Why learn Chinese? 7 reasons, with the facts behind them

More people speak a variety of Chinese as their mother tongue than any other language, and its characters have been written for more than three thousand years. Here are seven reasons to learn it, each checked against its source — and a simple way to start: find your level and learn 16 words a day.

Updated November 7, 2026 · 4 min read

Lire ce guide en français

Leer esta guía en español

Ler este guia em português

Bu rehberi Türkçe okuyun

اقرأ هذا الدليل بالعربية

阅读本指南的中文版

このガイドを日本語で読む

Chinese in five facts

1. The largest native language on Earth

Chinese is a group of Sino-Tibetan languages, and more people speak one of them as a native language than any other language in the world (Britannica). The one you will learn is Modern Standard Chinese: the national standard, based on Mandarin and on the pronunciation of Beijing, that grew out of a language-unification programme launched in the early 1900s. Where it is spoken, and how it relates to Cantonese, Wu or Min, is in Where is Chinese spoken?

2. A language of the United Nations

Modern Standard Chinese is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, with Arabic, English, French, Russian and Spanish. In Singapore, Mandarin is one of four official languages, beside Malay, Tamil and English (Constitution of Singapore).

3. One script, read across East Asia

Chinese writing was fundamental to the writing systems of East Asia, and Britannica estimates that some 1.34 billion people use its characters — called hanzi in Chinese, kanji in Japanese and hanja in Korean (Britannica). If you read Japanese, many characters will look familiar — and if you learn Chinese, Japanese becomes easier to read.

4. Three thousand years of texts

The earliest Chinese inscriptions, on bone and tortoiseshell, date from the Shang dynasty, and by 1400 BCE the script had some 2,500 to 3,000 characters, most of which can still be read today. Until the 18th century more than half of the world’s books were written in Chinese (Britannica). The story is in A short history of Chinese.

5. A grammar with no conjugation

Chinese words never change their form: no verb endings, no plural, no gender, no articles. Person and number are carried by the pronoun, and word order — subject, verb, object — does the work (Britannica). The hard parts are elsewhere: four tones in Modern Standard Chinese, and characters. Our Chinese grammar basics and how Chinese shows time explain both.

6. A recognised exam to aim for

The HSK, China’s international Chinese proficiency test, says it serves about 800,000 test takers a year at more than 1,500 test centres in 169 countries, and it now has a new “HSK 3.0” version (chinesetest.cn). Our free Chinese level test gives you a first estimate from A1 to B2 before you choose a level.

7. Pinyin makes the start easier

Pinyin, the official romanization based on Beijing pronunciation, was adopted in 1956 and modified in 1958 as a tool for teaching the standard language (Britannica). It lets you read and type Chinese sounds in Latin letters from day one, while you learn the characters step by step. On the websites W3Techs can classify, Chinese is the content language of 1.2% (W3Techs) — a reminder that the web’s language rankings measure only part of what people read.

How to start this week

1. Find your level with the level test.
2. Learn 16 words a day — about five minutes of active recall and spaced repetition, every day.
3. Learn every word with its tone, from day one: mā and mǎ are different words.
4. Read the grammar core once: Chinese grammar basics, then time and aspect.
5. Listen daily and repeat short sentences aloud, copying the tones.

Keep learning

• A short history of Chinese — oracle bones to pinyin
• Where is Chinese spoken? — dialect groups on a map
• Chinese grammar basics · Chinese tenses: time and aspect
• Learning Japanese too? JLPT levels N5 to N1 — sections, times and pass marks
• Learn Chinese with 16Word · Level tests in 36 languages · All guides · Plans