(The following is an excerpt from the blog onaroadtonowhere.com's latest post. You can read the whole thing here.)
So, you’re thinking of learning Chinese, are you? Great idea. Not only is it a fascinating language, but it’s also spoken by over a billion people. Learning Chinese will give you insight into the enthralling, large, sometimes beguiling nation of China. Get ready to open the doors to one of the world’s great, historic cultures.
As you maybe already know, there are numerous varieties of Chinese. The most famous are Mandarin and Cantonese. You also might know that there are two varieties of Chinese characters, the traditional and the simplified.
This article will focus on learning Mandarin Chinese with simplified characters since that’s what I did. However, I think the basic principles should apply if you want to learn traditional characters and study Cantonese or Shanghainese or whatever.
It’s a long and difficult journey, but learning Chinese is without a doubt a rewarding adventure.
Learning Chinese is Difficult
First thing’s first. There’s a whole cottage industry out there of people trying to sell you on the idea that learning Chinese is easy. Even one adorably named “Chineasy” complete with cutesy Pinterest-ready drawings of the characters. I wish learning Mandarin Chinese was a brightly colored skip through the park, but it’s not.
Chinese is not easy. It is a really, really difficult language, especially for English speakers. Anyone who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something.
Maybe I’m being too cynical. There are probably some well-meaning individuals who are just trying to motivate people to learn. The problem is that if you go around telling people Chinese is easy, what happens when those people find themselves staring at a newspaper full of incomprehensible characters or facing down a cab driver who is speaking twice as fast as he’s driving? Those people often give up.
That’s why I think it’s important to just be honest about it. Once again, learning Chinese is really hard.
However, the older I get, the more I realize that the difficult things in life are the most worthwhile. If you put in the effort to learn Mandarin, that moment when you figure out what the newspaper article is about, or have your first conversation with a cab driver will be all the more sweet. Plus, your hard work and effort will let you feel morally superior to those lazy bastards learning Spanish.
How Do You Know How Good Your Chinese Is?
The Chinese are lovely people, but they can be overly complimentary to foreigners. You might barely be able to produce a mangled “nihao” and your Chinese friend will respond with “oh wow, your Chinese is sooooo good!” So, how do you know what your Chinese level actually is?
Thankfully, there are the 汉语水平考试 a.k.a. Han Yu Shui Ping Kao Shi, a.k.a. HSK tests to guide you. The current version has levels ranging from one to six. However, in April of 2021, the Chinese Ministry of Education announced they would be updating and revising the HSK. It’s now nine levels.
This is probably a good thing, because, to be honest, the current levels seem a little arbitrary and are in need of some updating. That jump from four to five is a doozy.
Despite that, I would still recommend the official HSK textbooks. Even if you have no intention of taking the test. They introduce vocabulary in a nice, logical order, and do a good job of reviewing words you’ve already learned in later chapters. The early books are mostly dialogues, while later books have articles adapted from actual Chinese magazines and newspapers.
Though the official HSK textbooks are far from perfect, they’re the best of all the Mandarin Chinese textbooks I’ve tried (and I’ve tried a few). As a bonus, they don’t try to introduce you to any of the cornball characters, like the hapless American foreign exchange student or dopey businessman, who tend to populate most other language learning textbooks...
Read the rest of this post at onaroadtonowhere.com!