Learning to speak Chinese is no undemanding task, but it is very interesting to study such a dissimilar language. There is a diversity of Chinese language software computer programs, you could take a class, or also go to China to study!
Obviously, there are lots of benefits to speaking Mandarin even if it is at a basic skill level:
You open doors by simply trying to speak Chinese, even if you mispronounce words and get the tones wrong. Because few Westerners even try, you stand out from the crowd.
There are a lot of jobs, in intercontinental commerce and other fields, where knowing how to converse in Chinese is required. For other jobs, being able to read may be obligatory. Reading Chinese is at a much higher level of difficulty than speaking it, but of course far more jobs are available if you can do both. Incidentally, there are two kinds of written Chinese: characters and pinyin, which uses the characters of our alphabet.
There are also many forms of the Chinese language. Most recognized and most widely spoken is Mandarin Chinese, while Cantonese is next most popular. More than a billion people speak some form of Chinese, and the majority of them converse in Mandarin.
Most Westerners learn Mandarin. I once decided to study Mandarin but by mistake I actually took lessons in Cantonese for a little. This was before the internet. I don't think this mistake would happen now. Here is how it occurred: one spring I was in Paris, studying French as a college student. My father, who spoke Mandarin, had business that would take him to Hong Kong. He told me that I could meet him there, and that he would cover the costs if I began learning to speak Mandarin while I was still in France.
I thought that sounded pretty good so I went to one of the most important language schools in Paris. They introduced me to an elderly Chinese gentleman, and I studied with him for several weeks. I struggled with the tones especially.
But when I got to Hong Kong and met my father, I greeted him in what I thought was good Mandarin. My father didn't understand me. So I began counting out loud to ten, figuring that would prove I was speaking Mandarin. "That is Cantonese," my father said. It turned out that everything I had learned was Cantonese.
And all was not lost. As it happened, the process of learning tones did help me to speak Mandarin better.
Nowadays, with the internet, you have a vast resource for learning Chinese. I am picking up the study of Mandarin again, using a program called Rocket Chinese. However you choose to learn Chinese, you won't learn Chinese fast in the sense of becoming fluent astonishingly quickly, but you can pick up enough to have a lot of fun, or maybe even get a better job.
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