China is the thing at the moment. Everyone wants to learn Chinese language. Is it hard to be fluent in the Chinese language
2 Answers
I am afraid there is no universal answer to your question. Generally speaking becoming fluent in Chinese depends on how much time and effort do you plan to put into it. Obviously the more the better. I would say it might be easier if your native tongue is related to Chinese (for example if you know Japanese, you have a smooth start with reading and writing). Personally I spent a huge amount of time on mastering Chinese pronounciation, since mistaking the tones may lead to various misunderstandings.
Some say it may help if you have ever played an instrument or generally had some musical education background (cause then you had ear training and can at least hear the tones properly). Chinese syntax is believed to be not so hard to master, since it is pretty fixed (comparing to my native language Polish it really does seem fixed). There is no inflection, but you end up with hundreds of characters to memorize instead.
So is it hard? I would say yes. But it's also a lot of fun and satifaction if you manage to learn it well. I hope this answer gives you somewhat of an impression of what it might be like to learn Chinese.
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"I am afraid there is no universal answer to your question." I am afraid there is no question here.– monalisaMar 19, 2018 at 14:43
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"Is it hard to be fluent in the Chinese language" seems like a question to me– kashMar 19, 2018 at 16:14
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Oops. I thought he wrote "It is hard ..." because there's no question mark at the end.– monalisaMar 20, 2018 at 2:22
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Thanks for the response, i think i will take the first step in becoming an expert in these Chinese language Mar 20, 2018 at 11:28
All it takes is effort. You can start by learning the phrases first without minding the characters that much. There's a video on Youtube explaining how sentence mining works. You can view it here. At first I was sceptical about it, but I realized how great this method is after doing some experiments.
What I did was I downloaded Anki and created my own deck there based on Duolingo inputs. I don't do reviews on Duolingo, I just mine sentences from there and review it on my Anki deck instead as its algorithm is much better. I created fields for Hanzi, Pin yin, English Translation, Audio, and Notes (Discussion taken from Duolingo regarding sentences taken from there)
And then I also create reversed version of the cards. I just started doing this a couple of months ago and you won't believe how much progress I made.