Why the Hardest Language is the Easiest Language: The Attitude Approach

Whenever I tell people that I'm learning two languages they seem to think it is something incredible. The comments I get when I tell them the languages are Mandarin Chinese and Arabic are even more complimentary. People seem to think that these languages are the most difficult languages in the world and if I were to somehow try to learn both at the same time, I must be some type of genius. Let's stop right there. I am by no means a genius. Most the people I surround myself with I feel are much smarter than I am. So why is it that I can take on these two languages? My attitude.

Most people who know me, know that I like to stay pretty positive as I go about things. I try to look at the positives of any circumstance. I carry this same approach to learning a language: if you think a language is exceptionally hard, it will be. If you approach the language by noticing all of the ways that it is easy, you can have a better attitude about how you can go about learning it. For this post, I'm going use this approach to explain how the language I originally thought was the hardest language in the world is actually the easiest: Mandarin Chinese.

Pinyin

There is a whole lot of "pinyin" that will be included in this article. Pinyin is a phonetic medium of how to speak Chinese characters using English letters. It also marks the tones that you may have heard of as well. Most of it can be sounded out pretty standard with English. A few to note are "z" and "c". These are pronounced like the "-ds" and "-ts" at the end of "words" and "cats" respectively. Also, x-, sh-, j-, zh-, q-, and ch- all sound similar to each other except one is pronounced in the front and the other is in the back of the mouth.

Grammar

I'm going to start you off with my favorite part of Chinese that makes it SOOOOO much easier than most European languages: the grammar. You don't have to conjugate verbs! There are no genders with regards to different objects. The grammar is so simple to use. Here are some examples of how to say different things in English and Chinese:

English:
I am American
You are American
He is American
She is American
You (pl.) are American
We are American
They are American

Chinese
我是美国人
你是美国人
他是美国人
她是美国人
你们是美国人
我们是美国人
他们是美国人

Pinyin:
wǒ shì měi guó rén
nǐ shì měi guó rén
tā shì měi guó rén
tā shì měi guó rén
nǐ men shì měi guó rén
wǒ men shì měi guó rén
tā men shì měi guó rén

Tenses

If you noticed, the only word that changed was the noun. The verb was always the same. When you learn the verb for noun, you know it for all nouns. This also works with tenses. You don't have to change tenses for words as well.

English
This morning I ate breakfast
Right now I am eating lunch
Later I will eat dinner

Chinese
这早上我吃了早餐
现在我吃午餐
然后我吃晚餐

Pinyin
zhè zǎo shang wǒ chī le zǎo cān
xiàn zài wǒ chī wǔ cān
rán hòu wǒ chī wǎn cān

Questions

My favorite part though is that you can easily form a question with very little vocabulary. All you have to do is add a question word at the end of a sentence. The easiest translation for it would be to say "yes?" at the end of a sentence in hopes of confirmation. If instead of telling something they are American, I would ask them, "You are American, yes?" Obviously this isn't how we usually ask somebody in English, but it also shows why you may notice some people form questions to you in this manner.

English
You are American
Are you American? (You are American yes?)

Chinese
你是美国人
你是美国人吗?

Pinyin
nǐ shì měi guó rén
nǐ shì měi guó rén ma?

Tones

So let's talk about what people think makes this language difficult. People mention that they don't like that it is a tonal language because they aren't musically gifted of sorts. We actually use tones in English, we just don't realize it. "I'm Ron Burgundy?" is a perfect example of where a tone can drastically change the meaning of a sentence. In Chinese you have 5 tones: Flat, Rising, Dipping, Falling, and Neutral tone. The best example of how different these are is by using the word "ma"

Mother, hemp, horse, scold, question
妈麻马骂吗
mā má mǎ mà ma

All five of these words mean something very different. Making sure you use the right tone can be the difference between saying something or just utter nonsense. The good thing is that context can typically give you a good idea. If I was telling you about my breakfast and I said, "I ate with my 'ma' " but you were unsure of which tone I used, I'm guessing you could easily single out which word I meant to use.

Characters

By now you're probably realizing that the characters are pretty confusing. The reason pinyin was created was to help be a middle ground specifically because there is not indication of how to say a word based on the character. Honestly, when I come across a new word there is no easy method to figure it out besides looking it up. Chinese characters are graphical representations of the words. Basically, I like to think of them as cave drawings. The easiest one is for the words "person" and "big". If you look below, the first character is a very simplified stick PERSON. The second is as if the person was trying to explain how BIG of a fish they caught. These are the "simplified" characters as the "traditional" characters were much more complex and people would spend hours practicing how to write them (only Taiwan still uses the traditional characters as their native language).

Person
人
Big
大

Vocabulary

Lastly, the vocabulary is pretty entertaining. Any new words that have been created typically reside in one of two categories: loan words or combination words. A loan word is basically taking a word from another language and turning it into a Chinese word. I'll show some examples in the video below. The combination words are the ones that I really love. Basically as a new word is needed it is a combination of other words to describe it. Here are a few examples, try to see if you can determine what the full word is based on the other words that make it up:

diàn yǐng

Electronic Shadow

电影

shǒu yǔ

Hand Language (this is currently my favorite one)

手语

English:

Movie

Sign Language

Video

This weeks video I'm going to go through some of the stuff we mentioned here. I'll start by showing the difference of z-, c-, x-, sh-, j-, zh-, q-, ch- followed by the different tones. I'll finish off by saying a few countries that are loan words so try to see if you can guess which countries I'm saying without a translation.

Conclusion

When you approach a problem with the right attitude it can really effect how simple that problem may seem. We can't think that the "hardest" language in the world is the largest native language as well, can we?

Until next time.