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Why would a child who is simultaneously learning both Chinese and English prefer to read books in English over Chinese?To get more news about chinese alphabet for beginners, you can visit shine news official website.

I was recently chatting with a Chinese friend who is living abroad. He has two young children and wants to ensure that they grow up bilingual, with a strong command of both languages. His kids study Chinese and English in school, speak English outside the house, and use Chinese at home. Despite being equally exposed to both languages, he’s found that he needs to actively encourage his kids to read Chinese, or they naturally gravitate towards books in English. “I saw it happen with my friend’s daughter. Once she was eight years old, she only wanted to read books in English. I want to make sure my kids feel comfortable in both languages.”

This got me thinking about the fundamental differences between Chinese and most modern languages, and how these differences impact the way we learn Chinese. When starting out, many Chinese learners don’t recognize or appreciate these differences. They can get discouraged and give up, thinking that Chinese isn’t for them. When in fact, they are encountering the same challenges faced by anyone who pursues learning Chinese.

Understanding how the Chinese language is unique will help you learn more effectively and help prevent you from getting discouraged. Below are some of these key differences along with some strategies that you can use to take advantage of them.
Chinese is the only modern language that doesn’t have an alphabet. The writing system is “logosyllabic”, meaning each character represents a syllable of spoken Chinese and can be a word by itself or combined with other characters to create another word. The components within a character, called radicals, may hint at how the character is pronounced or what it might mean, but it is far from prescriptive. Unlike learning a word in an alphabetic language, a Chinese character requires rote memorization not only to understand what it means, but also how it’s spoken.

Rote memorization is exceptionally underemphasized to Chinese learners. People can be dismissive of flashcards or vocabulary learning tools, thinking that textbooks and immersion should always be prioritized. However, because of the Chinese writing system, spending a large amount of time memorizing new words is simply a requirement for learning the language. This is one of the reasons that we built Daily Chinese, which helps learners memorize large amounts of Chinese vocabulary in the simplest, most effective way possible.

As you memorize more words, the speed at which you learn new words will compound. You’ll begin to recognize patterns among radicals and characters. Knowing more individual characters, you’ll start to be able to discern the meaning of words made up of multiple characters. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, your word acquisition will pick up speed the more words you know.
Second, there is a common refrain that you need to know “2,000 to 3,000 characters” to be able read a newspaper. This statistic is often cited to give learners an idea of the vocabulary requirements for basic literacy. But, since words in Chinese can be made up of one or more characters, this stat is at best completely useless and at worst very misleading. Just because someone understands the words “知” and “觉”, does not mean they understand the word “知觉”. Based off of the vocabulary lists for the HSK (the Chinese proficiency exam used in Mainland China), the amount of words (not just individual characters) required to read a newspaper is probably somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000. This is a better metric for learners to shoot for if their goal is basic literacy.

The Chinese language doesn’t distinguish between definite (“the”) and indefinite (“a”) articles. It doesn’t contain gendered nouns (for example Spanish words like “el libro”, “la universidad”) and has a very small number of honorifics (changes to words based on social hierarchy commonly found in Korean, Japanese, Urdu, and other languages). Verbs don’t conjugate or change to mark tense (tense is often completely omitted). The same word can often be a verb, noun, and an adjective. There isn’t a clear distinction between plural and singular.