 18, 2020 2:18 PM
Comments · 2
Hi Michael,
I presume the difficulties English speakers and Russian speakers face are largely the same:
Pronunciation and the tones are hard to grasp at the beginning
The characters seem mindboggling to start with, but gradually you get used to them
You have almost no cognates so learning vocabulary is a slow and laborious process
There seems to be a never-ending stream of idioms, poetry and stories from Chinese history that you need to memorise to really understand everything Chinese people say
On a more advanced level, Chinese syntax, sentence structure and the subtleties of grammar are both intricate and complex, although few ever get to a level high enough to discover this. I'm only starting to understand the importance of this after over five and a half year's of study
Laurence
May 18, 2020
Tones
May 18, 2020
