Apart from the language studying experience I have learned before; English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Thai, which is my mother tongue, they are all languages that have the exact amount of characters or alphabet. This makes most of the start-up learners feel at ease because we can build and read words by knowing and remembering all characters, vowels or tone marks. Exceptionally, Chinese is the language that doesn't have the exact specific amount of characters for us to rely on. Although looking like Japanese characters, Kanji, Chinese entirely is a whole different world from Japanese. 

     Then how come so many people learn to know basic Chinese? Because basic Chinese we all learn nowadays starts from PinYin-- the English pronunciation above the odd characters to help us know how to pronounce each word. It does a pretty helpful job for beginning learners full of passionate interests. As long as the PinYin is above, Chinese is easy to pronounce. You don't always have to remember all the characters with ten lines to form one anymore. Unfortunately, life is not always that easy for you. In the reality where you communicate in Chinese, normally they don't write and use PinYin. They grow up knowing each character and words by their hearts and it's unnecessary for them to write PinYin when they already know how to pronounce. 

     The only way to be an expert in the Chinese language seems desperate but the key is an experience. The more words and characters you can remember, The more improvement and professional you achieve. Chinese is the language full of culture by itself, according to their thousands of history, the Chinese language develops and changes a lot through all those years. People often say Chinese characters look like a picture and it truly is. Ancient Chinese people build each character from many different possible ways, mostly from what they see in nature or reflect how they look at those things; for example, 心 is what Chinese people see the heart shape visually. Sometimes it comes from the deep-rooted culture in Chinese society; For example, 嫁 is the verb that means married but the term of this verb is only used for women. This character is formed between 女 which means woman and 家 which means home. In Chinese culture, when women get married, they have to leave their own homes to stay and live with their husbands so this verb visualizes a woman and a home to express this culture of getting married and have to leave their homes. 

     If you are happened to be fond of history and culture, the Chinese language can live up with your expectation. All its histories are wrapped up in not only its characters but also its poem, literature, idiom, phrase, and living method. The fun of learning Chinese is discovering cultures and myths behind each of their words because there is always a story to find out behind those beautifully odd characters. 

Peerada P.

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