5 Reasons Why Learning Chinese is Ridiculously Easy
A lot has been said about how hard Chinese is to learn. A lot. And there are indeed lots of things that are tough about learning Chinese — but this overlooks everything that makes learning Chinese blissfully simple. Let’s get into it!
No Conjugations!
Growing up in school in the United States, I was always told Spanish was the “easy” language to learn. But click this link, I dare you: https://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/ser
Nice and easy Spanish!
Know what this is? It’s the full conjugation chart for the Spanish verb ser, broken down into the “nice and easy” 142 conjugations you’ll need to know to express every variant of this verb depending on subject, tense, mood, and what you had for breakfast this morning. Oh yeah, and because this verb, like many others in Spanish, is massively irregular, it doesn’t help if you’ve memorized the 142 normal rules for conjugations, you’ve got to learn a whole boatload of new ones for this one.
Now want to know what this chart looks like for the same verb in Chinese? Here, I designed this chart just for you:
Now this is actually easy
No more wasting brain cycles on figuring out if you should be speaking in the preterite or imperfect tense! (What the heck does “preterite” mean, anyway?)
2. The Rest of the Grammar is Even Easier
It’s not just verbs. Nouns don’t decline either, as they do in, say, Russian or German. (Have you taken a look at the Russian declension charts on Wikipedia recently? If you’re looking for a good cry…)
And that’s not all. Look at how much fluff & complexity goes into the following supposedly “easy” English sentence:
She gives it to him.
We have two different third-person pronouns, he and she. Gender ain’t even binary, bro.
We have a completely different form of the third-person pronoun for “he” as an indirect object, “him”. That’s dumb.
We have a different form of the verb “to give” because it’s third-person, “gives” instead of “give.” Why?
We have encoded information here that this is a present tense verb and not a verb in any of the other totally different tenses that you would need to memorize (give / gave vs. live / lived, what the hell English?!). You couldn’t pick that up from context?
We have this annoying particle “to” that you need to throw onto the verb give and lots of other verbs as well. (To be fair Chinese has some of these too, albeit less common.)
We have this “it” here as a stand-in for a generic direct object, because...reasons.
In Chinese, none of the above is necessary. The sentence would read simply “tā gěi tā”, literally “s/he give s/he”, which communicates an identical meaning to the sentence in English with orders of magnitude less complexity. But I thought Chinese was supposed to be the hard language!
3. One Billion People Want to Help You Learn
As you may have seen from watching my YouTube channel, Chinese people tend to get very excited when foreigners speak Chinese. And their excitement serves as ridiculously good motivation for wanting to learn the language. That first time you can order in a restaurant in Chinese will feel like you’ve just won the lottery.
Speaking of winning the lottery, if you’re a native speaker of English, you’re in luck — there are millions of Chinese people who would love nothing more than to help you practice Chinese in exchange for helping them practice English, and there’s lots of free platforms like HelloTalk, Italki, and Tandem where you can find language partners.
4. Acquiring Advanced Vocabulary is Mad Easy
In English, we have lots of words like “streptococcus” which are just...wacky. You have to know the word in order to…know it. Unless, of course, you speak fluent Latin, as everyone did when these words were invented hundreds of years ago. But what if I told you there was a language where vocabulary just kinda…made sense? Where you could just read the word and just instantly know what it meant? Enter…Chinese!
So how do you say “streptococcus” in Chinese? 链球菌, aka “chain ball bacteria,” because…that’s just what it is.
Streptococcus. I prefer “chain ball bacteria” myself.
Or how about keratitis? Actually, I bet you don’t know what that is. But every Chinese person on earth knows what that is, even if they’ve never heard of it before, because the Chinese name 角膜炎 just directly means “inflammation of the cornea.” Because Chinese is such a nice and concise language, that phrase can be expressed with just three characters, and Chinese doesn’t need to resort to Greek or Latin to talk about stuff like this.
Pretty much every scientific or engineering term in Chinese is like this. Actually, in general, all vocabulary for new words that come into Chinese is easy like this. What’s computer in Chinese? 电脑, “electronic brain.” Phone? 电话, “electronic speech.” Cellphone? 手机, “hand machine.” Even common words often just make more sense in Chinese — rather than separate words for “beef” and “pork,” for example, Chinese just has 牛肉 and 猪肉, “cow meat” and “pig meat” respectively.
And this is a nice segue into the next point, which is…
5. Chinese Characters are the World’s Ultimate Data Compression Algorithm
We get it — Chinese characters are hard to learn. You have to memorize thousands of characters to get comfortable learning to read and write Chinese, and I’m not going to claim that’s easy. But Chinese people do get a lot value for all of that hard work memorizing the characters — data compression! Because each one is a semi-unique image rather than a direct guide to pronunciation, Chinese characters simply take up less ink than writing out the equivalent in an alphabet would — they express much more per unit of space.
社会 vs “society.”
近亲 vs “consanguine.”
世界人权宣言 vs “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
And intriguingly, because of this, some research suggests that Chinese speakers actually read faster in their native language than English speakers do in ours — 10% faster, according to one study. That’s a lot of extra hours in just one week, not to mention over a lifetime!
So I hope I haven’t come across as too cheeky in this essay — overall there’s plenty of stuff to keep you awake at night with Chinese, especially characters and tones. But hopefully this was a nice bit of counter-programming to keep you from thinking Chinese is an impossible language to learn!
