Name: Part 3- The Importance of Learning Chinese
Uploaded: 2014-06-15T14:50:41.000Z
Duration: 8 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

In the previous presentations we discussed in detail how

Chinese characters work as a pictographic writing system,

Gerund

and analyzed the traditional method of teaching Chinese characters

and proposed a solution to the typical problems that arise

when a foreign student studies Chinese characters.

to speak directly to the people we expect will be watching these videos,

commend you for being interested in Chinese

and offer some encouragement to stick with it.

First of all, the fact that you're watching these videos

means you're considering learning or improving your Chinese.

There are over one billion people in the world

making it the most popular first language.

Chinese is the 2nd most common language on the Internet.

Similiar to how English is a required course

around the world for many non-native speakers in school,

China is pushing for the same to become true of Chinese.

In 2005, over 30 million people all around the world were learning

Chinese as a foreign language or second language

National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

That number was forecast to have increased

Chinese shows the highest increase in enrollment in colleges and universities.

So it's great that you are also aware of this trend and are interested

in preparing yourself along with the rest of the world.

or still contemplating whether or not to learn Chinese,

have you considered what the benefits would be?

To state it briefly, "Business is booming!"

China is the second largest economy in the world.

It has a growth rate averaging 10% per year,

making it the fastest growing economy in the world.

It's the biggest global market in the 21st century.

If you can speak, read, and write Chinese,

an entirely new level of work opportunities will open up to you

in various fields such as government, international relations, investment,

manufacturing, business, tourism, translation, and education.

in an increasingly competitive business world if you are

of a foreigner dependent upon a translator.

Or perhaps you're simply interested in Chinese culture

and would like the opportunity to travel and perhaps live overseas.

Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, and Singapore are all exciting cities.

take into consideration when deciding if studying Chinese is "worth it":

Chinese is surprisingly easier to learn than a lot of other languages.

1. There are no tenses or verbs to conjugate

3. There are no masculine/ feminine conjugations

why do people always say Chinese is one of the hardest languages to learn?

the difficult aspects of Chinese are its writing system and spoken tones.

These are the two biggest stumbling blocks

and greatest causes of frustration for Chinese learners...

but removing that frustration is our speciality at the ABCs of Chinese.

Are you already living overseas in Asia for work or travel?

You can probably speak a fair bit of Chinese,

but you've been putting off learning how to read and write Chinese

In addition, you might think it's too much of an undertaking

since you're not planning to be in Asia for "that" long.

You can't order your own food in restaurants

You rely on already knowing how to say what you want to order,

pointing to the item, or having others order it for you.

You're looking down a packed city street trying to find a shoe store,

but you can't read any of the big shop signs.

to physically be standing right in front of the store so you can see

You are "functionally illiterate" ...and it's frustrating,

but you've gotten used to this and simply have to factor it into your life.

We've been in your situation, so believe us when we say

you will significantly improve the quality of your life

by mastering your tones and learning Chinese characters.

you don't need to dedicate 4 years of your life to taking Chinese classes.

If you take the right approach, you can have perfect tones

in a month, and you can easily learn all 400 of the building blocks

When you do that, all of the signs and posters that you've gotten used

to completely ignoring will suddenly start to jump off the wall at you.

like a blind person suddenly being able to see.

Your world will become so much bigger when you understand

the sign in your elevator that says the water in your building