Intensive Mandarin Chinese Course

The following video by Lindsay Williams - language teacher, language learner and language writer - gives an excellent and entertaining overview of the reasons and benefits of learning Mandarin. You can also read the full transcript of the video below.

Nǐ hǎo, (Hello) Nǐ hǎo ma? (How Are You?)

(Sigh) Mandarin Chinese! Can you believe it’s taken me so long to do a Nine Reasons to Learn Mandarin Chinese ? Let's end that right now and do this thing!

Reason number 1(Yī):
[There are] so many Chinese speakers. And not just in China [but in] Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and [elsewhere] around the world too. There’s 1 billion users of the language in China and 900 million of those are native speakers who use it as their first language. So, there is no way that you could ever complain about having no one to talk to. With first and second speakers combined, that makes it the most widely spoken language in the world with English coming second. I feel like that's it, we can end this video now. Zàijiàn(Goodbye). I’m still here.

Reason Number 2 (Èr)
Like we touched upon briefly in reason number one, Chinese speakers are everywhere, not just in mainland China. It's an official language in Taiwan and Singapore and it's widely spoken in communities around the world. And even if there's no one that you can necessarily practice with where you are, there's always going to be something on that face-to-face basis not too far away.

Reason Number 3 (Sān)
Okay, so big secret time: There's no verb conjugation in Chinese. What? Seriously, if you're coming from something like French or Spanish or Italian and you're thinking, okay, so let's do Chinese, here we go, I'm ready for this, and then you figure out there's no verb conjugations, you feel slightly cheated on every language you've ever studied previously. That's exactly how I felt. For example, the word Shì means to be in Chinese. It also means: am, are, is, was, were, had been, has been, will be, would be, would have been, will have been.....there’s plenty more, I'm sure.

Phwoar, English! Gosh! And it doesn't even change for different people. I 'Shì', you 'Shì', we 'Shì', they 'Shì', it 'Shì', everything 'Shì', everybody 'Shì'! So hang on a minute! How do you know then when stuff happens if the verbs don't have any conjugations? Well, time expressions. There are also a few other words such as 'le' which add this tense element to sentences but that's a little bit more complex and we don't need to talk about that today because we're here to convince you to learn Chinese not put you off. And honestly, don't worry, I'm really not trying to brush over that, and besides, it's a lot more simple than a full-on verb conjugation table to memorise.

Reason Number 4 (Sì)
Each Chinese character tells a story. Okay, so we talked about the easy bit first in the last reason with no verb conjugations. Let's talk a little bit about one of the more commonly expected tricky things in Chinese, the writing. The writing system of Mandarin Chinese is pretty unique. It's not an alphabet like Latin; it's not an Abugida like Thai; it's not an Abjad like Arabic or Hebrew. Instead, it’s the Semento Phonetic Writing system. This means that the written language is made up of what's called pictograms, logograms and ideograms. What you see nowadays, for example, the character for Sun has evolved from what was once a more pictorial representation of that thing. And over time these have evolved to become the Chinese characters we know and love today. Ideograms, on the other hand, represent more abstract ideas, so things like numbers work on this basis. For example, one, two and three look like this: 一 二 三
The nature of this type of writing system means that there's a lot to learn and you also have to learn the correct of stroke order. That means the order of each stroke of the character. Now this may sound like a lot of work, but what's really fun about learning Chinese and especially the writing and the reading, is that each character tells a story and you can really trace things back and see where things have come from and detect patterns. And if you love deciphering codes and all of that stuff, then oh, you're gonna love this!

Reason Number 5 (Wǔ)
Chinese is one of the oldest languages in the world. The first examples of written old Chinese date back to around 1200 BC. That's a long time ago. This means that the language has plenty of history to delve into as you learn more and more about the language .

Reason Number 6 (Liù)
History equals culture! Because the language and the country date back so far, and because the country is so big, there's plenty of culture to dig your teeth into and really get involved with. Finding something that you love about a language a place a culture is a really important part of staying motivated when it comes to learning a language. And with Chinese, you'll have no problem with this. Whether it's the various cuisines from Sichuan to dim sum or the music from traditional instruments to C-pop or the film, the literature or countless other things that you could fall in love with, Chinese has something for everyone.

Reason Number 7 (Qī)
So we mentioned in reason number six that because China is so big there's so much culture, but what we didn't touch upon is that because it's so big there's so much good stuff to see. Nature lovers, you're set! You've got natural sites such as Tiger Leaping Gorge, The Reed Flute Cave and the Yuanyang Rice Terraces.

If you prefer man-made sites you've got the Great Wall of China, the Terracotta Warriors and the Forbidden City. China is packed with places to go and things to see. Oh, and pandas, cute, fluffy, adorable pandas.

Reason Number 8 (Bā)
Okay then, back to the language, let's talk ‘tones’. Now there are languages found across the world with tones but the most famous examples come from Asia; Mandarin Chinese being one of them. If you've never studied an Asian language before this may be a tricky thing to get your head round at first and feel like a completely new and huge and scary concept. But don't worry, Mandarin Chinese is a good introduction to this. Basically, tones are to do with the way you say a word, sometimes giving it a potentially different meaning. Whether you go up or down or up and down and up, that's the hardest one to do with lots of words, or you stay at the same pitch, that's what tones are all about. Remember that word ‘to be’ that we looked at earlier: Shì? Well, change that tone on the ‘i’ and it changes the meaning of the word. Mandarin Chinese has four tones commonly called first, second, third and fourth. There are some various other names for the tones that various resources use but for now you can get away with understanding it as a one, two, three, four kind of thing. There's also the neutral tone too that shouldn't be forgotten about. Basically, from a complete non expert in Mandarin Chinese, things sound a little bit this: mā, má, mǎ, mà. [I’m] pretty impressed with my little tone demonstration there. Of course this can be a little bit frustrating at the beginning, but if you let it, it can become a lot of fun. A great example of just how fun this can be is the poem The Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den. This is a poem written in classical Chinese with 92 characters and just consists of the word ‘Shì’ - but with different tones. And it makes sense! And it's insane!

Reason Number 9 (Jiǔ)
I always thought ‘Jiǔ’ sounds like a northern English person saying‘Joe’. If you’ve spent most of your language learning time so far learning European based languages, then Mandarin Chinese is a great option to introduce you to a whole new world. Not only does it open doors to languages such as Japanese and Korean with the idea of some Chinese characters being used in Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanji. It’s also helpful if you then want to go on and learn languages with tones. Thai, Lao, Burmese and Vietnamese are all examples of tonal languages. And then there's the idea of learning a language with a different writing system. Chinese is a perfect introduction to this. In fact, it's often considered one of the most difficult writing systems, so if you can get to grips with Chinese, then that's going to make things a lot easier if you want to learn languages like Arabic, Russian or Greek. Just learning how you handle best these concepts when you're learning Mandarin Chinese, will open doors for you to plenty of languages. And chances are, you'll become much more inquisitive and excited about what's next. So there we go, nine reasons to learn Mandarin Chinese. This is always a language I feel like I need to study more and get back into, but what about you? Do you already study Mandarin Chinese? Maybe you're learning it right now? Let me know your reasons in the comments below and, as always, remember to subscribe for regular language learning videos. I will see you very soon. Xièxiè (thank you) Zàijiàn (Goodbye).