No foreign language is easy to
learn. Success requires, commitment, hard work, and stamina. It
also helps to adopt efficient methods of learning, and to be
backed by a supportive teacher, who might even be yourself. Some
people who have adopted inefficient ways of learning, and then
given up as soon as they came across a few difficulties, have blamed their lack of success on
the
difficulty of the language, rather than on themselves.
Others, on the other hand, who have put in the effort, and have been surprised at the ease with which they have been able to learn so much is such a short time, help to perpetuate the myth of its difficulty, by accepting without protest the flattery of all those who tell them they must be geniuses!
Contrary to popular belief, Chinese is not intrinsically harder to learn than any other language. It's just that the difficulties are different. What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts, or vice versa.
There are, in fact, many ways in which Chinese is much easier to learn than Latin, French, German or Japanese, the languages most commonly taught in New Zealand schools, as anyone who has made the effort to learn it can tell you. There are of course some things that are harder, but even they are not as hard as many Kiwis suppose.
The only way you can really find out whether what I am saying is a lot of nonsense or not, is to actually
Have a go!
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This page last revised: 10 December,2000