Learning To Speak Chinese: You Must Know If It Is Mandarin Or Cantonese You Want To Learn

Learning to speak Chinese is no easy chore, but it is extremely exciting to study such a special tongue. There is a variety of Chinese language software programs, you could attend a class, or even go off to Hong kong to study!

Certainly, there are countless benefits to speaking the Chinese language even if it is at a basic level:

You open doors by simply having a try at speaking Mandarin, even if you mispronounce words and make a mess of the tones. Given that few Westerners even try, you get noticed.

There are a lot of jobs, in international trade and other fields, where knowing how to speak Mandarin is necessary. For more challenging jobs, knowing how to read may be compulsory. Reading Chinese is at a much higher level of difficulty than speaking it, but certainly far more jobs are available if you can do both. By the way, there are two types of written Chinese: characters and pinyin, which utilizes the characters of our alphabet.

There are also many types of the Chinese language. Most well-known and most widely spoken is Mandarin, while Cantonese is next most popular. Over a billion people speak some form of Chinese, and the majority of them speak Mandarin.

Most Westerners study Mandarin. I once decided to learn Mandarin but in error I really took lessons in Cantonese for a while. This was before the internet. I don't think this error would happen now. Here is how it came about: one year I was in Paris, studying French as a college student. My dad, who spoke Mandarin, had things to do that would take him to Hong Kong. He informed me that I could meet him there, and that he would pay for me to begin learning to speak Mandarin while I was still in France.

I thought that sounded pretty good so I went to one of the main language schools in Paris. The people there introduced me to an elderly Chinese gentleman, and I took lessons with him for a few weeks. I had a hard time with the tones especially.

But when I arrived in Hong Kong and met my father, I greeted him in what I thought was good Mandarin. My father didn't understand me. So I began counting to ten, guessing that would prove I was speaking Mandarin. "That is Cantonese," my father said. It turned out that all I had studied was Cantonese.

But all was not lost. It turned out that the process of learning tones did help me to speak Mandarin better.

Now, with the internet, you have so many resources for learning Chinese. I am picking up the study of Mandarin a second time, with a program called Rocket Chinese. However you choose to learn Chinese, you won't learn Chinese fast in the sense of becoming fluent amazingly quickly, but you can pick up enough to have a lot of fun, or maybe even get a better job.

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