Why Learning Mandarin Is Worth Your Time?

Top 6 reasons to start learning Chinese today

Introduction

For most of us Chinese language is a synonym of something incomprehensible, impossible to decipher and understand. It is so different from any European language, that you have no chance of guessing what the people are saying. It is estimated that for an English speaker, Mandarin is one of the hardest languages to learn due to its unfamiliarity, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of characters used to write in it. And for that reason, you might be asking yourself: why would I ever decide to learn a language that difficult?

Learning Chinese was never on my mind either, until I travelled to China with my family and not only absolutely loved the country and its people, but also begun to understand how important China is already in the world, and how Chinese will only gain importance.

1. Most spoken native language in the world

Mandarin Chinese, with over 1 billion native speakers in the world, is by far the language with the highest number of native speakers in the world. It is the official language in China, Taiwan and Singapur, and widely spoken in Malaysia and across Asia in general. When it comes to China, the majority of people are not fluent in English (and to be perfectly honest - most don't know a word of English). If you want to be able to communicate in a meaningful way with locals, you will need to do it in their language

2. China is the fastest growing economy

This is probably the most compelling reason to dedicate time to learning Mandarin. China is developing at an incredible pace, well above any of the Western economies. Chinese firms have already penetrated world's markets and are important business partners on the global stage.

China is also the leader in a number of relevant industries: clean energy technologies, high speed rail (2/3 of the total length of the world's high-speed rail is in China), personal electronics and more. China has also recently overtaken the US in the number of quality research papers in natural sciences. It is not hard to imagine that in the near future, the top universities and the highest paying jobs in the fields of science and engineering will be not in America or Europe, but in China. And in order to be profiting from that, you would benefit from fluency in Mandarin.

I imagine that every European or American reading this would naturally refuse to accept that idea, but given how deeply China is already connected to other countries through Belt and Road Initiative and other investments in the region, China will be a natural choice of migration for high quality education and career for people from across Asia and Africa.

3. Vast resources of Chinese Internet available only in Mandarin

Since China is pretty much running its own Internet - with local equivalents of all of the American big tech giants - there is an ocean of resources that you have no access to if you don't speak Chinese. Learning even the basics allows you to access an unparalleled amount of data and read different media outlets with different perspective on the world.

4. Translator apps are almost completely inaccurate

You might have noticed that in recent years, translator apps have become very good. We used to laugh at sentences produced by Google Translate app, and now it can easily translate from English to German to French and back to English. It can catch nuances and produce perfectly correct sentences. Given the amount of data that is available for training those apps in those languages, it is not surprising.

But if you ever tried translating anything from Mandarin to English, you will realise that half the time it makes no sense at all, and the rest of time you can barely figure out what the text is about - even when it comes to things as simple as a restaurant menu.

That is because not only there are not as much data available to train the algorithms, but also because the structure of the languages is just so different. For me, only when I started learning Mandarin I realised why Chinese people struggle so much to produce even simple sentences in English.

For that reason, you simply cannot rely on translators to be able to communicate, and if you want to get your point across, you still need to speak the language.

5. Learning Mandarin gives you an insight inside the fascinating culture

China is a fascinating country, with interesting history and rich and beautiful culture. Speaking the language gives you the opportunity to truly understand it and immerse yourself in the country when traveling or living there. Learning any language gives you a key that unlocks many doors, and when it comes to China, what is behind that door is incredible.

6. Bragging rights

All right, the last reason should not be your motivation to do anything really, but if it helps you to get where you want to be then why not? If you live in Europe or Americas, you can be pretty sure that close to noone you know will speak any Mandarin (knowing how to say 你好 doesn't count). I think it is pretty cool to have a skill that makes you stand out from the crowd - it will certainly make people interested. And who knows if it will one day become the skill that distinguishes you from another job applicant?

Final thoughts

Learning a language is a commitment for years to come, so deciding on the most useful one to pick can be daunting. But rest assured that if Mandarin will be the one you choose, you will benefit in many ways you wouldn't have imagined.