If you are a parent considering teaching your children Mandarin as a second language, you may wonder if Mandarin is a difficult language for children, rather than a language closer to their native language. Why is the plural of “dogs” in English “ dogs and the plural of “mouse” “mice”? To express something in the plural in Mandarin Chinese, you simply add the word corresponding to the number of the member. In Mandarin Chinese, we usually join words together to form a new word with a fairly obvious meaning. You might think that Chinese is pretty intimidating compared to, say, Spanish or French, because you have to write characters and the manner of speaking is unfamiliar. If you made it to the end of this article and changed your mind about the intimidating nature of learning Chinese, we want to assure you that there is no reason for them or you to feel intimidated. Pinyin is an intuitive and easy way for English speakers to learn spoken Chinese. Students learning languages such as English, Spanish, or French need to distinguish which verb forms to use according to topic and time. With four tones and pinyin, you can accurately pronounce any Chinese character. Chinese pinyin is a system based on the Latin letters that China uses today to denote the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Pinyin also gives you a visual representation of what Chinese sounds like. When you learn pinyin, you train your mind to process the sounds and your mouth to pronounce them.