Is Chinese Hard To Learn? (Answered!)

Mandarin Chinese is widely considered to be one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, if not the most difficult. It is worlds apart from English on every level, features an entirely different writing system, and many complex grammatical rules which can trip up English speakers.

There is no getting away from the fact that learning Mandarin Chinese is incredibly difficult.

Despite the fact that around 16% of the world’s population speak the language, it’s among the most difficult for non-native speakers to learn—especially English speakers to which Mandarin has virtually no relationship.

That said, many have done it, and you have the same capacity to learn as they do.

Let’s find out more.

How difficult is Chinese to learn?

The simple answer is that Mandarin Chinese may be the single most difficult language for native English speakers to learn.

While some may contend this, few would deny that Chinese is among the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn.

While you absolutely should not be discouraged if you wish to learn Chinese, you’ve also got to set realistic expectations for your goal.

Learning Chinese is going to take a very long time, and that’s going to mean diligent, constant study as well as eventually immersing yourself in the language and using it every day.

It’s useful to think about language families when trying to determine how difficult a language will be to learn.

This is good as a rule of thumb, though, and it doesn’t give you the full story. English is a Germanic, and thus Indo-European language—there are many subcategories between these two. Chinese Mandarin is part of the Sino-Tibetan language, meaning it bears essentially no similarity whatsoever to English.

Thus, you’re effectively starting from the ground up.

It’s also important to mention we have been talking about Mandarin so far, but technically Mandarin and Cantonese are both forms of the Chinese language.

Mandarin, however, is by far the more common, spoken by around 1.35 billion compared to Cantonese’s roughly 80 million.

Learning the alphabet and characters is another difficulty you’ll have to contend with in Chinese, which you would not in many other languages.

Tone and pronunciation is also notoriously difficult in Mandarin, and the grammatical structure of sentences is essentially as different from English as it could possibly be.

There are certainly aspects of learning it that will be easier than you might expect, but on the whole, the language is very difficult to learn.

How long, then, can you expect it to take?

How long does it take to learn Chinese?

It will vary slightly from person to person, but you can expect your initial studies of Mandarin to take around 2200 hours at least.

This is according to the FSI’s official language categories, which rank languages based on their relative difficulty for an English speaker to learn.

Chinese is a category five language, meaning it is in the most difficult category, and 2200 hours of studying in a classroom should be your expected minimum.

However, beyond that, you’ve still got a long way to go.

Once your studies are done you’ll be in a position to conduct yourself in Mandarin, but you’ll be a long way from native level.

You should then spend some years living in the country and speaking the language constantly.

If you’re able to do this, you should expect to be approaching native level within about five or six years.

There’s no doubt, then, that it’s a long process and you should not expect to be speaking Chinese with ease in six months.

But, again, there are countless reasons to learn Chinese and countless reasons you’ll benefit from doing so, so learning it is definitely worth the time.

Is Japanese harder to learn than Chinese?

Both languages are very difficult for English speakers to learn, and while Japanese is slightly easier to learn, there’s really not a great deal in it.

Both languages are about as different from English as languages get, and they will both require around the same amount of time to study.

Japanese is, by some metrics, slightly less finicky and tricky to learn for an English speaker, but not really in any way that makes one massively easier to learn than the other.

Chinese is considered the most difficult for many reasons.

Let’s look at why.

Is Chinese the hardest language to learn?

Many do indeed consider Chinese to be among the hardest languages to learn.

It has thousands of characters to learn, a wide range of subtle but very significant differences in pronunciation and tone that can make the world of difference semantically, and many other things.

For all intents and purposes, Chinese is about as difficult to learn as languages get for English speakers.

That said, as with Japanese, there really isn’t going to be an enormous difference in the difficulty of learning most category five languages.

It takes enormous amounts of time and patience, and Chinese is subtly harder in some ways, but the difference may be hard to see.

The truth is, then, you’ve got long years of patient studying ahead of you if you want to learn Chinese.

It’s an infinitely rewarding experience that comes with many, many benefits—as mentioned, around 16% of the world’s population speak it, so that should speak for itself as a benefit.

But you’ve got to fully commit yourself to it if you want to see results, and be prepared for the long haul.

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