这个印度人在学中文！(This Indian Is Learning Chinese!)

With a supreme sense of irony, I have poached this photo from NBA star Yao Ming's campaign to save the elephant from poaching, and used it to illustrate the title of this post

It's all in the mind. I've told myself that learning Mandarin is easy. After all, over a billion people can speak, read and write the language, so it can't be all that hard.

Indeed, what I've found so far is that Chinese grammar is extremely straightforward, with hardly any exceptions. It's just that the character set is vast and requires memorisation, and the concept of tones can be initially daunting.

Tones

Indian languages have distinct vowels and vowel indicators for short and long vowels. I've told myself that tones are very similar.

An Indian language would make a clear distinction between "ma" and "maa", for example.

Mandarin makes a similar distinction between "mā", "má", "mǎ" and "mà", plus the occasional no-tone version of "ma". I've decided to treat these as separate vowel sounds.

Verbs

Already, I can see that from the perspective of a Chinese person, English is a horrendously complex language with a myriad of rules and exceptions.

"I eat" versus "He eats". Two different forms of the same verb, but thankfully with a standard modifier (the 's' at the end).

"I eat" versus "I ate". Yet another variation of the same verb, but impossible to derive from the original.

And then we have the past participle. Can you imagine the problems learners of English have with "drink-drank-have drunk", "ride-rode-have ridden", etc.?

Is "flown" the past participle of "flow" or "fly"? How can you tell?

In Mandarin, the verb remains unchanged regardless of the gender or number of the subject, and regardless of the tense. There are extra particles to indicate the tense, but the core verb is never affected.

去 qù ("to go") is the same regardless of the gender or number of the subject.

The past tense is indicated with the additional particle 了 le, so 去了 qù le means "went".

The future tense is indicated with the additional particle 会 huì, so 会去 huì qù means "will go".

The present continuous is indicated with the additional particle 在 zài, so 在去 zài qù means "is going".

The past participle is indicated with the additional particles 有 yǒu ("have") and 了 le, so 有去了 yǒu qù le means "have gone" (literally, "have go (past tense particle)").

Sometimes, one could just use the core verb without any modifying particles, and rely on other words in the sentence like "yesterday" or "tomorrow" to indicate the intended tense.

The core verb 去 qù doesn't change at all in any case! Imagine the horrors of catch-caught, teach-taught, bring-brought and buy-bought that lie in wait for the hapless foreign learner of English.

Sentence structure

English changes the structure of a sentence when it has to be turned into a question.

"This is John." becomes "Who is this?" when turned into a question.

In Mandarin, the question retains the same structure.

这 是 John (zhè shì John, or "This is John")

这 是 谁 (zhè shì shéi, or "This is who")

The use of question words in exactly the same place as the expected answer is quite straightforward. This is seen in Indian languages also.

Tamil:

idu John ("This (is) John") 

idu yaaru? ("This (is) who?") 

Hindi:

yeh John hai ("This John is") 

yeh kaun hai ("This who is?")

Question words are used in many contexts, all without changing the word order of a sentence.

他 叫 张明 tā jiào zhāng míng ("His name is Zhang Ming", literally "He's called Zhang Ming")

他 叫 什么? tā jiào shénme? ("He's called what?")

现在 一 点 xiànzài yī diǎn ("Now (it's) one o'clock")

现在 几 点 xiànzài jǐ diǎn? ("Now (it's) which o'clock?")

Other sentences such as "This is the teacher" can be turned into a question "Is this the teacher?" without changing the word order, by just adding the question particle 吗 (the no-tone "ma") at the end.

这 是 老师 zhè shì lǎoshī ("This is (the) teacher")

这 是 老师 吗? zhè shì lǎoshī ma? ("Is this the teacher?", literally "This is (the) teacher (question particle)")

Again, this kind of structure is well-known in other languages too. Japanese uses the question particle "ka". Indian languages too use this structure. It's the default structure in the Dravidian languages, but not unknown in the North Indian ones either. (I'm using the English word "teacher" as-is in these examples to keep it simple and maintain focus on the sentence structure.)

Japanese:

これは 先生 です korewa sensei desu ("This (the) teacher is")

これは 先生 です か? korewa sensei desu ka? ("This (the) teacher is (question particle)")

Tamil:

idu teacher ("This (is the) teacher")

idu teacher aa? ("This (is the) teacher (question particle)")

Hindi:

yeh teacher hai ("This (the) teacher is")

yeh teacher hai, kya? ("This (the) teacher is, what?")

This makes things pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. You just need to unlearn the English habit of complicating things. Knowing Indian languages helps a lot when learning Mandarin.