It may surprise many people to learn that Chinese can be easier to learn than many other European languages. Languages such as French, German and Spanish have more similarities with English, but also share many of the traits that make English difficult to learn as a second language. Mandarin Chinese is a lot more straight-forward and simple than people imagine. Here are the eight easiest things about learning Chinese:
01 - It's not necessary to learn the Chinese characters.
Pinyin is a well established method of writing Chinese in the English alphabet. Chinese school children initially learn Chinese through Pinyin. For example, hello is written as 'Ni hao'. There are 4 types of tone marks used in Pinyin. But most other European languages would have letters not used in English too!
02 - No gender distinctions in Chinese.
Words in other European languages will usually change depending on whether the word is male or female (or neutral)! For example in Spanish you will need to learn which of the 3 words to say 'the' is appropriate for the situation - el, la, lo. You need to learn the gender of each word you learn, even if it doesn't appear to have a gender - like a table! So you can be thankful that in Chinese you'll won't have to remember the gender of inanimate objects!
03 - No verb conjugations in Chinese.
The verb 'to be' in English can change dramatically. For instance 'I am', 'You are', 'He is', etc. This is called conjugation and occurs in most languages throughout the world. These have to be learned, often by rote when they do not follow regular patterns. For example in German, 'to be' could be either bin, bist, ist, sind, seid or sind! You'll be glad to know that in Chinese, 'to be' is always shi. Verbs in Chinese always remain the same regardless of the person. So that means you won't have to learn lists of conjugations off by heart!
04 - Count in a truly decimal system.
While Europeans were still counting in dozens and scores, the Chinese were inventing the decimal system. Once you learn numbers 1 to 10 in Chinese, all other numbers follow a regular pattern based on these building blocks of 1 to 10.
05 - Verbs don't change for different tenses.
Taking the example once again of 'to be' in English, this becomes 'was' in the past tense. This also has to be conjugated once more - 'I was', 'You were', etc. Verbs will change in the past tense, future tense, and lot of other exotic tenses like the present continuous! In Chinese, verbs stay exactly the same for all tenses. So how do you let someone know you're talking about something that happened in the past? Easy, just add a timeword like yesterday, last week, etc!
06 - The names of Days and Months are based on their number.
The days of the week in Chinese don't have individual names so much as having individual numbers. If you know numbers 1 to 7, you can quickly master the days of the week in Chinese. Likewise the names for months of the year follow a simple pattern based on the numbers 1 to 12.
07 - The Plural is always the same as the Singular.
What's the plural of cat - cats. Just add an 's', its easy right? How about the plural of man - men. Hmm! How about wolf - wolves. What about sheep - well its sheep! Confused, you should be! You'll be relieved to know that in Chinese, words never change in the plural!
08 - Chinese words are formed very logically.
Once you know the meaning behind a new word in Chinese, it is very easy to remember. For example meals in English are typically called breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What is the meaning behind these words? How are these 3 words related? The answers are not clear. The words for these meals in Chinese are zaocan (literally 'early meal'), wucan (literally 'noon meal'), and wancan (literally 'late meal'). The underlying meaning is clear, as is the relationship between the words.