Are you considering to learn Chinese? What speaks in favor, what speaks against learning one of the most difficult languages in the world? This is what the Mandarin learning community has to say about it.
The pros of learning Chinese
Cultural reasons
- Learning Chinese will allow you to communicate with about a billion native speakers and other learners all around the world.
- Learning Chinese opens doors to an ancient history and culture that are fascinating.
- Learning Chinese is the key to understand present-day China and the Chinese people.
- Learning Chinese makes traveling through China even more valuable as it allows you to connect with the locals.
- Learning Chinese helps you enter the world of Chinese painting, film, literature, calligraphy and music and see the world through different eyes.
Career opportunities
- Learning Chinese is an investment for your future and career that acknowledges the economic shift towards East-Asia. China is on its way to become the largest economy in the world and expected to surpass the US around 2030. This means that there are more and more opportunities for foreigners working in China or dealing with Chinese companies allover the world.
- More and more businesses prefer to hire multilingual employees with Mandarin skills as marketers, communication experts and other positions.
- When working in China, having at least a basic understanding of Chinese shows that you are committed to doing business and that you’re taking your Chinese partners seriously.
- Before Covid tourism from China was on the rise. In the future, hotels, restaurants, bars, museums will want staff that can speak Chinese to cater to the growing number of Chinese tourists.
- When working for big international organizations Chinese is a big plus. Chinese is one of the official languages at the U.N. and becoming increasingly important in international negotiations.
- Stand out of the crowd with Chinese on your CV: It shows you’re not afraid of challenging tasks and possess long-term commitment.
Mental health & personal development
- Learning Chinese exercises your brain in a unique way. Mastering Chinese characters and the four tones trains your cognitive abilities and benefits your mental health.
- Learning Chinese will change you and your view on the world. You’ll learn to think in a different language and see things from a new perspective. You’ll become more open-minded and understanding towards different cultures and mentalities. You’ll start to question your own background and cultural habits (in a positive way).
- Learning a new language like Chinese is the perfect opportunity for self-improvement and cultivating healthy life and study habits. It’s also the perfect time to rethink how you learn and what truly motivates you (on the long term).
The cons of learning Chinese
Linguistic reasons
- Chinese is one of the most difficult and time-consuming languages to learn, especially when your own language(s) is completely unrelated to Chinese; meaning there’s no linguistic overlap to profit from like between Italian, French and Spanish for instance.
- The writing system is highly complex. To be able to fluently read a news article you’ll have to learn at least 2000 characters, but in most cases a lot more. Knowing the words more often than not doesn’t cut it: understanding texts written for adults also requires developing reading comprehension through experience. This mean practice and practice means time.
- Writing characters is another major obstacle. Every word has its own unique graphic representation. I can’t give a solid estimation of how much time it takes to master writing the first 1000 basic Chinese characters. But imagine studying (and reviewing) the stroke order, components and meaning for each character and writing each one at least 40 times. Then multiply that by a thousand. Isn’t mastering Pinyin, the romanization system for Chinese, sufficient? Well, not in the long run. Pinyin transfers the pronunciation, but not the meaning in most cases. This is because Chinese is a tonal language with a relatively small number of basic syllables. Many words sound similar but are represented by (completely) different characters. This means that for serious learners learning Chinese characters is mandatory.
- The Chinese tones are both hard to differentiate and to reproduce correctly in active communication.
Career opportunities?
- For a career-oriented person learning Mandarin might seem like an inefficient use of resources. Mastering the Chinese language or even learning it to a useful level takes years, whereas learning a programming language like Python can be done in months. Studying Mandarin in many cases means taking yourself of the job market for some years. The pay-off at the end is by no means set in stone.
- The Chinese economy is not as booming and dynamic as before and China’s general outlook is bleaker than previously expected: “Our longer term outlook remains that economic growth will slow significantly in China (to 4% by 2025). As we recently argued (here), China is facing an ageing population (which is actually projected to start shrinking from 2030 onwards, according to US Census data), a very high debt load (335% of GDP), increasing tensions with several countries (which will hurt exports as well as limit needed imports) and weak productivity growth.” (Source: Rabobank April 2021)
Conclusion
It’s reasonable to consider the pros and the cons before you’re starting a big project and investing your time and money into it, although I’m pretty sure this is not how must people start learning Mandarin! In the end, it really boils down to the question if the glass is half empty or half full. And that’s up to you, my friends!
Personal note: the author of this article never thought about all of this when I started learning Chinese. My main motivation to learn Chinese was to be able to speak with my Chinese family and improve my opportunities for the future in a general sense. For me learning Chinese had not automatically lead to finding the best job ever, though it would have been nice. I look at it this way: Sometimes we’re drawn to do certain things. Some things have uncertain outcomes. I don’t use my Chinese skills in my present job. Can this change in the future? Sure, why not?
In the end, learning Chinese is an adventure. You can’t be fully sure where the journey leads, nor should you want to be. But you definitely should invest in yourself and learning new skills for the future! Nobody but you can decide if Mandarin is going to be included in that skill package.
What are your thoughts about the pros and cons of learning Chinese? Did I miss any major points that you’d like me to include? Please feel free to leave a comment down below! : )
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