As parents, we always consider very carefully what to let our children learn. Language is a key and we should really consider selecting one that can help our baby’s life journey. But is learning Mandarin a rewarding and easy process? Let’s look at an American teenager, Kenneth Burns, sharing as below. The experience from him could be a good reflection of the prospect and difficulty in learning Mandarin.

Chinese was first!

Mandarin is my first foreign language, I speak two other languages, Afrikaans and English, but I grew up with them bilingually. So, Mandarin was my first active effort in acquiring a new language. I have come to learn a fascinating new world of foreign language and language learning in the process. I have slowly started doing research on Spanish, just to see how the language works and get a general overview on it. I got to two interesting conclusions – Spanish looks so easy now, compared to Chinese, but also darn why didn’t I learn this before Chinese? I could’ve grasped the Chinese grammar so much easier.

Yeah, so they are a bit paradoxical, so I couldn’t come to a precise conclusion. Here is my logic. One’s first foreign language comes along with a lot of other things, merely than just the language you are learning. You become so much more aware of the processes of language, the grammar, the vocabulary recall, the conjugation, the verbs, everything! This is acquired along with the language: the process itself.

 

Learning a Language

The process is very useful in future language learning endeavours. However, I didn’t have that when I started learning Chinese. So when someone told that Chinese grammar was easy, I was like… erm, what you do mean about conjugating verbs? I don’t understand? All these processes were done sub-consciously in my native languages. Now I had to go learn them. That’s why I struggled with Chinese grammar. I couldn’t understand why it was so “simplistic”. What was going on here? Now, that I look back on it, Chinese grammar is ridiculously easy. The verbs and everything is isolating.

Now when I started doing research on Spanish, I saw that has some conjugation and some interesting things with pronouns and verb concord. However, I can understand it a lot easier after I have learned a foreign language. I know how the things fit together. Now, I’m thinking what if I learned the process of learning a language with a different language that was more similar to English. Note, I’m not saying an easier language, but a language that has less relative difference than Chinese, then afterwards Chinese would be so much easier to learn.

 

Chinese has it’s advantages

However, learning Chinese first has taught me much humility. Now, when I look at Spanish, I go, wow, it has a Roman alphabet and a pretty good phonetic relation with its words. It also has an easier discount, for instance the word “alphabet” in Spanish is “alfabeto”. I mean, c’mon that’s way easy. I’ll dive right into this with no trouble.

Thus, after learning Chinese, other languages seem like a breeze, however, in the back of my mind I still think, what if learned another language and then moved onto Chinese, I could have grasped that big difference between Chinese and English much easier.