![\"Why](\"https:\/\/www.saporedicina.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/12\/why-english-is-so-hard-for-chinese.jpg\" "\\"Why")
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As we\u2019ve discussed in a previous article (Why Native English is Worth its Weight in Gold in China<\/a>), learning English is something of a priority for the Chinese. <\/p>\n But, despite all the time, money, and effort, China just can\u2019t seem to produce very many competent ESL speakers. The flip side is no different; Chinese is consistently ranked among the very hardest languages to learn for native English speakers. The number of Chinese programs in American higher education is growing rapidly, so more and more people are feeling the pain many of our readers struggle with on a daily basis<\/a>. <\/p>\n In this and in my next article, I\u2019m going to take a stab at explaining why exactly this is \u2013 starting with why English is such a nightmare for Chinese students. <\/strong><\/p>\n When studying English, the sheer volume of material that a native Chinese speaker needs to learn is pretty staggering. We all know that Chinese is (in)famous for having thousands upon thousands of characters, but when it comes right down to it, they all draw from the same extremely limited pool of syllables; 412 of them to be exact<\/a>.<\/p>\n When an English speaker starts learning Chinese<\/a>, there\u2019s only a handful of truly new sounds they need to master \u2013 the \u201cq\u201d of \u8bf7-type words, the \u201cx\u201d in words like \u8bb8, the umlaut in words like \u7eff, and a few others. But from Day 1, Lesson 1, a Chinese ESL student is confronted with a whole host of sounds they\u2019ve never had to produce before. <\/p>\n Ever noticed that Chinese people seem to say “Hallo” rather than “Hello”? That\u2019s because \u201cha\u201d (as in \u201c\u54c8\u201d) is a sound in Chinese, but the \u201ce\u201d of \u201chello\u201d isn\u2019t. Literally the first word a Chinese ESL student is ever taught forces them to make a sound they\u2019ve never made. <\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the new sounds, either. The complaint I generally hear more than anything else from Chinese students is that there\u2019s just too damn many words in general. And it\u2019s true that English has a pretty huge vocabulary; for starters, it took lots of words from Latin, German, Dutch, and French while it was developing. <\/p>\n Furthermore, in the modern era of globalization and mass immigration, American English in particular has absorbed countless words from languages all over the world \u2013 even Chinese (see: kung fu, chi, feng shui<\/a>, gung ho, mu shu, tai chi, and yin yang). <\/p>\n And when your starting point is Chinese, the vocabulary required to understand \u2013 much less speak \u2013 English can seem pretty overwhelming. Chinese is a super contextual language and often uses one word to describe a whole bunch of different things. For example, \u573a (chang) is a character that basically means any big open space used for some particular purpose. \u201cice ball \u573a\u201d means hockey rink, \u201ccompetition \u573a\u201d means stadium, \u201cbasketball \u573a\u201d is court, \u201cgolf \u573a\u201d is golf course, \u201cplane \u573a\u201d is airport, \u201cfire bury \u573a\u201d is crematorium, and… <\/p>\n Well, you get the point. Explaining to kids that they have to learn a new (multisyllabic) word for every single one of these things is somewhat akin to telling them Santa \u2013 which they call \u201cChristmas Old Man, by the way\u201d \u2013 doesn\u2019t exist. <\/p>\n This is one of the many facets of Chinese-English learning that has been made much easier by computers and smart phones. That being said, it can be hard for native speakers to appreciate just how wacky (to put it charitably) our spelling system is. <\/p>\n Consider, if you will, teaching a bunch of kids the following sentence: \u201cI don\u2019t know why this goddamn language is often quite odd.\u201d (ps. SDC does not condone teaching children this sentence. Proceed at your own risk). <\/p>\n These kids have spent hours reciting and copying the alphabet, and you have to straight-facedly act like it makes perfect sense that “damn” is really just “dam” and “know” isn\u2019t pronounced “keh-now.” Once they\u2019ve got a handle on that, you have to explain that \u201cqu\u201d and \u201cgu\u201d are really more like \u201cqw\u201d and \u201cgw,\u201d that the \u201ct\u201d in \u201coften\u201d can take a hike; and that, for some reason, the letter \u201cy\u201d sounds exactly like \u201cw,\u201d \u201ch,\u201d and \u201cy\u201d put together (to say nothing of asking them to \u201cqueue\u201d up in line). <\/p>\n If explaining all the different words is like telling kids Santa isn\u2019t real, this is kind of like telling them that Benny the golden doodle had to go to a big farm upstate. <\/p>\n And that\u2019s just basic silent letters and the kind of rules most native speakers master at a young age. The average Chinese student tends to abandon all hope roughly around the time you start getting into plural spellings. <\/p>\n When there\u2019s more than one of something, just add an \u201cs\u201d or an \u201ces,\u201d right? Wrong! One mouse becomes two mice, one goose becomes two geese, and don\u2019t even get me started on octopi and moose. And hey, what about \u201cie\u201d vs \u201cei?\u201d I believe the age-old rule goes as follows: \u201ci before e, except after c, science, either, neigh, weird, caffeine, and go f@#k yourself.\u201d The unfortunate reality is that our lovely melting pot language kinda screwed the pooch when it came to standardizing rules.<\/p>\n And speaking of rules…<\/p>\n Our collection of set-in-clay grammatical rules are pretty nonsensical; should he or she want to prove that that is false, the Grammar Nazi the comments section has has their work cut out for them.<\/p>\n Seriously, though. I\u2019m not going to spend much time on actual grammar rules because a.) they\u2019re a nightmare for everyone, not just the Chinese and b.) an in-depth discussion of English grammar could cure even the most stubborn (stubbornest? ironically, it just green-lined me) case of insomnia. Moving on.<\/p>\n The more time you spend teaching English in China \u2013 at least in my limited experience \u2013 the more you go from worrying about the technical difficulties to worrying about the fundamental and seemingly insurmountable differences between not just our languages, but the way we and the Chinese perceive the world. Perhaps I\u2019m being melodramatic, but hear me out.<\/p>\n Chinese has no tenses. Words don\u2019t change in any way based on when they occur, have occurred, or are going to occur. There are of course, words that mean \u201cfuture\u201d and \u201cpast\u201d and \u201cwill,\u201d but the basic construction of a sentence about when you did something goes noun-time-verb-object. <\/p>\n So, \u201cI ate a hamburger yesterday\u201d becomes \u201cI-yesterday-eat-hamburger.\u201d There is a particle \u2013 \u4e86 \u2013 that indicates the completion of an action<\/a>, but that\u2019s about it. <\/p>\n If you want someone to know when something is taking place, you just stick the time in the sentence. Simple, right? WRONG \u2013 but that\u2019s a topic for the article about why Chinese is hard, so we\u2019ll give it a pass for now.<\/p>\n On a surface level, it should be clear how the addition of tenses adds to the burning slag heap of difficulties Chinese students have with English. Once again, it comes down to too much material: their whole lives, they\u2019ve gotten away with using a single verb for all situations. <\/p>\n Let\u2019s take swimming as an example. In Chinese, \u201cswim\u201d is \u6e38\u6cf3, or y\u00f3uy\u01d2ng<\/em> (sounds like yo-yawng). So \u201cI went for a swim yesterday\u201d is \u201cI-yesterday-go-\u6e38\u6cf3\u201d and \u201cI like swimming\u201d is \u201cI-like-\u6e38\u6cf3.\u201d If you want to say \u201cI swam from China to Australia,\u201d you just say \u201cI-from-China-\u6e38\u6cf3-go\/arrive-Australia,\u201d and \u201cshe swims everyday\u201d becomes \u201cShe-everyday-\u6e38\u6cf3.\u201d Notice the very subtle pattern?<\/p>\n Nothing but \u6e38\u6cf3. \u6e38\u6cf3 for days, as it were.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve already told the kids Santa doesn\u2019t exist and that their dog is dead. Get ready to cut them and pour salt in the wound, because you now have to explain that in order to say \u6e38\u6cf3, they have to learn \u201cswim,\u201d \u201cswims,\u201d \u201cswimming,\u201d \u201cswam,\u201d and of course \u201cswum,\u201d if it so happens to be preceded by a helping verb (because English grammar is super intuitive!). <\/p>\n And why? <\/p>\n Because of tenses! You know, the thing that is a totally new and alien concept to you! Well, and making pronunciation sound more natural. Sometimes. Depending on the situation. You just kinda have to do it enough times to get the hang of it.<\/p>\n That can be difficult, though…<\/p>\n For all the crazy difficulties of English \u2013 and for all the ways it pretty objectively makes no sense \u2013 people all around the world manage to learn it. As noted in a past article, China is something of a standout when it comes to poor ROI for their English students. <\/p>\n In my experience, the airport staff in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia \u2013 a city of just over a million in the most sparsely populated country on earth \u2013 have better English than those at Beijing\u2019s Capital Airport \u2013 one of the largest and busiest in the world. <\/p>\n On the EF English Proficiency Index, China ranks below Uruguay, Russia, Vietnam, Bosnia, Japan, South Korea, and perhaps most tellingly, Hong Kong and Macau. They\u2019ve got the largest population and economy in the world \u2013 they throw more money and effort at teaching their kids English<\/a> than anywhere else on the planet! <\/p>\n And Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Macau all demonstrate that being native speakers of an East Asian language \u2013 even Cantonese \u2013 can\u2019t be the only factor.<\/p>\n If that seemed like an overly-long introduction to this point, it\u2019s because I wanted to solidly cushion the following statement: the Chinese education system is broken nearly beyond repair. That\u2019s an opinion and you\u2019re free to disagree with it, but let me make the case.<\/p>\n Actually, let me do one more round of cushioning: let\u2019s not forget that China has one of the most impressive academic histories on the planet \u2013 they pioneered the concept of the civil service exam, and were producing impressive scholars before most of our (Europeans and Americans, that is) ancestors had figured out how books worked. <\/p>\n Ok? Ok.<\/p>\n But the world has changed \u2013 and to be blunt, their system hasn\u2019t. The teacher lectures, and the student memorizes. Kids are expected to recite and to copy. They are never allowed to question their teacher, and most devastatingly, the concept of asking \u201cwhy\u201d is completely alien to them. <\/p>\n If they\u2019re extremely lucky, they see a native speaker once a week who might throw some new ideas their way now and then. But every other day of the week, twice a day, they \u201cstudy English\u201d with a Chinese teacher who, 9 times out of 10, has never left China and teaches the entire class in Chinese (excepting the example sentences the kids have to chant). <\/p>\n They recite passages without ever knowing what they mean, memorize sentences for exams that they never use again, and learn exactly one *correct* way to deal with every situation that leaves them utterly helpless when confronted with any real-world communication that deviates even 1% from what they have memorized. Ever spent time talking with any Chinese exchange students? Odds are, they absolutely aced all the standardized tests and have thousands of crazy vocab words memorized \u2013 and yet they have immense difficulty with even the simplest real-world English communication. <\/p>\n And that\u2019s the situation if everything is running as it should \u2013 in reality, corruption and mindless bureaucracy means that class-ruining rich kids are never removed from high-level courses, completely unqualified teachers (both Chinese and foreign) fail to teach their kids anything at all, and a completely dogmatic focus on teaching to the test (a sin we Americans are neither unfamiliar with nor innocent of) means that any attempt at introducing practical communication skills into the curriculum has to be fought and bled for. <\/p>\n Need a few more reasons? Take three!<\/p>\nProblem 1: There\u2019s too many words and sounds<\/h2>\n
Problem 2: Learning to spell<\/h2>\n
Problem 3: Our grammar is ridiculous<\/h2>\n
Problem 4: Tenses are an entirely new concept for a Chinese student<\/h2>\n
Problems 5 – 1,000,000: The deck is stacked against Chinese ESL learners from Day 1<\/h2>\n
Bonus Round Problems<\/h2>\n
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