Working in Chinese and then learning how to translate Chinese to English (or vice versa) requires a good deal of memory power. The Chinese language can be quite complex in its written form. Even if you stick to simplified Chinese characters (jiantizi, 简体字), you’ll need to memorize upward of 4,000 “hanzi” (漢字) characters in order to boast of any real reading or written fluency in Mandarin Chinese.
Japanese and Koreans also use Chinese characters, although not to the extent Chinese do. Japanese and Korean rely heavily on phonetic alphabets, reducing their dependency on Chinese characters, especially in their modern usages.
Even if you employ a translator for your English to Chinese translation, it might be a good idea to try and master some of the basics of Chinese. China and its ancient language are shaping the future of global business culture and will do so for a long time to come.
The good news is that Chinese grammar is rather simple. Chinese is a subject–verb–object (SVO) language, just like English. This means Chinese sentence structures stick in the brain fairly easily for native English speakers. The bad news, as we’ve already pointed out, is all of the Chinese characters you’ll have to commit to memory.
Instead of simply learning the rules of a phonetic alphabet, you’ll have to dig into Chinese culture, and the deeper structure of hanzi. Learning the components, or radicals (bushou, 部首), that comprise Chinese pictographs can help you immensely. There are around 214 radicals you’ll need to learn in order to get a grasp on things. Even to a language novice, that’s a pretty manageable number.
Radicals usually have a simple sematic meaning, but sometimes they can also indicate phonetic sounds. By learning Chinese radicals, you can often guess, decipher, and start to classify hanzi in your brain, which should help you learn new characters down the road.
Of course, you’ll have to spend a lot of time with flash cards or reams of paper, writing Chinese characters down. Memory in Chinese language acquisition and Chinese translation is exceedingly important. The more characters you commit to memory, the stronger your memory will become.
That being said, you should definitely tackle the Chinese radicals (we don’t mean people of a countercultural bent) as well. There are fun websites, like Chineasy.org, plus a ton of colorful books that can help you associate radicals and Chinese characters with Chinese history and the Chinese way of literally picturing the world.
