Most people regard Chinese (mandarin) as a hard language to learn, mainly because it is so different from our European languages; the way it is spoken is very different, using more uncommon letters like ‘x’ and of course it uses characters which are very different from the standard 1-26 letter alphabet.
However, when comparing the grammatical side of common western languages like English or French and Mandarin, Mandarin is quite clearly the easier option. This is because Mandarin sentences are constructed of single characters per word, which do not change endings according to their case, gender or tense – which European languages do.
When asking a Latin class what the hardest bit about Latin is, 87.5% of the class said that the endings are the hardest part, whereas in a Mandarin class 83% of people said that the hardest bit of Mandarin was learning the characters. After asking one of the girls taking Mandarin as a GCSE about her least favourite and favourite parts, she said, “I love learning this language because there is so much culture to learn about and because it is so different from English, although I find it really hard to remember how to read and write characters – that’s probably my least favourite!”
It is obviously a hard language to compare with European language due to it’s significant differences, but I personally think each language suits a different person – if you quite artistic and enjoy logically structured sentences, then Mandarin is better for you, whilst on the other hand, if you like European languages and are good at memorising grammar, then a language like French or Italian would be good for you.
It is all about you as a person and what your strengths are!
