No Longer a Failure: An Asian-American’s Reflections on the Difficulties of Learning Chinese and how to Overcome Them

      Chinese is a very difficult language, and the fact that my family had spoken Chinese for thousands of years did not make it any easier to learn. Like many other Chinese-Americans, I went to Chinese school as a child and struggled to learn Chinese. In this aspect I am like the millions of first generation Chinese-Americans who have struggled to learn their ethnic language. However, I think that I am especially qualified to write on this topic because Chinese was especially difficult for me. As someone who once failed every single Chinese test he had taken for around seven years but has now improved to an AP level, I am more familiar with the challenges of learning Chinese than most. In this article, I explore some of the challenges that I attribute to the difficulty of learning Chinese for anyone not raised in China.

     One characteristic that makes Chinese so incredibly challenging to learn is the difficulty of practical Chinese. It’s critical to understand this point, because the rest of this article is dependent on this observation. Written and spoken Chinese are filled with difficult, uncommon words that make reading and conversing in this language nearly impossible for many students. In addition, Chinese is full of idioms, allusions, and special phrases that make it even more difficult for those learning the language to communicate. I think that this characteristic is pretty unique to Chinese because my friends in AP Spanish and French don’t have this problem – they can converse impressively, and read newspaper articles and even novels. However, I am far from their level and can’t even stumble through a short newspaper clipping by myself. I've taken Chinese for over ten years but am still less literate than a first-grader.

     The challenge of communicating has some important ramifications that make learning Chinese especially difficult. One of the most effective ways to learn Chinese, and a method commonly used by schools in China, is to read prodigious amounts of Chinese. Articles, short stories, essays, anything that can be read off a screen or a textbook. By reading vast amounts of Chinese, one can further one’s understanding of the language and its grammar while improving one’s vocabulary. In fact, I have found that if I have read a character enough in writing, I can write it without going through the arduous task of rote memorization. However, because reading Chinese is so difficult for students not raised in China, students normally can’t utilize this method and are left with endless rote memorization. Although rote memorization is both boring and inefficient, Chinese students are often left with no other alternative and spend countless hours scribbling characters with minimum return.

Chinese students often spend countless hours memorizing
characters with minimum return.

      There are other ways, however, to learn Chinese that I find much more effective than mindless memorization. Watching the news or other videos that contain plenty of dialogue consistently is an effective way to increase one’s ability in Chinese given enough time. However, the key with this approach is consistency and time. One has to consistently watch these videos over a few months to see the results and many people give up before then. But if one persists, his or her Chinese really will improve at a tremendous rate.

     Replacing handwritten vocabulary quizzes with typed recognition quizzes is another way to better learn Chinese. The idea behind this method is to make it possible for students to read Chinese text, so that the student can improve their Chinese ability by reading. This is probably the most effective way of learning to read and write Chinese, though it is still considerably difficult. However, any one of these strategies are better than just rote memorization.

     Chinese is a difficult language – yes – but learning Chinese doesn’t have to be as hard as many people make it to be. There are significant challenges for those not raised in China, but learning Chinese is definitely possible for those willing to put in the work. And the good news is that it gets easier – the better one’s Chinese is, the easier it is to improve it. The hardest part of learning Chinese is the beginning; afterwards it only gets easier.