I just need some advise please. My daughter can choose to take up Chinese or French as a compulsory language to study from grade 7. While she has studied Chinese in grade 5 and 6 ( we don't have either background) and she gets good grades as they dont write the Chinese letters yet- only vocab ( in the english way) and speaking. She is contemplating if learning Chinese gets harder than French grade 7 onwards. Any experience or recommendations are welcome as per your experiences with these languages. Thanks heaps for your help.

I am in year 8 and I am have been studying Chinese since year 7. I am also going to be continuing Chinese in VCE. I have been finding Chinese quite enjoyable and it opens many opportunities in the future as well. As of now, I am also not finding it too difficult. If your daughter has already learnt some Chinese vocabulary, she will likely be ahead when the Chinese characters are taught. I would recommend to take up Chinese if your daughter already has some experience and also because Chinese allows you to provide insight and value to international relationships with companies.

Thank you for your insight. Do you write Chinese characters or you are allowed a reference sheet during assessments like a cheat sheet?

Usually, we aren't allowed cheat sheets but the Chinese characters aren't too difficult as they are quite symbolic of the word they mean and you can quite often decipher the meaning of the word from the visual clues in a character. Also, if it is worth knowing, after only been studying Chinese for less than 2 years, I can make simple yet meaningful conversations regarding family, friends, school, subjects, animals, items, times, birthdays, introductions, colours and many other day-to-day terms as well as being able to write the characters.

3 months later

As a Chinese native, I would not recommend learning Chinese. In primary and secondary school, I find that Chinese is taught to a very shallow level compared to other languages, with most of my non Chinese friends learning Chinese basically unable to string up grammatically correct sentences, and for the life of them could not say a single word even anywhere close to correctly, even those at the very top of the class. Characters are probably the worst part, with even natives struggling. Furthermore, VCE Chinese is incredibly competitive from what I have heard and offers decent (at best) scaling for a language. I'd say take French.

Taking French from Year 7-Year 12 was definitely an eye opener. I felt that it helped me connect to my own language of English much better, as we were studying language functions, grammar, and tenses, while making comparisons. I can't say too much about Chinese, other than it may open more opportunities for usage in the future, given the large Chinese diaspora in Australia. Since graduating in 2020, I haven't had to use French for my job, social relations, etc. It is a wonderful language and subject to learn, and I highly recommend learning any language

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