Learn Chinese for Travel, Work and Study

The sounds are few and the tones are everything. Mandarin has around four hundred distinct syllables before tones and about thirteen hundred with them; each syllable is a consonant plus a vowel, with no clusters, no final consonants but n and ng, and four tones — level, rising, falling-rising, falling — plus a light neutral one. Pinyin writes the sounds with Latin letters and the tones with marks over the vowels, and most of it reads as an English speaker would guess, with a handful of traps: “q” is a soft ch, “x” a soft sh, “zh” is j, “c” is ts, and the “i” after “zh”, “ch”, “sh” and “r” is barely a vowel at all. Learners who get the tones early get the language; those who postpone them are understood with difficulty for years.

The characters are the long project. Each represents a syllable and usually a meaning, built from a few hundred components that recur — a water element on the left of every word for liquids, a tree in every word for kinds of tree — so that the system is learnable, if slowly. Mainland China and Singapore write simplified characters; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau write the traditional forms, which are more complex and were the only forms until the twentieth century. Reading three thousand of either takes most learners two to three years of steady work, and writing them by hand longer still; in practice everyone, Chinese included, now writes by typing pinyin and choosing the character from a list.

The grammar is where Mandarin is kind. Nothing conjugates or declines; time is shown by a word for yesterday or tomorrow, or a small particle — “le” for a completed action, “guo” for something experienced — and a question is made by adding “ma” at the end. The one habit to acquire is the measure word: things are counted with a classifier between the number and the noun, “sān běn shū”, three volume book, “liǎng bēi chá”, two cup tea, and there are dozens of them, chosen by the shape or kind of the thing. Word order is subject–verb–object with the time and place before the verb, and adjectives come before their nouns.

Address is more about the whole sentence than about a pronoun. Mandarin has a polite “nín” beside “nǐ” for you, used with elders, officials and customers, and it uses titles and roles — “lǎoshī”, teacher, “jīnglǐ”, manager, a surname plus “xiānsheng” or “nǚshì” for Mr and Ms — far more than names; among friends and the young, kinship terms and nicknames do the work. Modesty is grammar: a compliment is deflected with “nǎlǐ nǎlǐ”, where, where, and a gift is offered as a small thing. Standard Mandarin, Putonghua, is based on the Beijing dialect and taught in every school in China and Taiwan, where it is called Guoyu; Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien and the rest are spoken languages of their regions, not dialects of Mandarin, and share only the script.

Mandarin sits in the slowest of the US Foreign Service Institute's groups for English speakers, at some 2,200 hours of class before a learner works comfortably in it — four times Spanish — and nearly all of the extra time goes to the characters and the tones. The spoken language alone is quicker than its reputation: with pinyin and a tutor, a learner holds a basic conversation within six months, because there is no grammar to conjugate and the vocabulary is built from a small set of syllables. The characters set the pace of everything else, and learners who put in a daily half-hour of them from the first week read menus in six months and newspapers in two or three years; learners who skip them stay illiterate in a country where everything is written down.

In Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen a visitor manages in English at international hotels, with younger professionals and in the places built for foreigners; everywhere else — taxis, trains, restaurants, shops, the police station that registers a foreigner's address — Mandarin is the only language, and translation apps carry the visitor who lacks it. Taiwan and Singapore are far easier in English, Singapore officially so. Multinationals and the technology sector hire English speakers; Chinese firms, ministries, schools and courts run in Mandarin, and a foreigner's career in China opens a level at a time with the HSK. Universities teach most degrees in Chinese and ask for HSK 4 or 5; a large and growing number of programmes, above all in medicine, business and engineering, are taught in English and ask for none.

• Mother, hemp, horse, scold: “Mā, má, mǎ, mà” — one syllable, four tones, four words, and the sentence Chinese teachers use to show why the tones are not optional.
• Have you eaten?: “Chī le ma?” is a greeting, not a question about lunch; the answer is “chī le”, yes, whether you have or not.
• Ten on one hand: Chinese count from one to ten on the fingers of a single hand, with set shapes for six to ten that a market trader expects a foreigner to know.
• Four is unlucky, eight is rich: “Sì”, four, sounds like “sǐ”, death, so buildings skip the fourth floor; “bā”, eight, sounds like prosperity, so phone numbers and licence plates with eights sell for fortunes.
• Every programme has subtitles: Chinese television subtitles everything in characters, because speakers of Cantonese or Hokkien may not follow spoken Mandarin but all read the same script — a gift to learners.
• Tea, ketchup, typhoon: All three came into English from Chinese — tea from the Min word “te”, ketchup from a Hokkien fish sauce, typhoon from “dà fēng”, big wind — along with kowtow, gung-ho and chow.
• Woman plus child equals good: The character for “good”, hǎo, is written as a woman beside a child; “peace”, ān, is a woman under a roof. Characters carry pictures, and learners remember them that way.

Chinese has one dominant certificate and one alternative. The HSK, the Chinese Proficiency Test, is set by China's Center for Language Education and Cooperation and sat at Confucius Institutes and test centres in well over a hundred countries, on paper and online, many times a year. Its six levels run from HSK 1, a few hundred words, to HSK 6, reading and writing fluently; a higher band, HSK 7–9, sits above them as one exam for advanced learners and translators, and a separate speaking test, the HSKK, is taken alongside at three levels. The HSK certificate is valid for two years for admission purposes. Taiwan's TOCFL, the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language, tests the same skills in traditional characters at bands aligned to the CEFR and is the certificate Taiwanese universities and scholarships ask for.

No Chinese visa, residence permit or work permit requires a level of Chinese, and Chinese citizenship is not in practice open to foreigners. What the HSK decides is study and, informally, work. Chinese-taught undergraduate degrees ask for HSK 4, and the better universities for HSK 5; the Chinese Government Scholarship requires HSK 4 for Chinese-taught graduate programmes; and employers in China treat HSK 5 or 6 as the sign of a foreigner who can work in the language, which the work-permit points system also rewards. Taiwan's scholarships ask for a TOCFL band. With steady classes most adults pass HSK 2 within six months, HSK 3 within a year and HSK 4 in about two; HSK 5 and 6 are projects of three years and more, set by the characters.

Chinese self-study is better equipped than any language but English, because the problem — characters — has been solved by software. A dictionary app that reads a character from the camera and plays its tone, a spaced-repetition deck for the characters, a writing trainer that corrects stroke order, graded readers that feed in a few new characters per story, and Chinese television with its built-in subtitles: that is the kit, and most of it is free or nearly so. The tones, alone, resist self-study; they need a listener.

A tutor is the one tool for the tones. No learner hears whether their rising tone rose or their third tone dipped until a Chinese speaker says the word back, and tones fixed wrong in the first months stay wrong for years. A tutor also keeps the measure words honest, teaches the roles and titles that textbooks reduce to “nǐ hǎo”, and chooses the characters: simplified for the mainland and Singapore, traditional for Taiwan and Hong Kong, and both for anyone who means to read widely.