Since more and more people have started learning Chinese now, I would like to talk about things you should know about studying Chinese to help you to have a better understanding of Chinese studying.

The first thing you need to know is that learning Chinese is really not as difficult as you think. I have heard a lot of foreign friends say learning Chinese is too hard, there's no way I can understand it, and all the characters look the same to me......It’s very easy to look at Chinese and start stressing about how much there is to learn.

Chinese is a systematic language, there are many methods of learning it.  You need to know that every language has its easy points and its hard points.  In Chinese, the grammar is very simple but the memorization of the characters and the pronunciation is very hard.  It’s genuinely not as hard as it seems.  It’s like anything else, it will seem hard at the beginning，but when you look back after a few months you will think it’s actually going ok.

Another thing is that a lot of people want to take shortcuts while learning Chinese. They say “I don’t want to learn how to read, I don’t need to learn how to write, I am going to skip learning the Chinese characters.  That’s not a good decision!  As soon as you start learning Chinese, you need to try to write the characters as well, because as I said earlier, Chinese is a very systematic language; if you learn how to write, then it would help you to say the characters, and you would know a lot of Character meanings by looking at different radicals. It can be interesting to learn the characters. To begin with, it might be frustrating because your handwriting of the Chinese characters doesn't look right, but you will get better as you go on.  Plenty of Chinese don’t have good handwriting as well, just remember not to skip learning Chinese characters, they are fundamental and they will make your speaking and reading leaning easier.

Hope you can find the joy of Chinese learning!