The difference between learning Chinese and Urdu Language.

Byline: Dr. Kiran Bibi

Chinese character learning for pinyin writing students has always been an essential and challenging task. Chinese is the world's most ancient, exquisite, sententious, and exuberant language, but it is also regarded as the most difficult language to learn. It is not only for non-Chinese, but it has four different levels of difficulty of writing, recognizing, reading, and memorizing for Chinese people. For centuries Chinese trying hard to learn their script but still challenging to find one who can claim a complete understanding; a small number of Chinese possess the ability to recognize, write, read and pronounce precisely while others can't; which makes it even more difficult for foreigners to learn this language. This article highlights the snags for Pakistani students in the learning phase of Chinese characters' attributes and teaching as a foreign language and then talks about their solutions. The history of teaching Chinese in Pakistan is only more than thirty years which is not very long.

The need for learning Chinese in Pakistan expanded after the 1980's Chinese reforms. Nevertheless, students find it difficult and throbbed by Chinese characters giving up halfway through after learning for six months or a year. There could be many subjective and objective reasons for this, peradventure, the materials used in the teaching, the student's unfamiliarity with Chinese characters, their learning level, or the teaching technique being at fault. There are some practical and psychological problems too for Pakistani students. Most of the social and educational interactions are in English or Urdu, and both are very dissimilar in nature and font. Chinese characters are a unity of form, sound, and meaning called morphemes. However, phoneme and syllable characters have only shapes and sounds, but no purpose is very different from Chinese characters. It is worth noting that even if it is "shape", there is a big difference between the "shape" of Chinese characters and the "shape" of pinyin characters. For example, the "aeY=" (come) character is written in different strokes, having a name but no meaning, and pronunciation will be different.

There are many basic Chinese stroke types that are intricate for memorizing them and their pronunciation. Moreover, five different tones make them more complex. On the other hand, English has twenty-six phonemes, and each alphabet sound is unique and distinctive, making it easier to memorize...