Is Mandarin Hard to Learn? Characters, Tones, and Grammar

Short answer: Yes, and the three parts of Mandarin are hard in different ways. Characters are a second vocabulary you build for years: the HSK 3.0 syllabus lists 3,088 of them to read at its top level. [2] Tones make the first months hard, because a change in pitch changes the word. Grammar has almost no word endings, though it has a handful of patterns that English lacks, and we would rank it the lightest of the three.

Second Language, the game we make, has a Mandarin course, and below we quote counts from its course files to show what a beginner actually meets.

How the three systems compare

The US Foreign Service Institute (FSI) puts it in Category IV with Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean, the languages it calls exceptionally difficult for native English speakers, and plans 88 weeks of full-time training for them, about 2,200 class hours. [1] The FSI page does not say how those hours divide between characters, tones, and grammar.

Why characters take years

Characters take years because you learn each one separately before you can read it. Many contain a part that hints at their meaning or sound (radicals are the best-known of these parts), but you still learn each character’s pronunciation one at a time. Pinyin, the Latin spelling of Mandarin sounds, carries you through the first months, but books, signs, and messages are written in characters.

How many characters do you need?

The HSK 3.0 reading lists give a concrete answer for each level: 246 characters for HSK 1, 371 by HSK 2, 1,096 by HSK 4, 1,940 by HSK 6, and 3,088 by HSK 7-9. [2] See HSK levels explained for what each level lets you do.

In Jun Da’s frequency list of modern Chinese, which counts about 193 million characters of text, the 1,000 most common characters make up 89% of the characters in that text, 2,000 make up 97%, and 3,000 make up 99.2%. [3] Those percentages count single characters in running text. Many common words are two characters long, and the missing 11% includes names and often the key word of a sentence, so knowing 89% of the characters still leaves a lot you cannot follow. It does mean the first thousand characters are worth far more than the next thousand.

The 250 words in our Mandarin course use only 233 different characters, and 159 of them are on the 246-character HSK 1 reading list. Once you know 电 (electric), the words 电话 (telephone, “electric speech”), 电脑 (computer, “electric brain”), and 电影 (film, “electric shadow”) each need only one new character.

Should you learn to write by hand?

If you only want to read and send messages, you can type with pinyin and choose the character from a list (see how to type in Chinese), and many learners put handwriting off for that reason. If you plan to take the HSK, do not skip it. HSK 3.0 has a separate handwriting list: 100 characters across HSK 1 and 2, 150 more at each of HSK 3 to 6, and 500 more at HSK 7-9, for 1,200 in all, and the HSK 2 tasks include writing simple information such as times and places. [2] The HSK 2.0 vs HSK 3.0 guide shows where writing now appears in each exam.

Why do tones feel hardest at the start?

Tones are hardest in the first months because English uses pitch for questions and emphasis, while Mandarin uses it to tell words apart: mā (妈, mother), má (麻, hemp), mǎ (马, horse), and mà (骂, to scold) differ only in pitch. At first an English speaker can hear these as one word said four ways, so the early problem is hearing the difference, before saying it.

Do tone drills work?

Short listening drills on single words helped in a 1999 study at Cornell. Yue Wang and colleagues trained eight American learners of Mandarin for eight sessions over two weeks to identify the four tones in words spoken by native Mandarin speakers. Their identification accuracy showed an average 21% increase from the first test to the last. The gain carried over to new words (18%) and to new words from new talkers (25%), and it was still there six months later. [4] When the same trainees were recorded before and after, native listeners identified their tones 18% more often after training, although they had only practiced listening. [5] It is a small study, eight people in a lab task. You can copy its method by listening to the same words from several different speakers early on.

In connected speech, tones also change. Two third tones in a row turn the first into a second tone, so 你好 is written nǐ hǎo and said ní hǎo, and 一 and 不 change tone depending on the next syllable. Our course’s pinyin writes the 一 and 不 changes the way they are said (yíxià, shì bú shì) and keeps the written third tone, as standard pinyin does, so you still have to apply that rule by ear. The Chinese tones guide covers each change with examples.

What about the sounds themselves?

Beyond tones, the new sounds are a short list: the zh, ch, sh, r group, the j, q, x group, and the vowel ü. Pinyin q is close to English “ch”, x to “sh”, and c to the “ts” in “cats”, so a learner who reads pinyin like English will be wrong in a consistent way. The pinyin guide has the full table.

Grammar: few word endings, several new patterns

Mandarin words barely change form. There is no verb conjugation, no grammatical gender, and no case, and most nouns have no plural ending (们 marks plural only on pronouns and some words for people): 我去 (I go), 他去 (he goes), and 我们去 (we go) all use the same 去. That removes much of the memorizing that Spanish or French asks for. What you learn instead is word order and a set of small words that English has no equivalent for.

Which patterns take time?

• Word order around the verb and noun. The basic order is subject, verb, object, but time and place come before the verb, and modifiers, even long ones, come before the noun. 那个穿红衣服的人是谁？ (Who is that person wearing red?) is word for word “that wear red clothes of person is who?”.
• 了 and 过. Mandarin marks whether an action is complete or has been experienced, instead of marking tense. The HSK syllabus introduces 了 for completed actions and for a change of situation at HSK 1, and 过 for experience at HSK 2. [2] Both can sit in one sentence: 我已经吃过饭了 (I’ve already eaten).
• Measure words. A number or “this” and “that” need a counting word before the noun: 一本书 (one book), 一只狗 (one dog). The HSK 1 grammar list names nine of these for counting things. [2]
• Complements. A verb is often followed by a second word that says how the action turned out: 听懂 (listen and understand), 回来 (come back), and at HSK 3, 找不到 (look for and not find). [2]

Of the 2,500 example sentences in our Mandarin course, 562 contain the particle 了 (not counting words like 为了) and 325 contain 个, the most general measure word. Both turn up in the example sentences for the course’s second word, 我 (I), so it pays to learn them from many examples instead of from one rule.

What to learn first

Start with the pinyin spellings and the tones, with audio, before you try to remember any characters. Both are small, closed sets, and every word you learn afterward is easier to keep once you can hear and spell it.

Then move to the HSK 1 word list. Our game, Second Language, teaches about half of it, 148 of the 300 words, plus 40 of the 200 HSK 2 words, through 2,500 example sentences with audio in two generated voices. It will not cover the other half of HSK 1, so plan to learn those words elsewhere; how to learn HSK vocabulary has a daily plan for the list and the levels after it.