Chinese reference books. Photograph: Alamy
David Cameron wants our schools to teach Mandarin. But China’s first language has a reputation as one of the hardest in the world. Can we really expect our kids to get their heads round it? Here are eight reasons why – for a native English speaker – learning Mandarin is one of the trickiest tasks there is.
1. You’ll find the writing baffling …
Mandarin uses characters, rather than a phonetic alphabet. You need to recognise around 3,000 characters to read a Chinese newspaper. “The problem with Chinese all has to do with the writing system,” says Dr David Moser, academic director at CET Beijing. “It’s such a massive obstacle that there are people who make their careers here who make the decision just to ignore writing and reading because it isn’t worth it.”
2. … and the tones a nightmare
Mandarin is tonal. The way a word is spoken determines what it means. So the word “ma”, for example, can mean either “horse” or “mother”, depending on which of four tones it is spoken in. “Pretty much everybody learns the tones wrong the first time,” says translator Brendan O’Kane, one of the presenters of podcast Popup Chinese. “And then, after a few years, they realise they sound ridiculous.”
3. The mistakes can be filthy
The tonal system leads to some embarrassing errors. The word for “ask”, for example, is one tone away from the word “to kiss”, and the word for pen is one tone from a word for female genitalia. So students tend to ask their teachers some inappropriate questions.
4. Your progress will be glacial
“Chinese is not actually difficult,” says O’Kane. “All you need is five years and a high level of focus. You have to be prepared for the fact that at the end of one year you’re not going to be very good, and at the end of two to three years you will be slightly better but still not good.” Or, as Moser puts it: “Chinese is a five-year lesson in humility. And after five years, you’ve learnt humility and you still haven’t learned Chinese.”
5. You won’t be able to text message
Even once you’re fluent, the language remains time-consuming. “It’s so much slower to try to write Chinese on paper or digital media,” explains Moser. “Producing a simple text message in Chinese takes two or three or 10 times as long. You have to keep looking up characters over and over and over again. It wastes weeks of your life every year.”
6. Good teachers are in short supply
Chinese as a second language is a new field, and not a well-established one. “One of the obstacles to learning Chinese is that a lot of the people teaching it are Chinese,” explains O’Kane. “And they are wonderful users of the language, but they have never had to think about it from an outsider’s perspective.”
7. In any case, most of the people don’t speak it …
Although Mandarin is China’s first language, it is really only the language of Beijing. There are dozens of dialects and sub-dialects used elsewhere – and even in Beijing. “Among the dialects,” says Moser, “there are many, many accents and regional variations, and they are not like accents among English speakers, who can usually understand each other. Mandarin and Cantonese are as different as French and Italian.”
8. … and nor do their leaders
Even towering figures in Chinese history struggled with the language. “Strictly speaking,” says Moser, “Chairman Mao never really learned the poo-tong-hua [Mandarin] language.” Mao grew up in Hunan, and spoke with a strong Hunanese accent, using a lot of regional dialect. “He had lousy Mandarin,” says O’Kane. “If you listen to recordings of him, his accent was really jacked up. It sounds funny.”
Why Mandarin is tougher than David Cameron thinks
