How hard Is Cantonese to learn?
English speakers can learn any language with a lot of dedication and effort, although some are undoubtedly harder to master than others. So is Cantonese hard or easy to learn for English speakers?
The US Foreign Service Institute (FSI), a division of the US government that prepares officials for service overseas, is well aware of the challenges presented by teaching English speakers a foreign language. The staff at the FSI have compiled a list of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn after teaching foreign languages to US diplomats for 70 years. “Hard languages” and “super-hard languages” make up the list.
The FSI defines “hard languages” as “languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English.” “Hard languages” require an average of 44 weeks of training, i.e. 1100 class hours, to reach proficiency.
“Super-hard languages” are explained to be “languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.” The FSI estimated the average length of time for a student to achieve proficiency in a “super-hard language” is around 88 weeks, AKA 2200 class hours. It is double the amount of time believed to take to learn a “hard language.”
Unfortunately, Cantonese isn’t the hardest language to learn but has been tagged second place on the “Super-hard languages” list.
But fortunately, there are many Cantonese speakers on the Internet who are working hard to promote this ancient and interesting language. By creating some targeted Cantonese online courses and resources, students can master the initial conversation skills and meet their basic communication needs within 4 weeks and will be fluent in Cantonese in as little as 12 weeks. They make learning Cantonese more easily.
Why do people feel Cantonese is hard to learn?
1) Like Mandarin and other members of the same vast family of languages, Cantonese is tonal. It has six tones, as opposed to the four in Mandarin, that’s means learning Cantonese is harder than Mandarin, and to someone who doesn’t already speak a tonal language, tones just sound weird. In Cantonese, you can’t change your voice pitch to emphasize a point the way you would in English since it will sound completely different.
Tonal languages are those in which word meaning is influenced by word tones and pronunciation. Cantonese can be difficult to learn because of its tonal structure, even for speakers of other Chinese languages. Mandarin has four tones compared to Cantonese’s six, and a syllable’s meaning is determined by its pitch and contour.
2) The peculiar sounds of Cantonese are another factor contributing to its difficulty. Although Mandarin and Cantonese share some sounds, Cantonese actually has a greater number of unique sounds than other Chinese languages. It’s important to understand how to pronounce each character correctly because many sounds in Cantonese that have no meaning in other languages do so in Cantonese.
Cantonese has certain difficult sounds, such as the diphthong (two vowels together) in the name for Hong Kong (Heung Kong).
3) Writing systems are among the most challenging concepts to acquire when learning a language. Traditional Chinese is another name for the Cantonese language. Cantonese uses the conventional Chinese writing system, which accounts for this. Mandarin, on the other hand, is known as simplified Chinese because it has fewer tones and utilizes simpler characters.
The writing system is a difficult concept for beginning Cantonese students to learn. Because Chinese is so dissimilar to European languages, learning Chinese characters can be particularly challenging for speakers of those languages.
In addition, The names of each character in the Cantonese writing system must be known and retained. Tens of thousands of character logographic writing systems are used in Cantonese. Because a Cantonese speaker cannot distinguish between syllables in a text.
4) Many language learners use English loan words as a starting point for learning other languages because English is a worldwide language. Of course, it’s best to begin with something you are already familiar with or with which you can draw on existing knowledge. Unfortunately, Cantonese has very few words that are borrowed from English.
Cantonese, especially the dialect used in Hong Kong, has absorbed some words from English as a result of its strong political ties to the United Kingdom. The majority of Cantonese language, however, will require you to start from scratch.
5) In terms of Chinese, Mandarin is undoubtedly the most widely used language. The common system of instruction is one of the factors that makes it simple for many individuals to learn Mandarin.
Because it uses a common romanization system for learning, Mandarin is simple to master. The Pinyin romanization system is used by Mandarin speakers to make language learning simple. For those learning Cantonese, this is the issue. It lacks a recognized standard Cantonese romanization system.
6) Last but not least, do you know how to say “head of cattle” in English? Every noun in Cantonese, however, has one of those. They are known as “classifiers,” and all you need to do is study them along with the word. There are probably a dozen of them that you’ll run into, but you can get away with about half of them. They’re also easy to guess because they tend to group nouns with similar properties together, such as “animate non-human thing” for dogs and cats, “sheet-like thing” for towels and blankets, and so on.
Conclusion
In response to the above problems, many people in the market have tried different methods to solve them, and the results are encouraging! We will discuss how to solve it in the next chapter.
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