For a lot of new learners, learning Mandarin Chinese seems like a daunting task. There is a general notion that Mandarin Chinese is very difficult to learn, and learning it is an almost impossible task.

More than a billion people in this world speak Mandarin Chinese – it can’t be impossible to learn, can it?

Our primary focus here is on learning spoken Mandarin Chinese and not the script.

So, if your aim is to learn spoken or conversational Mandarin Chinese, here are the top 10 reasons why learning Mandarin Chinese is not hard:

1. Mandarin Chinese has no tenses

   While in English or other European languages, we struggle to remember all the verb forms and tenses to talk about the past, future, etc., in Mandarin Chinese we can use the same word for all tenses.
   There are some particles that are used to indicate the time of the action – but it is much easier than remembering verb forms for so many tenses!

   So, while in English we say go, went, gone, going; in Mandarin Chinese, we just use  Qù 

2. Nouns do not have gender!

   In spoken Mandarin Chinese, there is no gender distinction in personal pronouns:

   the pronoun tā (他) can mean ‘he’, ‘she’, or ‘it’

3. Nouns do not have plurals either!

   You don’t have to worry about adding the -s or -es! The plural form of the word remains the same as its singular form in Mandarin! Mandarin usually employs quantity words or measure words to indicate plurality.  Lets take an example:

   1 Friend = Yīgè péngyǒu (1 = Yī)
   3 friends =  Sān gè péngyǒu ( 3 = Sān)

   The words ‘friend’ and ‘friends’ both translate as péngyǒu. ‘gè’ is a measure word.

4. Mandarin Chinese has no articles

   No need to worry about the ‘a’, ‘an’, or ‘the’. There are some measure words which are quite easy to learn

5. Things like days of the week, names of months are extremely intuitive.

   These names use numbers extremely effectively. For example:

   Month =  Yuè
   January = Yī yuè (1 Month)
   February = Èr yuè (2 Month)
   March = Sān yuè (3 Month)

   Similarly,

   Week = Xīngqí
   Monday = Xīngqí yī (week 1)
   Tuesday = Xīngqí‘èr (week 2)
   Wednesday = Xīngqí sān (week 3)

   Simple, isn’t it?

6. Vocabulary is also quite intuitive

   Nationalities are simply country name + people (rén)

   America = Měiguó,
   American(s) = Měiguó rén (America people)
   China = Zhōngguó,
   Chinese =  Zhōngguó rén (China people)

   Similarly,

   Electricity = Diàn
   Computer = Diànnǎo (Electronic brain)
   Telephone = Diànhuà (Electronic speech)

7. Verbs don’t conjugate in Chinese
   

   I eat = Wǒ chī
   He eats = Tā chī

8. Possessives are simple!

   Just add ‘de’ and you are done!

   My = Wǒ de, Your = Nǐ de, His = Tā de

9. The sentence structure stays standard for most cases – SVO (Subject-Verb-Object)

10. The characters themselves can be quite indicative of what they mean

    A more detailed post on Mandarin Chinese characters is coming up soon!

    Learn Mandarin Chinese logically, for free: CultureAlley Mandarin