Illustration: Xia Qing/GT

The most frequent question I get from my foreign students who are learning Chinese is, "How come Chinese is so difficult a foreign language? Will I ever be able to speak it?"

It's not a secret among the Chinese teachers in our university that the main purpose of the very first classes with your new students is to build their confidence. The most usual case is that we face a bunch of young students from all over the world who, while excited about living and studying in China, are still extremely nervous about learning the "legendary" Chinese language.

It is always a big puzzle to me why all the foreigners who have just started to learn Chinese are so worried. Many of them are even bilingual or multi-lingual themselves. But they are still afraid.

It makes me wonder what kind of reputation our mother tongue has in the world.

"Where did you get the idea that Chinese is more difficult to learn than other foreign languages?" I used to ask them.

Most would tell me that they read about it on the Internet or heard it from their parents or friends who've never been to China.

I also feel like many newcomers to China have a curious kind of perspective toward the Chinese that borders on idolatry.

They are like, oh, you can speak Chinese, a language that is so complicated, and you can write Chinese characters, which are like thousands of different pictures and impossible to memorize.

Oh my god, you can type Chinese on your phone so fast! Are you sure you didn't go to a temple for two years to get trained for this? 

It's really cute, but this kind of mindset would be a big obstacle in learning Chinese.

Combined with the common stereotype that Chinese people are all math geniuses, and they always score the highest on tests, it's really challenging to help the students build confidence. And yes, such things as tones in Chinese are a complete strange system to most students.

But come on. It's just a language. It's the same language we used when we were going through the terrible "twos" that drove our parents crazy.

I think the worst response from a teacher to a student's anxiety is trying to make them even more awed, by telling them that Chinese is so different from any other language they have been exposed to in the past.

It's a rookie mistake for Chinese teachers.

An ideal teacher is ready to answer any questions of yours because with a college diploma in teaching Chinese, he or she is professionally trained in semantics, phonetics, didactics and a whole bunch of other kinds of -tics.

They will never simply tell you that "It's how the Chinese say it," when you ask them why this is correct and that is wrong; they will be able to know how to draw a tongue bitmap to make specific instructions in how to pronounce.

They are very experienced in dealing with the lack of confidence in foreigners, and will be able to guide you through this phobia phase.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.