michaelcruickshank Last updated: August 29, 2022

9 Reasons Why Learning Chinese Is the Smartest Move You’ll Ever Make

Whether you’re looking for a new academic pursuit, new career skills or a new perspective on life, learning Mandarin Chinese is one of the absolute best investments you can make with your free time.

With more than a billion Chinese speakers in the world today, learning Chinese in this day and age promises dramatic results.

But don’t just take my word for it—read on and discover why you really should be dropping everything and learning Chinese!

1. Chinese will open up a world of opportunity for you
2. Chinese skills can make you an attractive hire
3. Communicate with more than a billion people in Chinese
4. The Chinese diaspora is almost everywhere
5. Gain access to Chinese online spaces
6. Chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn
7. Memorizing characters and tones is less important than you think
8. Digital learning is making learning Chinese easy and fun
9. Handwritten characters are less important than before

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1. Chinese will open up a world of opportunity for you

At this point in time, Mandarin Chinese is hands-down the best language to learn in order to get a head start in life.

The main driver of the language’s attractiveness is China’s booming economy and its status as a rising global superpower. Over the last 35 years, China has transformed itself from an impoverished country to becoming what is arguably one of the largest global economies.

China has opened itself up to the world, encouraging foreign investment and economic cooperation. Because of this, there is a huge demand for people who can bridge the gap between this new growing China and the wider world.

2. Chinese skills can make you an attractive hire

Of course, to be this sort of bridge, there is one skill you must have: fluent Mandarin Chinese.

Due to the lack of people in the Western business world who can speak both Chinese and English, there’s a huge demand for these skills, and this can of course mean very lucrative wages.

Through learning Chinese, you can transform yourself into somebody who is critical to the success of a project in China, thereby making yourself a very attractive hire.

3. Communicate with more than a billion people in Chinese

There are currently around 1.3 billion Chinese speakers in the world today. While English is widely spoken in many other countries of the world such as India, Nigeria and those of the European Union, this is not the case in China.

Most students learn English in school, but few can speak it to any useful level. Only through speaking Chinese can someone really experience everything that China and its millennia-old civilization have to offer.

4. The Chinese diaspora is almost everywhere

China has a huge diaspora found in almost every country in the world. This presents learners with a readily available pool of people with whom to practice their language skills without even leaving their country.

Furthermore, this community is often very eager to help you learn Chinese, and through engaging with them, you have the ability to make whole new groups of friends!

5. Gain access to Chinese online spaces

While much of the world shares a common online space, this is not the case for China. The Chinese internet is full of its own unique multimedia, memes and other content virtually unknown to the rest of the world.

A good example of this is Chinese video-sharing sites Youku and Tudou, which function as Chinese versions of Netflix and YouTube respectively. The key to accessing these spaces is Chinese fluency, yet another reward for learning the language.

The future will likely be Chinese, so get ahead of the curve!

6. Chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn

When it comes to the issue of grammatical complexity, Chinese grammar is relatively simple.

Unlike most European languages, it does not feature complicated constructs like cases and genders. It also treats tenses in a very simplistic way.

Furthermore, unlike other East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, the language is free from complicated honorific grammar.

When you consider how long learners of other languages focus on verb conjugation and genders, you will begin to understand that this is an area where Chinese learners can rapidly outpace learners of other languages.

7. Memorizing characters and tones is less important than you think

People will often dismiss Chinese by saying things like “Won’t I have to learn 10,000 random pictures?” or “Doesn’t every word have 10 meanings?”

The truth is that Chinese characters are not random pictures, but a reasonably organized system of radicals and phonetic elements that isn’t too hard to understand. In addition, a learner really only needs to know 2000-3000 characters to have a reasonable degree of fluency.

With respect to tones, while important, they are not necessarily critical to understanding. In reality, Chinese people tend to use context more than tone to understand what you are talking about in any given sentence.

8. Digital learning is making learning Chinese easy and fun

Digital learning techniques have exploded in popularity in the last decade or so, providing learners with great dictionary programs like Pleco and brilliant character-learning programs such as Memrise and Anki.

Media-assisted learning techniques are also a huge help when it comes to learning Chinese. For example, FluentU turns a library of authentic media into full language lessons by using interactive features, such as flashcards and subtitles.

There are also many amazing apps for learning Chinese. All of this makes attaining Chinese proficiency faster and easier than ever before.

9. Handwritten characters are less important than before

Another way in which technology is making Chinese an easier language to learn is the way typing is supplanting character writing in China.

A number of popular character input methods are used throughout China on mobile devices and computers, and they have grown to become the primary way that Chinese texts are created.

What this means is that you really only need to be able to recognize a Chinese character, in order to type it, rather than learning how to physically draw it through rote memorization.

Chinese is not as hard as you might think, and in fact, technology is making it much easier.

The future of the world will likely be shaped by the billion-strong population of China, and it is indeed a hugely useful move to learn to speak to these people and understand their culture.

So don’t hesitate—drop everything and start learning Chinese today!