Introduction

The Chinese character has more than 3,000 years of history. It is a kind of hieroglyphic which originated from carapace-bone-script in the Shang Dynasty (16th – 11th century BC). It then developed into different forms of calligraphic handwriting like large seal script, small seal script, official script, regular script, cursive script and running script. More people speak a variety of Chinese as a native language than any other language in the world, and Modern Standard Chinese is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

The spoken varieties of Chinese are mutually unintelligible to their respective speakers. They differ from each other to about the same extent as the modern Romance languages. The Chinese language was developed using images, which means in its simplest form it resembles a game of Pictionary. Many (not all) of the Chinese characters we use today come from ancient drawings of the items they are meant to describe. This can be very helpful for those learning Chinese for the first time. A common example is the word for mountain “shan, 山.” The three points of the character are meant to resemble the three peaks of a mountain ridge. In this blog, we’ll discuss if it’s possible to master Chinese in a year:

1. Get as close to total immersion as possible: How much you can learn in three months depends largely on how much time you can spend learning Chinese everyday. You should be spending as much time as you can on Chinese and as little time as possible using any other language. Unsurprisingly, if you’re able to devote 100 percent of your three months to speaking, reading, writing, listening and thinking in Chinese, you’ll make more progress than if you can only spend three hours after work studying Chinese.
2. According to the US State Department, Mandarin is notoriously difficult to learn. The language is tonal, and fluency requires mastering thousands of characters. Mandarin competence takes 2,200 class hours, with half of that time spent in a country where it’s spoken. If you put the rest of your life on hold and focused only on studying Chinese – at 5 hours of practice a day, it would take you 88 weeks.
3. Depends on the level of motivation you have to learn Chinese: Your reason to learn Chinese is also a big factor that can help you reach a good level of proficiency. Only a strong reason will push you towards putting in all that effort that is needed. Also, it is your reason that will keep you going when you find yourself stuck at a plateau or feel like quitting. So, find a strong reason that motivates you to learn Chinese.
4. The amount of time you take to practice writing in longhand: Part of your learning plan involves writing in Chinese. Longhand. Yes, you’ll probably spend most of your life in Chinese tapping out text messages on your iPhone… but writing in longhand is key to building a strong foundation in the language and solidifying your grasp on characters.