For Chinese speakers

The challenges

• a language with no family relationship to Chinese;
• conjugation: Chinese verbs don't conjugate;
• articles and gender, which don't exist in Chinese;
• agreement (plural, feminine);
• distinguishing sounds like [ʁ] and [l], [b] and [p];
• intonation: French is not a tonal language.

Tips

• lots of listening and repetition;
• always learn the gender with each noun;
• prioritise the conjugations of the most frequent verbs.

The FSI ranks Chinese among the hardest languages for English speakers, and the reverse is also true: patient, regular study is the key.

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