Language Learning Resource

Language Facts: 

• Chinese learners will have to choose between learning primarily Simplified Characters or Traditional Characters. This might depend on an area of interest, but all things equal Simplified will be a little easier to learn. While it’s true that learning the characters is quite the undertaking, it’s not quite as complicated as at first glance. But to become proficient you will have to learn thousands of characters. 
• Pinyin is a standardized romanization of the Chinese language. It’s important at the beginning to learn some fundamentals with pinyin, as they will be the base for typing and pronunciation/tone. 
• There are 4 tones , plus a neutral tone. Getting comfortable with the tones is a big challenge for someone to learn Chinese, especially if they don’t speak/have studied a total language before, like Thai or Cantonese. 
• Word order is Subject-Verb-Object, like English. 
• Mandarin is a very analytic language, or to say that words don’t change based on grammatical function and instead syntax and participles are used to convey grammatical information. Because of this, some aspects of Mandarin grammar will be surprisingly simple to learn. 
• Verb tense doesn’t exist in a way a Western language speaker would be used to. There are participles to indicate aspects of verbs, like completed actions or progressive actions, but sometimes the tense in which an action takes place is left to context. 
• A challenging part of vocabulary acquisition will be measure words, that pair to different categories or types of nouns. These measure words are mandatory when indicating any amount of a town (think: two bottles of water, one pair of socks)