Chinese Language- Below 1,000 Chinese Characters Which Allow You To Read 90% Of The Recent Chinese Publication
Is it really hard to learn Chinese as a foreign language?Is it true Chinese is difficult language to learn as a foreign language?
Actually, I don't think so. Comparatively grammar in Chinese is much simpler than that of the European languages. English speakers sometimes complain that languages like Spanish have a complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc), whereas the Chinese language has little or no bound morphology and there are no grammatical paradigms to memorize. Form of each word is fixed and single: no prefixes and suffixes are there to verbs to show the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject. In order to show their number or their case, nouns do not take prefixes or suffixes. It is not my intention to say that Chinese has no grammar; what I am trying to tell you that Chinese grammar is mainly concentrated on how meaningful sentences can be formed by arrangement of words without inflectional morphology. Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that's why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle.
You would probably say that you are far from convinced by the above. Okay, I've got one more encouraging and authoritative evidence for you. I fortunately encountered a piece of animating news in Beijing Times two days ago. According to a survey conducted by the Education Ministry and Language Commission of China, 90% of the present Chinese publication are allowed to be read by less than 1,000 Chinese characters. The survey’s claim is based on 900 million characters used in more than 8.9 million files selected from newspapers, magazines, the Internet and television. Nowadays, the Chinese media is using fewer characters, and to understand 90 percent of the content in publications, you need only to know about 900 of around 50,000 individual characters that are made up of Written Chinese. On the other hand, how many words are there in English? Nearly 100,000 and still increasing. There is one significant reason for this and that is Chinese characters focus on meaning, not pronunciation like in English, and further, many characters are primitive and a few are found only once in the entire history of the written language . It may be only 6,000 known by an average Chinese university graduate.
Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this. I do not intend to convince you that Chinese is an easy language to learn or other languages like English are tougher. What I mean is that Chinese is not as difficult as you imagined or heard about, but different from your mother tongue, but difference does not mean tough necessarily, Isn’t it?What it means is that Chinese is certainly simpler than you imagined or heard about, it’s just very dissimilar from your mother tongue, but dissimilar does not mean difficult necessarily, Doesn’t it? And that hard Chinese idea won't be of any help in your study. Be confident of yourself and once you overcome that fear factor, you would actually find Chinese language to be easy to learn. All the best with you Chinese language learning.
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