My kid started Mandarin language kindergarten, I am trying to learn enough to help him with his homework. Mao simplified the language quite a bit when he took

My kid started Mandarin language kindergarten, I am trying to learn enough to help him with his homework. Mao simplified the language quite a bit when he took over. This is why in Taiwan they still use traditional characters. Mao was considering converting to the Latin alphabet as well but apparently Stalin told him it would invite western decadence. Because there are around 8k characters, the ABC song we teach kids for use in ordering dictionaries does not work. There are 3-4 different ordering systems so you end up owning 3-4 different dictionaries, though often I give up and just use an app. There are 8,105 simplified Chinese characters according to the official list, 3,500 classified as "frequent." My kid has about 4500 hours of elementary school left so he has to learn about one character per hour. Mandarin does not use spaces between the words. This introduces some ambiguity in parsing multi-character words but it does not seem to be a huge problem in practice. There are some things that are easier though, Mandarin does not have much in the way of conjugation, possession, plurals and gender like you do in French and Spanish. There are some counting words you have to learn, like how in English we have flock, pack, herd, etc.