Certainly, willingness may be there, but teaching yourself Chinese is a little more difficult in reality. Chinese language emerged from a variety of tones and sounds which are not familiar to American speech patters.  The desire to speak Chinese, or to learn the Chinese language and writing style is an admirable endeavor for many.  But, anyone having a desire to learn how to speak Chinese Mandarin should be ready to buy a huge variety of books, CD-ROMs, and other formats which may help them in the process.

Actually, I don't think so.  Chinese grammar, if compared with the grammar of European languages, is much simpler.  It is the complaint of English speakers at times that foreign languages like Spanish are filled with complicated grammar (masculine and feminine genders, verb conjugations, etc) , however Chinese language has no bound morphology and grammatical paradigms are not there to learn.  Verbs do not take prefixes and suffixes to show the tense or the person, number, or gender of the subject as each word has a fixed and single form.  Prefixes or suffixes showing their number or their cases are not taken by nouns.  It is not my intention to say that Chinese has no grammar; what I am trying to tell you that Chinese grammar is mainly concentrated on how meaningful sentences can be formed by arrangement of words without inflectional morphology.  Plus each Chinese character pronounced in one syllable, that's why when watching Chinese movies, you find that a few words can be translated into a syllable mapping in the English subtitle.

Learning Chinese can be achieved with a grand wealth of books available out there from learning Chinese the 'fast and fun way', to Chinese for Dummies to Chinese 'made easy for kids'.  Inorder to learne Chinese, of course, there is a treasure of fundamental courses on beginner's Chinese, and we should not forget about a large number of Chinese phrases and Chinese language dictionaries.  The problem with these is that many of the books fail to produce a format that is user-friendly enough and inexpensive enough to be of adequate value .

Now, would those all above relieve you a little bit in your Chinese language study? Hope so, but do not misinterpret this.  It is never my intention to convince you that Chinese is a simple language to learn and other languages like English are much difficult.   What I mean is that Chinese is not as difficult as you imagined or heard about, but different from your mother tongue, but difference does not mean tough necessarily, Isn't it?What it means is that Chinese is certainly simpler than you imagined or heard about, it's just very dissimilar from your mother tongue, but dissimilar does not mean difficult necessarily, Doesn't it?  And that hard Chinese idea won't be of any help in your study.  Be confident of yourself and once you overcome that fear factor, you would actually find Chinese language to be easy to learn.  All the best with you Chinese language learning.

Engaging private tutors would have been a better idea than wasting money on books is the opinion of many who have spent lot of money.  Many people think that private language tutors are way beyond their budgets. In addition, some wishing to learn to speak Chinese live in rural areas, where Chinese language tutors are not to be found.


To be able to speak to those who speak that language is suitable way to learn it.