In today’s All About Chinese we take years of Chinese learning experience and China life experience and boil it down to bring you the top 5 reasons to learn Chinese.

There are numerous different reasons to learn Chinese, below some of the more important reasons are listed.

• Chinese is the language of nearly one-quarter of the world’s population. Speakers of Chinese are spread throughout the globe.

• Unlike most languages, Chinese has a unique writing system, which provides visual comprehensibility and is considered by some to be an art form.

• Chinese grammar is easy!

• When you learn Chinese you also learn how the Chinese think. The structure of Chinese is not only logical, but also pragmatic, and very related to the particular way of Chinese thinking. Learning Chinese opens up the culture of one of the world’s oldest civilizations. You are learning much more than just a language.

• China currently boasts the fastest growing economy in the world and is widely regarded as the potentially biggest global market in the twenty-first century. Proficient speakers of Mandarin Chinese will have more job opportunities in various fields such as business, government, international relations, information technology, tourism, education, translation and much, much more.

Below are some cultural insights into different aspects of Chinese linguistic Culture.

• Chinese is its own language family– About one-fifth of the world’s population, or over one billion people, speak some form of Chinese as their native language.

• China is the only country in the world whose literature has been written in one language for more than 3,000 consecutive years.

• Chinese is its own language family, and there are estimated to be 8,000 dialects of Chinese.

• Though there are tens of thousands of characters, Mandarin Chinese has only some than 400 syllables, or individual word sounds. As a result, a single sound can represent more than 100 different written characters. Tones and the use of compound syllables multiply the number of available word sounds.