One most distinctive difference of Chinese Language with most other languages is the Chinese characters. I think this is the hardest fortress for language learners to conquer.
While most Western Languages consists of 26 alphabets (English), each Chinese characters in a way, is a picture-a simplified and modified picture that represent something.
Actually we as Chinese speaker, also did not really studied how each and every single characters came from (oracle)- only a few that is very significant e.g.
Fire 火 (pronounced as "Huo")
From above, you can see "Fire" originated from a stack of wood in fire. Then over the years the oracle simplified and modified to today's character 火.
The second barrier that Chinese language learners to overcome is the tone. For instance, Mandarin Chinese language is of 4 different tones. Each different tone would mean different meanings.
As such , the romanized tool (which we call Hanyu Pinyin), always label with number 1,2,3 or 4. For instance in "Fire", it should be labelled as "Huo3", the third tone.
Huo1, Huo2, Huo3 & Huo4 are all different meaning.
PS: Famous Huobi Exchange in crypto world, Huo is the "Fire", Bi is the "Currency".
After giving 2 big barriers to readers, I would like bring good news to Chinese Language learners -- that is the grammar in Chinese Language is super simple. There is no past tense, present tense, future tense , future continuous tense etc in Chinese grammar.
For instance,
Past tense , we will say "we yesterday go to the shop " (direct translate)
Present tense, we will say "we now go to the shop"
Future tense, we will say "we tomorrow go to the shop"
The verb will not change- always in "go", only the time will indicate when is the thing going to happen.
Stay tune for following lessons!
Wow love the Chinese language. Not one of the easiest to learn or speak but opens a world to the Chinese culture which is rich in tradition and history.