Can Chinese read English?

Despite English being taught in the Chinese school system for many years, few Chinese could be considered fluent in English. There are hundreds of millions of people in China studying English, but less than 1\% of Mainland Chinese are conversational, according to some estimates.

How long will it take to learn Chinese?

“How many years does it take to learn Chinese?” “Is it hard to learn Chinese?” According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) scale, it will take English speakers 88 weeks (2,200 hours of active learning) to reach native/bilingual Chinese proficiency.

Is Chinese the most impenetrable language on Earth?

To a non-Chinese speaker (like me), and especially to a Westerner (like me), Chinese is the most impenetrable family of languages on Earth. While there may be only an eighth as many syllables as in English, the tonal variations for each syllable in Standard Chinese impute vastly different meanings.

What is the difference between understanding spoken Mandarin and written Chinese?

Note that there is a difference between understanding spoken Mandarin (听的懂; tīng dé dǒng) and written Chinese (看的懂; kàn dé dǒng) – the difference between understanding the sound (听; tīng) and the sight (看; kàn) of the language. Audio clips are marked with ►

Can a visual system teach you to read Chinese?

ShaoLan Hsueh, a Taiwanese entrepreneur and venture investor living in London, has developed a visual system for learning to read Chinese, called Chineasy, that transforms cornerstone Chinese characters known as radicals into clever illustrations and stories to teach people a basic vocabulary.

How many characters do you need to read Chinese characters?

Basic literacy, according to the Chinese government, starts at two thousand characters. A solid grasp of a daily Beijing newspaper requires knowing around three thousand. An erudite Chinese reader should recognize five to seven thousand characters.