Learning Chinese for non-Chinese

I would like to share my experience and observations with you. As a Chinese American, I strongly consider myself a global citizen. I was born, educated, and had worked in Shanghai, China for almost 28 years, prior to moving to Brussels, Belgium in April, 1989, and have lived in the US since Oct 1993. To me Chinese is my native language, I am still heavily influenced by my Chinese thinking, writing, speaking, etc. I feel comfortable talking in Chinese than in English except something I learned outside of China. However, my kids were born in the US, the native language is English, like many first generation of Chinese Americans, it is extremely hard to keep them learning Chinese in the US. Don't feel bad if you spend a lot of time learning it, but still can't become fluent in Chinese. Study showed that learning Chinese takes 4 X efforts than learning Italy or French for an English speaking person.

Standard Mandarin is the official language of China and one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. The majority of overseas Chinese uses Mandarin. So you choose to learn standard Mandarin is excellent. There are many spoken Chinese [local dialects]. It is hard to estimate how many dialects exist [some said 8,000], but they can be roughly classified into one of the seven large groups, i.e., Putonghua (Mandarin - majority speaks), Gan, Kejia (Hakka - my father speaks), Min (my mother speaks), Wu (I speak), Xiang and Yue (Cantonese). Each language group contains a large number of dialects. These are the Chinese languages spoken mostly by the Han people, which represents about 92 percent of the total population. One interesting phenomenon, why we see many Chinatowns almost in every city around the world? It is because the WRITTEN CHINESE can be read by all Chinese who learned how to read and write regardless of the local dialects they speak. For example, people from Hong Kong speak Cantonese, people from Nanjing speak Wu, some people from Taiwan speak Min or Hakka, but amazingly they all can read written Chinese [Chinese Characters]. People in Japan, some in Korea, and some old generation of Vietnamese etc. can read Chinese characters.

Chinese characters are either pictographs or ideographs. A well-educated Chinese today should recognize over 6,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read newspaper.

A real story to share with all... I met a Belgian man around 40 years old in 1991 when I was in Brussels attending a Chinese festival. I was truly amazed by his Chinese, not only he could read, and speak, but he could write really good Chinese, better than most of Chinese. "You must have learned Chinese in China for many years." I asked. "yes, I learn Chinese for 10 years, but I never had a chance to visit China, I always wanted to visit China" he said. "how can you read, speak and especially write Chinese so well?" I asked. "I learned by myself, everyday I write 100 Chinese characters on a black board, listen to Chinese radio, read Chinese books and talk with Chinese I meet." he proudly replied, the last sentence he said to me is the KEY "I treat the language as an ART."