Lesson of the Week: Learning Chinese

When you go to high school or college, most likely there is a foreign language requirement. It's easy to take Spanish or French because these languages are Romance languages just like English. You can get a good grade and learn a little about a culture that has a lot of similarities to America.

What if you decided to try something totally different from English? I studied Mandarin for two years. Mandarin is a dialect in China. There are about seven main dialects in China. The official national language of China is Mandarin, which is why most American schools teach it.

One cool thing is that Chinese languages are written in picture symbols, called hanzi. It is difficult to remember how to write the characters because some words have complicated designs. The characters used to be more pictoral, but China adopted a simplified version of the characters to make writing easier.

Another unique aspect of Chinese languages is that words have tones. A word can be said with different intonations and mean very different things. In Mandarin, there are four tones and it was difficult to get them right when pronouncing words.

I learned a lot about Chinese culture from studying Mandarin. I think branching out to vastly different languages is what the foreign language requirement is all about.