how hard is it for an adult native English speaker to learn Chinese Mandarin?

Hey Mikey,

It depends on a few things 1) will you be living there? 2) will you be dealing with native speakers on a daily basis? 3) How dedicated will you be to learning Chinese?

After honestly figuring out the assessment, you need to factor that in...if you're living in China, it'll be MUCH easier, if not, well, soooo much more difficult. If you're living in China, but working with an American company, you're still screwed, but if you have the time to devout to it, the average fluency rate for actually being able to learn in any other language (by learn I mean actually take a college level calliber class and grasp it) is about 5 years. Mandarin will depend on how quickly you grasp the sign system. It really is quite easy if you can think in pictures, if not, well, it'll be longer.

The first thing you need to do is figure out which basic symbols go with what sounds, some basic grammar, and then vocabularly vocabularly, vocabularly.

The government gives employees studying Mandarin 36 months to learn Mandarin, and that' ALL THEY do (learned that after talking to the NSA last year)... and sometimes that's extended.

GOOD LUCK!

1

Rreally hard, especially the intonation.
Different intonation gives different meaning. People may misinterpret what you mean.

Anyway, Good luck for you!

It's going to be really hard...wish you good luck!

It depends on what aspect of Mandarin you wish to learn.

You should consider if you just want to be able to speak and understand putonghua (spoken mandarin), or if you wish also to be able to read and write Hanzi (chinese characters).

An adult learner may have great success learning to speak and understand spoken mandarin. A great deal of practise and daily exposure to the language would be needed, but basic fluency could be achieved in six months to a year with a lot of hard work.

I would suggest concentrating on speaking and listening to putonghua at first. Later, if you are so inclined, learn to recognise characters. A non-native speaker of Mandarin, unless they start learning at a very young age, will have a hard time remembering all the characters.

I was six when I started learning, I quit after six years because it was way too hard. You have to learn the proper simplified and complicated characters and write them in specific strokes mix them together. There are millions of characters in the language, and one character usually means one word. The pronunciation is easier, and would be easier to learn with "pin-yin" but remembering the five accent strokes and pronunciation for particular letters joined together is hard to memorize.

I admit that environment is important but not the most important.The key is your passion and attitude toward learning Chinese Mandarin. Many Chinese never go aboard but they can speak English very well.I work in Chinese training center for foreigners. In our school, most of learners are adults and even some people are over 50 ages.However, they can speak Chinese though learning besides some persons can speak Chinese well and write Chinese characters.
www.hnbw.cn

Tough but not impossible.
Writing would be harder then speaking though from my point of view. Since there are no alphabets, each word is generally unique and needs to be memorized.

may be as hard as a chinese to learn english. but unlike there are a very small number of native english teacher to chinese, there're too many native chinese speaker to a chinese-learner. you are one of them they are lucky.

Yes it will be hard intially, but learning to write chinese can be much more harder than speaking.... even i stay in China for past two years... and trust me i cannt still spk well, where as their are some people i know... who can use it fluently to some extent in just about a year. depends on how much hard work and concetration u put into it. U really gotta have a good control over ur tongue to spk this language. Another major thing is.... be it cantonese or mandarin.. the characters are the same... but will be spoken differently. That is.. there are many local dialects...but they all use the same characters for writing. And a "Q" will be pronounced as "Chi", or a "X" as "Shi" or something like that.... be prepared for that. Sometimes many words may sound similar to u... they just have very little variations, like the same word.. if u twist ur tounge and pronuonce will mean something else.
Guess u got wat i mean....

I am an American living in China. The "hard" part about learning Mandarin is the tones, Mandarin has 4 tones so a word like "ma" can have four different meanings based on the tone you use. The English language does not use tones, per say, so it makes it difficult.

I have a BA in Pretention and and MA in Bombast. But I don't know **** about Chinese.

hello, i am a chinese .i would like to communicate with you.and you come to china ,beijing,i am glad to be your guide!
my skype is graciepurplesunset or yuan from beijing
my email is [email protected]
thank you for your attention!

you probably spend like 2 years and learn how to say bad word in chinese, that would be easier, but if you learn how to write those the most difficult word, you might need to work so damn hard, cause even i am chinese, i still think those word so difficult, and spend like 10 years learns those word, good luck

The English language is the hardest language to learn.
Those of us who speak it , naturally don't think so , but it is.

If you are an adult , it can be difficult to learn any other language. If you put your mind to it though , you can do it.
It is better to try and learn new languages at a young age , while your brain is still willing to learn eg:straight out of school.

Very difficult

Any language where you have to learn a new alphabet is going to be challenging, especially when there are symbols instead of letters, but people have done it before. It will just take longer to become fluent since you have to spend so much time learning the basics.

This is not an easy one if you have never learnt of Chinese before. But it is still easier than learning Cantonese because the phonics of Cantonese are more complicated.

Extremely hard. It is hands down the hardest language to learn period!!