"Americans have never been particularly interested in learning other languages and are even less interested today." (Will Americans really learn Chinese, the New York Times) It seems to be a common sense that U.S people don't like to learn foreign language, this may be a little bit Anglo-centric, but this is not weird since English is the world language. However the article then tells us "Chinese instruction is no passing fad, what with 1.3 billion people to talk to." What makes the U.S people turn out to be a passionate language learner?.
Through reading the article, we may know the reason is the development of China. China is now considered one of the most powerful and greatest economies, has a great impact on American people; we never imagine Chinese would be the most popular language to be learned in U.S before. In fact, President Obama announced a new initiative by 25th September 2015 aimed at having 1 million American schoolchildren learn Mandarin Chinese over the next five years. "If our two countries are going to do more together around the world, then speaking each other's languages so we can understand each other is a good start," Obama said ( Kylle FELDSCHER, "Obama wants 1 million Americans learning Chinese by 2020", Washington examiner). However, Chinese is always claimed to be among the world's most difficult languages, if not the most difficult language, to learn, as what the article describes, how can a foreigner learn it well or at least learn it easier? I reduce the hardship of it into five parts and try to fix them.
The first one is zi, character. No doubt that the Chinese character is the most complicated one in the world. We have 26 letters in English, but we have an 8.5inch * 6inch * 2.3inch dictionary which is full of Chinese character, each one has its unique stroke and every two, three or four characters can make a word. When you start to learn Chinese, you have to memorize them and there is no lazy way, the only shortcut is to memorize the most useful server thousand characters.