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With over 100,000 characters, Mandarin is considered one of the hardest languages to learn. The Defense Language Center classifies Mandarin as a Category IV language and offers a 64-week long course to learn the language.<\/p>\n
While the language has over 100,000 characters, according to the Chinese Learning Institute, knowing around 3,000 can be considered as fluent. Mandarin is a tonal language, which means how you say a word determines what it means. An example of tone in English is using a higher pitch to signal a question.<\/p>\n
Mandarin has five tones, flat, rising, dip, falling, and neutral. To show how the tone affects the meaning of a word, let\u2019s like at \u201cma\u201d, depending on the tone it can either mean \u201cmom\u201d or \u201cto curse.\u201d So be sure you watch your tone.<\/p>\n
Mandarin also has the distinction of being rated as the second most spoken language with 1.117 billion speakers, 918 million of which as native.<\/p>\n
Learning a language can be a rewarding experience, whether for work, travel, or just a love of learning. There are many options on how to learn a language from private lessons to software. If Mandarin seems like a challenge, Spanish is considered the easiest to learn.<\/p>\n