Learning Mandarin Chinese Is Easy – If You ArePrepared To Work At It! (Chris Parker Story – Part 1)

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Learning a new language forsome people is easy, whilst forothers it is a very dauntingprospect. Some have a naturaltalent for language learning orwere fortunate enough to beraised speaking two or morelanguages. Other people had abad language learningexperience in their school daysand are convinced that they willnever be able to master a newlanguage.

Related Post: You’re Never Too Old to Learn a Foreign Language

Whichever bracket you fall into, and particularly if you were brought upspeaking a language in the Indo-European language family, learning Chinesecan be one of the most challenging languages of all to learn.

Some struggle to master the Chinese tones whilst others find it very difficult toget to grips with the numerous Chinese characters. (There are approximately80, 000 of them but, fortunately, you will really only need about 3,500 inStandard Chinese.)

That said, if you are someone who is thinking of learning Chinese I’d like topresent two inspiring videos to you. You’ll find the first one on this page and theother one by .

The first video (below) was uploaded to You Tube on 17 October, 2011 and thesecond one was uploaded on 5 May, 2013. Both videos feature a truly inspiringyoung chap called Chris Parker.

Chris, who is 25 years old, speaks fluent Mandarin, and in the videos hedemonstrates his impressive mastery of the Chinese language by sharing (inPutonghua) the various challenges he faced from days he first considered

learning Chinese during his last year of high school (approximately 6 years ago)right up until he reached the stage of creating his own Chinese learning courseand setting up his own website.

Watch the first video here and – if your Mandarin is not quite up to Chris’level – read the English translation below.

In my last year at school I made my mind up to study Chinese. At that time, myform tutor, when he found out I’d chosen this subject, pulled me to one sideafter class and said, “Chris, are you sure you want to study Chinese atuniversity? Do you know how difficult this language is? If you really want tostudy Chinese, I support you but, you have to be sure about it!”

I told him I’d thought through it and was prepared to take on the challenge. Alsoa lot of friends thought it was weird asking me, “Why on earth do you want tostudy Chinese? Why don’t you choose Engineering, Chemistry, Maths or atraditional subject like that? If you really want to study languages why don’t youchoose French German or Spanish?”

I didn’t know how to reply at the time but I knew a lot of people thought I wasquite strange! One time I went to visit a Chinese department there was a guywho’d come to meet people and I asked him a lot of questions about his study.

He was in the fourth year of university and he said when reading Chinesenewspapers there were a lot of characters he didn’t know, he could only pick upthe gist.

Hearing that really made me think I really had a big challenge ahead of me.Later, after I got to university, our Chinese textbook had over 20 lessons and wehad to study 1 unit every 2 days. There was lots of new vocabulary dialoguesand a lot of Chinese characters because at the time I had never written aChinese character before – I had a lot of difficulty initially writing characters.

So after about a week I started to think, how difficult is this Chinese going tobe? Can I really take on this challenge? After 2 or 3 weeks I got used to writingcharacters. Although I found a lot were difficult to remember I would spend a lotof time after class practising writing characters, using computer software tocheck the correct stroke order.

In the holidays I would watch TV and practise characters at the same time andlisten to textbook dialogues slowly a load of times. Afterwards, I got used to mystudy I really got into it and started to really enjoy it.

Later, when I got to Taiwan in 2007, when ordering food, I only knew friednoodles, fried rice, kung po chicken and simple names of dishes like that. Ihadn’t learnt any other names of dishes so when ordering food I would alwayslook things up in the electronic dictionary.

However, after 2 months I had learnt all the characters in the menus there andmade a lot of progress with everyday speech. When I got to Mainland China alot of people were really curious towards foreigners and everybody would askme a load of questions like: What country are you from? Do you like China? Doyou like Chinese girls? What places have you been to? Questions like that.

Beforehand, I had read on the Internet that Chinese people are passionateabout studying English so it would be hard to practise Chinese with locals. Butmy experience wasn’t like this in fact it was the opposite; most people were verywilling to to speak to foreigners and speak Chinese.

After the first week of university I didn’t have any more doubts about mydecision to study Chinese, and I never regretted it. And a lot of friends I met inChina couldn’t speak English at all so if I couldn’t speak Chinese I wouldn’t beable to communicate with them.

I also got a lot of enjoyment from studying Chinese history, philosophy andliterature. I think that studying Chinese and other languages has changed myview on life, way of seeing other people and has broadened my horizons.

So I hope that I will be able to gain even more enlightenment from my study andwork in the future!

So there you have it, impressive, eh? It just goes to show that with a littledetermination and a lot of hard work learning Mandarin Chinese is easy!

Please leave a comment below and let us know if you are inspired byChris Parker’s story.

Or tell us if you think learning Chinese is easy or difficult?

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