While much of Chinese culture has made its way into our American lives, there is still limited opportunity for Americans who wish to learn the Chinese language. Even the public school where I first started learning Chinese no longer offers Chinese as a language because the program was not a priority for funding. It's a real shame, though, because that program was one of the most transformative aspects of my time in school.

The Chinese language, to a native English speaker, may seem to be the most “foreign” a language can be. Its dialects, its tonal structure, and its overall sound are so different from the Western languages many choose to learn as a second language that trying to learn Chinese feels like an impossibility.

Now, for the people who want to know where to get started, I figure I could give my tips on how best to spend your time learning Chinese as well as some explanation of how learning the language requires a few different approaches from those taken in learning other languages.

First, as with any language, the best way to learn is to throw yourself into the places you are required to use it. Start with a few phrases, and grow from there. That's the only real step you would need to take if you had the resources to go to China, but not everyone has the time or money to do so.

If you can't toss yourself into the culture, you're left with taking courses in the language, friends who might be able to help and the internet. Out of these, taking a course is easily the safest option. This would help you lay the foundation for understanding the aspects of Chinese that are unique to the language and with which you may not already be familiar. Still, you need to make as much use of friends and the internet as you can.

Those are the parts of learning a language that anyone can tell you. Here comes the hard part.

There are three main reasons Chinese is difficult to learn. Let’s first assume that the dialect being learned is Mandarin, and let’s pretend that no other dialects exist. The first reason is because written Chinese is pictographic rather than phonetic, and instead of words there are “characters.” Unless you’ve seen the character before, there’s no guarantee that you will know how to pronounce it. On the other hand, there’s still a chance that you will know what it means. A single “character” may be a combination of many other characters that then produce a new meaning. Before we talk about learning to accommodate for this, let’s talk about the reasons Chinese is hard to learn: tones and homophones. These two aspects go hand in hand. In English we have homophones, but imagine now that every word were a homophone with at least three other words, and only your inflections and contexts would distinguish what word you are trying to say. For example, the Chinese language can have four distinct written characters with different meanings, but all four would be pronounced “ma.” Each of these characters would be read with a different inflection and therefore have a different “tone.”

How do we get around all of this? The answer is Pinyin. Pinyin is a system for writing the sounds of Chinese characters in a way that can be semi-easily read by those only familiar with alphabetic languages, particularly English. Pinyin, unlike English, has to take into account the tone changes of all of the characters, which complicates the system. Luckily, the four basic tones are marked by four simple diacritics, or accents, that pictorially match the sounds of the words. It’s actually really simple once you get the hang of it.

Here’s the bad news if you are trying to get into learning Chinese: There’s no way to get around having to memorize everything. Every character is unique, and if you want to be able to read, you have to know them. If you want to be able to write, you need to know them even better. It’s up to you how you want to memorize them, but it just takes time and effort to do so. As for memorizing spoken word, just try to watch as many videos in Chinese as you can. I recommend starting with something at least entertaining, like “I Am A Singer,” which you can watch on YouTube.

Now that you know some of the basics, watch these videos, download the Pleco dictionary app, and you’re on your way: