Everyone said Chinese is much harder to learn than English. But as native
Chinese speaker, I didn’t feel it until my kids started to learn. After I taught my kids for some time, I finally found the reasons. Mainly Chinese has three major drawbacks:
1) Grammar rules too loose.
2) Pronunciation rules too loose.
3) Character writing rules are even looser.
The most difficult part is writing. There are only 26 basic letters in English, while in Chinese, there are over 30 basic strokes and countless stroke combinations. In some way, Chinese is more like image in raw bit-map format, while English in compressed jpg format.
It’s really a daunting task for kids to learn the Chinese, so I came with some shortcuts. Hope it’s helpful for other kids, esp. those speaking English.
（1） Shortcut for learning PinYin (Chinese Phonics in mainland China)
Over 100 years ago, learning to read Chinese was very hard even for native people. Some clever people borrowed English alphabets and produced PinYin, Chinese phonics. So overall speaking PinYin is very similar to English phonics, except some small differences:
(a) All consonants sound same except：
c: chi,(吃）
q: chee,(七）
x: see，(西)
z: zhi，(知）
(b) Vowels sound similar, usually a bit longer:
a: ar，
e: ee，
i: yee，
o: al
u: usually sounds as wu , if after i or y, sounds as yiu
There are 5 tones in saying characters: flat, up, down-up, down, and one special relative-quiet.
（2）The radix (偏旁) determines the group a character belongs to
(3） Quite often， character sounds same as right/bottom half：
Statistically， about 50% of characters, right/bottom part sounds same as the whole character。So in case you can’t say a character, just read the half. You have 50% chance to be right, e.g. 湖 和 护 呼
So overall speaking, the shortcuts is: guessing a character's meaning based on radix, while guessing the sound based on the other half.
