— What children growing up abroad really need to cross is not the threshold of “being able to speak Chinese,” but the point where Chinese becomes a tool for thinking

By Jane Sonnenschein · June 25, 2026

Wittgenstein once wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” I used to hear this as a philosophical proposition. But after spending these years raising a child abroad and accompanying her as she learns Chinese, I have come to feel that it describes something very concrete, something happening every day in multilingual families.

Of course it matters whether a child can speak Chinese. But what matters even more is whether the language has truly entered the child’s thinking—whether it can help them understand the world, express their feelings, and organize their experiences. If Chinese remains limited to everyday family phrases such as “eat,” “go to sleep,” “hurry up,” and “do your homework,” then the language may still appear to be there, but in reality it has already retreated into a very narrow corner.

Recently, I came across an article on Xiaohongshu (a Chinese lifestyle and social-content platform often compared loosely to a mix of Instagram, Pinterest, and community-based recommendation platforms). Someone had translated into Chinese an English-language article written by a native English speaker.

The original author had studied eight languages, so he was clearly a strong language learner. That was precisely why his comparison of the difficulty of learning Arabic and Chinese caught my attention. More importantly, he did not simply ask which language was “harder.” He made his point of reference clear: he was looking at these languages from the perspective of a native English speaker.

That distinction matters.

When people talk about whether a foreign language is difficult, they often forget to ask one basic question: What is your first language?

For a native Chinese speaker, Japanese or Korean may offer a certain sense of familiarity through shared cultural references, vocabulary, or writing traditions, so the experience of starting those languages can be very different from that of an English speaker. For someone whose first language is German, English, or French, languages such as Spanish or Italian may feel relatively accessible because they belong to the same broad Indo-European family or share the Latin alphabet.

A language is never simply “easy” or “difficult” on its own. A great deal depends on the linguistic background of the person learning it.

What stayed with me most from the author’s description of learning Arabic was the sense that, at some point, the language began giving him very strong positive feedback.

Arabic has its own writing system, as well as roots and patterns of word formation. It does not use the Latin alphabet, and its system is quite different from English, German, or French. But from the way he described his experience, once he gradually understood the letters and the underlying patterns of roots and word formation, something seemed to click.

He no longer felt as though he were memorizing piles of unrelated words. He had begun to enter the internal logic of the language.

That made him more and more motivated to continue. His vocabulary grew faster, and eventually he even became interested in the history and culture behind Arabic.

I have never studied Arabic, so I cannot judge professionally whether his understanding of its structure was entirely accurate. But I understand very well the kind of learning experience he was describing.

When you are learning a language, there can come a moment when you suddenly realize: this is not random. There is a system here. I can begin to understand it, and once I understand the pattern, I can use what I already know to make sense of something new.

That moment matters enormously.

It gives the learner a sense of control and, with it, the motivation to keep going.

Positive feedback matters whenever we learn something.

If the more you learn, the more you understand; if the more you learn, the more you are able to use what you know; if the language gradually begins to open up a larger world for you, then you are much more willing to keep investing time and effort.

But if learning brings only frustration—if every step reveals another obstacle, if you memorize a great deal but still cannot really read, if you spend years studying and remain stuck at basic communication—it becomes very easy to give up somewhere along the way.

I think this may be exactly what happened to that author when he learned Chinese.

He mentioned that Chinese does not have complicated verb tenses and that its grammar can appear quite simple. For example, in sentences such as “I eat,” “you eat,” and “he eats,” the verb itself does not change according to person or tense in the way it does in many European languages.

From the perspective of a native English speaker, Chinese can indeed feel unusual in this respect: sentences are often short, grammatical forms change relatively little, and a great deal of meaning depends on context.

So if someone remains only at the most basic level of everyday communication, Chinese can easily seem “simple.” It can even seem thin.

But as native Chinese speakers, we know very well that this apparent thinness does not come from the language itself.

It comes from having reached only a shallow layer of it.

Any language looks thin when you only know its surface.

Someone who can use English only to shop, ask for directions, order food, and say hello is not going to experience the complexity of Shakespeare, Dickens, Woolf, or modern English writing either.

Chinese is the same.

If a foreign-language learner knows only how to say “eat,” “sleep,” “I want this,” “I’m going there,” and “it’s hot today,” of course Chinese will seem simple. What they have encountered is only its most everyday, practical layer.

But much of the real depth of Chinese lies beyond that layer.

What makes Chinese difficult is not only the number of characters or the tones.

Its deeper difficulty is that its beauty and power arrive relatively late.

You first have to cross a long threshold: recognizing characters, learning to write them, distinguishing homophones, and gradually building a working knowledge of two or three thousand commonly used characters. Only then can reading begin to become reasonably fluent.

And it is only after you enter the world of reading that much of what lies behind Chinese slowly begins to open up: idioms, historical allusions, history, classical poetry, classical texts, context, deliberate understatement, and a distinctly Chinese way of expressing meaning.

A four-character idiom is often far more than four characters.

Behind it may be a historical event, a particular person, a choice, a judgment about values, or even a model of human behavior that can be recognized again and again in real life.

Take the idiom “talking about warfare on paper.” It is not simply an old story that children are expected to memorize. It expresses an idea: theory that is detached from real experience can fail when it meets an actually complex situation.

Or take the story behind “the old man at the frontier loses his horse.” It is not merely an ancient tale. It reminds us that whether something is fortunate or unfortunate cannot always be judged in the moment.

When a child truly understands expressions like these, they are not merely learning vocabulary. They are beginning to understand a way Chinese culture has traditionally looked at reality, fate, and change.

History works in much the same way.

Reading history is not simply about knowing what happened in which year, nor is it about memorizing dynasties and historical figures.

It allows us to look at the situations people faced before us and recognize problems that return again and again in real life: power, choice, loyalty, betrayal, rise and decline, endurance, judgment, timing.

These things have carried many different names throughout history, but they keep reappearing in different forms.

If a child can enter this world through Chinese, what they receive is no longer merely language input. They gain an entire body of material through which to understand the world.

Classical Chinese poetry is even more like this.

Much of its beauty comes precisely from what it does not fully say.

A few characters, one image, the trace of an emotion—and then an enormous amount of space is left open behind them. The poem seems to have said a great deal, while at the same time saying almost nothing directly. The reader has to enter that space and feel it for themselves.

A moon, a river, a gust of wind, an empty mountain: on the surface, these are simply elements of a landscape. Yet they often carry separation, loneliness, homesickness, time, and fate.

A great deal of the beauty of Chinese poetic imagery is created through this refusal to say everything.

If someone has never reached this level, it is difficult for them to understand why Chinese can feel so rich.

This is also why many children growing up abroad gradually reach a point where their Chinese stops developing.

The problem is not necessarily that they could not speak Chinese when they were young. Many children speak and understand it quite well in early childhood. They can talk to their mother, communicate at the dinner table, and manage everyday family life without much difficulty.

But once they enter the local school system, the dominant language begins to take over more and more functions. It becomes the language in which they learn new knowledge, socialize with classmates, express complicated emotions, do homework, give presentations, read books, and make sense of the world.

If Chinese remains limited to family life during this period, it gradually becomes a very narrow language.

The child can still use it, but only in a limited range of situations.

They may be able to say in Chinese, “I’m hungry,” “I don’t want to do my homework,” or “School was okay today.” But they may struggle to explain why they feel hurt, why they are anxious, why they had a conflict with a friend, why they love a particular book, or what they think about a complicated question.

Little by little, whenever they need to think about something more complex, they naturally turn to the stronger language—the one that comes more easily.

It is not because they do not love Chinese.

Chinese simply has not continued growing alongside their thinking.

Once a language can no longer function as a tool for thought, it gradually becomes little more than a label for one part of daily life.

This is especially important for families raising children abroad.

Many parents assume that as long as their child can still speak Chinese at home, the language has been successfully preserved.

But being able to speak Chinese and being able to think in Chinese are two very different things.

The first can be maintained for a while through everyday exposure. The second has to be built slowly through reading, expression, discussion, writing, and cultural input.

If a child receives only instructions in Chinese but never tells stories in Chinese, expresses opinions in Chinese, learns history through Chinese, reads literature in Chinese, or discusses feelings in Chinese, then it is very difficult for the language to become a real tool of the mind.

This is why I have come to place more and more importance on Chinese reading and writing.

Of course, I do not think Chinese should be learned only through rote memorization.

Mechanical copying, endless repetition, and writing something again as punishment can absolutely wear away a child’s interest. But with a non-alphabetic writing system such as Chinese characters, it is also difficult to gain real mastery without writing or repetition at all.

People often say children should simply read more. Reading is certainly important. But if a child cannot recognize even the most basic characters, there is no real way to begin reading.

Character recognition, writing, reading, and understanding are not competing methods. They are different parts that need to be built together at different stages.

The important thing is not to leave a child trapped forever in the painful early stage.

If all they do is write characters, correct mistakes, and memorize vocabulary, but they never reach stories, books, history, poetry, and meaningful expression, then it is very difficult for them to experience positive feedback.

Chinese will simply feel hard, annoying, and useless.

But if parents can help a child gradually cross that first threshold and discover that Chinese can tell beautiful stories, introduce fascinating people, express very subtle emotions, and give words to complicated things inside them, then Chinese can begin to change from “a language I have to learn” into “a language I want to use.”

That was also the biggest thing I took from the article I had read.

When that native English speaker learned Arabic, he seemed to reach a stage where the language system itself began rewarding him. That drew him further in and eventually made him curious about the culture behind it.

When he learned Chinese, perhaps he had not yet reached the point where Chinese begins to offer that kind of reward.

He saw the simplicity of its surface grammar, but had not yet reached the depth behind the characters, idioms, poetry, history, and context.

So Chinese felt thin to him. It seemed too dependent on context. It did not seem to open up suddenly at a particular stage in the way Arabic had for him.

That is not his fault.

On the contrary, I think his experience is highly representative.

Many foreign-language learners stop at exactly this point. So do many children growing up abroad.

The threshold at the beginning of Chinese is high, while much of its beauty comes late.

If there is no one to guide them through the middle, and if they do not receive enough positive feedback along the way, they can easily give up before they ever reach the part where Chinese begins to open into something much wider.

So when children growing up abroad learn Chinese, the real answer cannot simply be: “Just keep going.”

Persistence matters, of course.

But how you persist matters even more.

Parents need to understand that Chinese cannot remain only the language of daily family life. It has to gradually become a language the child can use to understand the world.

Children need to read stories in Chinese, listen to history, understand idioms, experience poetry, express themselves, tell the stories of their own lives, and eventually begin writing down their own thoughts.

Only then can Chinese move beyond the kitchen, the dinner table, and the homework notebook.

It can enter the child’s mind, their feelings, and their way of seeing the world.

A language truly remains with a child not because their parents repeatedly demand that they keep it, but because the language becomes useful inside them.

It helps them explain themselves clearly.

It helps them understand other people.

It gives them access to another body of cultural memory.

And beyond one language, it gives them another way of seeing the world.

Chinese is difficult, of course.

For many children growing up abroad, it may be harder than alphabetic languages such as English, German, or Spanish, because they have to cross the barriers of characters, tones, reading, and cultural background.

But Chinese is not thin.

It simply hides much of its richness deep inside—behind its characters, words, stories, poems, and history.

Only when a child reaches that point do they begin to understand that Chinese is not simply another way of speaking.

It is another set of codes for understanding the world.

And that is what makes learning Chinese abroad truly worth continuing. 

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version：中文不是单薄，而是它的美来得太晚

German version: Chinesisch ist nicht oberflächlich – seine Schönheit zeigt sich nur sehr spät