For speakers of English, European languages or those languages of the world that use a Romanised system, learning an Asian language can be a huge challenge.

Why you may ask? Having to learn tones and an unfamiliar script!

Tones are a fundamental part of any Asian language where the meaning of a word is dependent on how high or low the tone of your voice is.  Get the tone slightly wrong and you will change the meaning of the word altogether.  Get the word wrong, and you could put your foot in your mouth big time!

For many non-Asian speakers, it is sometimes difficult to hear the slight differences in each tone and that is why it is so important to get it right from the very beginning.  From the moment you take up learning an Asian language, you may have to do things differently than you have in the past.

Where you have concentrated on writing the word down in a Romanised form that you can recognise, a more useful approach may be to memorise each tone and learn the importance of diacritics or specific marks used to indicate the phonetic value of a word.  Do this correctly and you will be set for learning a language long-term.