What Are the Pros And Cons of Learning Chinese?

What are the pros and cons of learning Chinese?

As to the language itself. Some pros. -You should be able to speak to at least 1/10 of the world's population. -Every single character is now one syllable long. You will not have to worry about pronouncing some monstrously long word that takes up half a line on the page. -Each character's meaning is connected to what basic characters make up the word. This can help you decipher the meaning of a sentence which you might otherwise not understand. -You don't have to conjugate verbs (at least, not that much). To say "I run" in the past tense, you say something like " In the past, I run" or "I already run." There is no one "ran" word. Same for future tense, and most other tenses. -Numbers are much simpler. Once you remember how to write one through nine, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, and one hundred thousand, you can pretty much write any number you want. In English, 11 and 12 are "eleven" and "twelve," so t do not follow the otherwise -teen rule for numbers between ten and twenty. In Mandarin, eleven is literally, "ten one," twelve is "ten two," and the pattern continues like that. Twenty would therefore be "two ten," translated. Pretty simple. -In Chinese, we use these "phrases," which are typically groups of four-character that add detail and description to the sentence; for instance, 人山人海 is a phrase that means that there is a lot of people, or that it is packed. The meaning of some phrases may be intuitive, but some others may not. Chinese people, in my opinion, use these more often than English speakers use idioms. -In Chinese, there is a word that denotes possession - 的. Pronounced de, it changes the word to become a possessive word, functioning similar to an apostrophe. Using this word, you no longer have to worry about previously perplexing puzzles, such as when to use who and whom. Some cons. -Unlike English, you can't tell how to pronounce a word by how it looks. So, you must be able to recognize a lot of characters, if you wish to be able to convert from the written to the oral. -The opposite is true as well; a word pronounced gives almost no clue as to how to write it down, unless you have the sentence that it is used in for context clues. Of course, you could always write down its pinyin, which is the english alphabet's method of pronouncing the word, but several characters can have the same pinyin, so it may not be very clear. -If your first language is not Chinese, or any language that is close/related to Chinese, then you will probably have an accent that native speakers can hear, unless you do something big like live in China for a few years to learn the language. -In Chinese, sentences typically have a Sentence-final particle, which helps carry the meaning of your sentence across. Each word creates a different feeling for the sentence, so if you use the wrong one, the sentence sounds awkward. -Also, in Chinese, one does not simply say, "one lion." In English, "one lion" is permissible, but you can also refer to lion as "a pride of lions." In Chinese, though, you must use a Collective noun in certain situation, when referring to a noun. Alternatively, you may use 䞪 (ge), which can be used as a collective noun for any object, but if you repeatedly use this one too many times, then it becomes apparent that you do not know the language well enough.