Poll: Is Chinese hard to learn?

[Gatx]

I can speak it but I can't read or write. I think it's a very uninuitive language in that regard. It just makes more sense to me that you could phonetically piece together every word in English (and other languages) from a set of letters, than it does having to memorize a unique symbol for EVER SINGLE WORD.

 

[BeeGeenie]

I also want to ask a quick question that I now throw into this thread. Is English a creole? It was mixed with Norman-French heavily, but Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese have up to 50% chinese borrowed vocabulary and people do not think they are creoles, yet English and Afrikaans are sometimes thought of as such. Farsi is also heavily simplified in grammar and borrowed many Arabic words. It's like the line between a dialect and language; the line between a creole and non-creole with heavy borrowings has not been established too. Also who thinks making a logographic system just for European languages sounds like a fun idea? It'd be a secret code only native speakers know themselves.

Hard to say, really. One could argue that English started out as a German pidgin spoken by the Celtic peoples of Britain, that developed into a distinct creole. So you might be able to argue that, if the Celtic language had a significant effect on the grammar of English.
French did not do much to affect the grammar of English, it just introduced lots of vocab, same as Chinese upon Japanese.

So you might have a case that it's a German/Celtic creole, but not a Norman French creole.