Poll: Is Chinese hard to learn?

[Goulashsoup]

We will all be speaking it soon anyway. It isn't that hard!
Yes it has tones, characters, and lots of subtleties

but it has NO tense, NO articles, NO subject verb agreement NO case(not even for pronouns which English has),and NO irregular plural forms.

Even simpler than English, which I find easy already for being simple enough for basic conversation. Yes Chinese is harder for me but only because its more foreign, but if I knew no language and compared it to everything then it might not be so bad.

 

[Chemical Alia]

I had a little over one year to learn Chinese in the army to become an interpreter, and I thought it was super awesome and of all the languages I've studied, the easiest. But I only mean that in terms of listening and speaking. Even though there are very few cognates with English, the more words you learn, the easier it is to memorize them thanks to characters having meaning and providing context (森林，lol). Beginner Chinese grammar starts off pretty simple and in many ways similar to English, so I found myself being able to communicate my ideas a lot earlier and a lot easier than in other languages I studied, like Spanish. Not having to worry about things like cases and conjugation helped a ton with that.

Reading and writing is horrible. I've probably forgotten how to write 90% of hanzi simply because I never have to do it and literally only ever type if I'm using Chinese, which is rare enough as it is. Recognizing a word and being able to write it are two totally different skills. Having two PRETTY DIFFERENT writing systems isn't nice, either.

But overall, cool language and would recommend.

 

[Kolby Jack]

I know of all the languages the US military teaches, Chinese has the longest course (a year and a half). I wasn't in that class, so I can't speak for exactly how difficult it is, but it does vary from person to person. Some people can learn languages fairly easily, while others struggle a lot. I've heard Arabic is pretty easy though; very formulaic. Also keep in mind, the goal of military language courses is not FLUENCY, it's just enough understanding to be useful to the military. Fluency takes YEARS of dedicated study, and most likely full-on immersion.

 

[Nickolai77]

I remember this one time at my Serbian mates house. His mother spoke Serbian most of the time to him. One time she had a long conversation telling us what we were having for lunch but in Serbian, however she said 3 items of food in English. They were all stunned I knew what the fuck they were on about.

I've done university projects with Chinese students who tend to speak their language to eachother when discussing things about the project between the themselves but i'm able to get the gist of what their going on about because they seed English words such as "presentation" and "deadline" into their conversation. Sometimes if i'm clear what they've been going on about i can even break into the conversation in English. Maybe languages are picking up English words so fast they forget they're actually English hence the surprise of your Serbian hosts.

***

I've been taught some Chinese in the past and personally i found it quite hard. It's physically difficult to pronounce the words and there's few points of reference to help you remember certain words like there are with other European languages- for instance most of the simple English words are related to German (I, me, have) and most of the complicated English words are related to French, and all the numbers sound roughly similar. I remember spending a whole week learning to remember 1-10 in Chinese, whereas you could probably teach me 1-10 in Italian in a couple of hours.


That all said, Chinese doesn't appear to be as rules-based as European languages- I think of all the European languages English seems to have the least rules and part of what's difficult for an English speaker learning other European languages is learning the language rules which go with it. So that's a big plus point for Chinese, but i still think it's a hard language. That said, i do enjoy learning foreign languages, even if i'm not naturally good at learning them.


Oh, but i don't think Chinese is something we're all going to be speaking anytime soon. The majority of the worlds population speaks a European language- be it English French or Spanish, and because the three languages are related it's easier for say, a South American, to learn English or French than Chinese. Chinese is going to be a hugely important language for trade and business, but not a global lingua-franca.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Yes it is to me but in saying so I am incapable of learning another language fluently (I was soo bad in French, Welsh and German classes).

 

[Bestival]

"Chinese" is impossible to learn, as there is no such language. You're either talking about Mandarin or Cantonese here.

As for the difficulty of those two, I guess that will depend on the person learning it. Some people have more talent for languages than others, French was always a huge pain to me. English was easy enough though.

 

[Da Orky Man]

Apparently learning to speak i isn't too hard if ou can get your head around tonal languages, but reading/writing is extremely difficult. Hell, a vast amount of China's population now can't be said to be fully literate simply because of how their writing system works.

 

[Emanuele Ciriachi]

My wife is chinese, we are married since more than 7 years. I speak italian (mother tongue), english, french and some japanese.

Chinese is by far, by very far, the hardest of them all, possibly as hard as all the other languages I have to learn so far combined. Mostly because they have 4 ways to pronounce every vowel that encodes a different meaning whereas we usually use tone to convey mood, and the difference between those 4 pronunciations are subtle to grasp for a westerner.

I will have to learn it eventually - our 3-years daughter already understand it quite well, if I don't the rest of my family will have a secure channel to communicate between them to my exclusion!

 

[balladbird]

I had a little over one year to learn Chinese in the army to become an interpreter, and I thought it was super awesome and of all the languages I've studied, the easiest. But I only mean that in terms of listening and speaking. Even though there are very few cognates with English, the more words you learn, the easier it is to memorize them thanks to characters having meaning and providing context (森林，lol). Beginner Chinese grammar starts off pretty simple and in many ways similar to English, so I found myself being able to communicate my ideas a lot earlier and a lot easier than in other languages I studied, like Spanish. Not having to worry about things like cases and conjugation helped a ton with that.

You were an army linguist? I went through the program back in '06, back then the army and marine interpreters were being filed into the arabic classes, good that they can finally diversify a bit.

To answer your question, I'd say it's easier to learn than english, but if your pool of knowledge is based entirely on latin or germanic languages it'll be a bit harder than if you have experience with other asian languages.

part of the reason is exactly what you described.

but it has NO tense, NO articles, NO subject verb agreement NO case(not even for pronouns which English has),and NO irregular plural forms.

Japanese, Korean, and Tagalog play by similar rules in terms of tense ambiguity, and while this does make it hard to get the hang of conversation, it's a lot easier to learn a language that doesn't have tense or articles than to learn a language that does when your native tongue doesn't.

Can you imagine trying to comprehend infinitives without having a sufficient enough grasp of the concept to even understand what they are?

 

[Sandernista]

If you have a good teacher and are diligent I don't think it is any harder than any other language. I haven't practiced in years but I can still spit out a few sentences.

 

[yamy]

"Chinese" is impossible to learn, as there is no such language. You're either talking about Mandarin or Cantonese here.

As for the difficulty of those two, I guess that will depend on the person learning it. Some people have more talent for languages than others, French was always a huge pain to me. English was easy enough though.

By Chinese people usually mean Mandarin so its usually safe to assume unless they mean otherwise. Also, Cantonese is not a written language. Whilst you can write with it, nobody actually use it to communicate by writing.

As to whether Chinese is difficult to learn, it depends on what background you come from. English speaker tend to find it difficult as there is no alphabet in Chinese - its a completely different writing system. Japanese/Korean speakers tend to have an easier time as Japanese evolved from Chinese, similar to how many European languages evolved from Latin.

I don't know whether they had been any subjective studies into the difficulties of languages removing people's languages background, however.

 

[Chromatic Aberration]

Speaking as a German with experiences in French, Norwegian and obviously English who once took a half-year course in Mandarin: it's easy to put together but very difficult to use in practice. OP has essentially nailed all the things to consider here.

From a grammatical point of view it's very easy and much less messy than say German or French which makes it very easy to learn from a purely technical perspective. The difficulty then comes from it's application: the millions of characters and the tonal aspect of it as a language are a very hard thing to wrap ones mind around without prior exposure. The first means one has to memorize a great deal of information to merely properly read and write and the second means the same for speaking the words plus adding the difficulty of being based on pitching ones voice accordingly all the fucking time. And let me tell you, as someone who has never learned to play an instrument, learning and properly assessing that is really not as simple as it sounds.

So in total I'd say it probably comes down to the same amount of effort if you aren't proficient in some European languages already; as Nickolai pointed out, similarities to other languages help a lot in learning a language. Chinese is in that case obviously a different breed for most but I'd say that this doesn't make it more difficult altogether.

 

[zumbledum]

myself im terribad at languages never could get on with any of them , maths and sciency stuff makes sense but languages is all just dry learning to me, but im English i know if i speak loud and slowly anywhere in the world eventually some english speaker will come and service my needs
Im going to have to take the firefly route when China takes over from Merica, if you can swear in the language you can get by in most situations i find.

but i have a nephew who is like a savant with laguages, he self taught himself mandarin in a year, took the test at the embassy and was utterly gutted to only get Fluent, he wanted native! so pissed was he he stopped overnight and decided to learn arabic instead then converted to Islam , hes at SOAS now in London think the poor bastard has a permanent MI5 tail

 

[Goulashsoup]

My wife is chinese, we are married since more than 7 years. I speak italian (mother tongue), english, french and some japanese.

Chinese is by far, by very far, the hardest of them all, possibly as hard as all the other languages I have to learn so far combined. Mostly because they have 4 ways to pronounce every vowel that encodes a different meaning whereas we usually use tone to convey mood, and the difference between those 4 pronunciations are subtle to grasp for a westerner.

I will have to learn it eventually - our 3-years daughter already understand it quite well, if I don't the rest of my family will have a secure channel to communicate between them to my exclusion!

Yes, but you have to admit it could be worse with European style grammar and all. I do think English isn't the easiest language, maybe for us we think it is but Afrikaans is even simpler, and indonesian is even more simpler, and chinese except the tones, signs,modal particles, and aspect is simpler. English is not the hardest language like they joke in the US but it is not the easiest compared to every language with more than 1 million speakers.

One thai I know said he found Chinese very easy since he already used tones in Thai and didn't have to use European style grammar which he said English has that we think it has very little of. Thai is like chinese in that you do not decline or conjugate, even more simple morphologically than English. No grammatical gender but you talk differently based on gender and use different pronouns and greetings.

 

[ExtraDebit]

I'm chinese but grow up outside of china, I speak both mandarin and cantonese and I still find the language hard as fuck! I can chat and type in chinese on the computer with a little help of the dictionary sure, but ask me to write it on paper and we'll have trouble.

The thing is: in english, once you learn the rules of the alphabeth and memorize a few words you can write 90% of the words you hear or speak, in addition if you see it on paper even if it's completely foreign to you and never saw the word before you can still pronounce it.

The same cannot be said for chinese, if you saw a character you never saw before, there is no way that you can pronounce it. If you hear a word from the radio you never heard before, there is no way you can write it. example, if you hear the word "zhong", there are literally 50 or more character with that pinyin (tone).

Each word you learn you need to memorize. Maybe I just have bad memories or are bad with languages, but it's hard for me.

 

[freaper]

If you've got the time, and are interested, you could always try to learn Japanese first. The pronunciation is easier, the hiragana writing is simpler than purely writing in kanji (although they still use kanji all the time) and the grammar is a nice compromise. It might be a way to introduce yourself to more Asian languages.

EDIT: this thread is making me wonder; if China were to open up to more international influences, would their language become easier for others to learn? I mean, it seems logical, but how far would it go?

 

[SsilverR]

I did a bit of Kanji (the japanese alphabet for chinese characters) and it was way harder than katakana

 

[Korolev]

The tones are hard. I tried to learn Mandarin a while back, got through a couple of courses on it, but didn't follow it up and literally I have forgotten everything. Mandarin has 4 tones, Cantonese has 7, which is even worse. I kept trying to pronounce words in the appropriate tone and my tutor just kept laughing at me because I couldn't do it right.

The writing is more difficult than the speaking.

Now, is it any worse than English? Probably not! English has its fair share of strange pronunciations and "double-meaning" words.

You can learn Chinese if you really, really try hard enough. Many Chinese people learn English, because they are driven by necessity to learn it. I can bet you that if you were stuck in China for 3 or 4 years, you'd learn Mandarin pretty quickly too.

I really wish my mother had taught me Cantonese when I was younger. She taught my Sister, didn't teach me or my brother. I don't know why.

 

[Nomadiac]

Japanese/Korean speakers tend to have an easier time as Japanese evolved from Chinese, similar to how many European languages evolved from Latin.

Just a note: Japanese and Korean are not related to Chinese. There's just been so much influence from China culturally over the past hundreds/thousands of years that heaps of the vocabulary is made up of Chinese loanwords. There's an entire division of vocab in these languages based around whether they're native or from Chinese (kango and hanja-eo for Japanese and Korean respectively). The basic structures of the languages, however, are still really different from Chinese.

That said, it's still probably easier for speakers of these languages to learn each others' than English, because of the shared writing system (Korean mostly uses hangul now, but Chinese characters are still used), vocab (though it's changed enough to be unrecognisable in speech most of the time), media influence (particularly for Korean and Japanese - I'm not sure how much Chinese media is in Korea and Japan) and just being more similar morphologically to each other than they are to English. There'd still be a lot of difficulties, particularly between Korean/Japanese and Chinese as they're most different from each other.