What makes the Chinese language so different from most other languages?

1. Pronunciation

For those of you who aspire to learn Chinese, there is good and bad news here. The good news is that Chinese pronunciation follows the phonetic hanyu pinyin script with great regularity. Like with any language, you will have to learn a few new sounds, but this isn’t the worst part. The real difficulty in pronunciation is that the same set of sounds can have an entirely different meaning depending on whether you pronounce it in high pitch, rising pitch, falling pitch, or a pitch that first falls and then rises again. We use tones in European languages as well. When you ask a question, the last words in a sentence get a rising pitch. But this doesn’t change the meaning of the words individually, just the message of the sentence as a whole. Getting your brain around the recognizing and consistently pronouncing the tones is the most important thing to do when you first start learning Chinese.

2. Vocabulary

Except for a few words that have been borrowed into the Chinese language from English, you will find the Mandarin vocabulary totally unrelated to European languages. Once you put your mind to it, learning the words is not that much more difficult than learning the words for any other language though. And there is an internal logic to the vocabulary that makes sense once you get past the first basic vocabulary.

How to write the words of course is an entirely different chapter, learning Chinese characters is unavoidable if you want to learn Chinese well and will be a work in progress for a long time. I personally enjoy learning the characters because they are like little works of art in themselves, and for someone like me with limited creativity, it’s great fun to be able to draw so many different things. But it does require time, and some people may opt to just learn recognizing the characters and type them on the computer.

3. Sentence structure

Chinese sentence structure is different from European languages in that the circumstances (place, time) come before the action. But once you have the gist of this, it is surprisingly consistent, and unlike in e. g. Spanish, you don’t have much choice of where to put the words. So once you know the drill, sentence structure is not going to take you much effort in Chinese.

4. Verbs & tenses

Could we actually say verbs and tenses don’t exist in Chinese? Different tenses in Chinese are not expressed by changing the verb (by changing the root or inflecting it), but by adding a word to express the tense. To put it simply, "了" (le) means that an action has completed. To express past, you put "last year" or "yesterday" at the front of the sentence. This really does save a lot of time, as compared to learning language like Spanish, French or German.