Poll: Is Chinese hard to learn?

[ChanTheNoob]

I'm Chinese myself, and Cantonese was the first language I learnt to speak. I started learning English at 5 years old, and I'm currently much better and English than Chinese. In fact, I still can't write in Chinese, despite trying to learn it for the 16 years that I've been alive. So yeah, it is quite hard.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

Is this learning just to speak/read & write or both? A friend of mine is learing to speak Manderin and he doesn't think it is too bad, he recons it's the same difficulty as french, but he thinks it would be much harder to learn to write. Although I imagine he is comparing it to French/German/Spanish again, due to it not using the western alphabet!

 

[lacktheknack]

What about Russian? Russians sound fuck awesome.

Currently learning! It has a fairly firm set of grammar and spelling rules without many exceptions, which helps a lot.

The thing is, it has complicated cases, tense, masculine/feminine/neuter spellings, and a few other quirks that are WAY more technical than English. I mean, look at the <link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_case>wiki page for instrumental case. The very first example is in Russian, because Russian relies on it while English doesn't. It's right up my alley, because I like memorizing a good strong base (grammar rules, etc.) before putting various words on top of that base (and they're all phonetic!). This is why I wouldn't do well with Chinese, if OP is to be believed: There's no case, tense, articles, etc, which makes it difficult to contextualize (in my brain, anyways).

Now, if only I could easily roll my Rs...

Btw, OP, Why do you think we'll soon all be speaking Chinese? Everyone speaking English would (tragically) make more sense, as it's the most evenly distributed language.

 

[talideon]

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.

Ok, I don't know where you got the idea that Korean and Japanese are Sinitic languages, because they most certainly are not. While both Korean and Japanese have borrowed a lot from the languages of China, including Han characters and substantial amounts of vocabularly, they are not actually related to any of the Sino-Tibetan languages.

Current linguistic thought is that they're isolates, but that they may be part of the Altaic group of languages, which would make them very distantly related to Mongolian, and Turkish. This notion is controversial as it depends on a small number of basic historical cognates.

Just because a language shares vocabulary and a writing system doesn't mean they're related. Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet, but isn't related to any of the languages of Europe that use it. Similarly, English borrowed large amounts of vocabulary from Latin and Greek, but is only very, very distantly related to it, while it's very closely related to Dutch and Low German, in spite of surface appearances.

 

[JokerCrowe]

My friend studied Mandarin and Latin at the same time once, he said that they were both pretty difficult but almost completely opposite in WHY they were difficult. He said that Latin was Hell to learn Grammatically because it has all those different ways you change the words around when speaking in different tenses and pronouns. The Chinese grammar was like you say very easy, because it doesn't have any of that. But when it comes to Pronunciation Latin beat Mandarin by a LOT because, no-one knows how Latin was pronounced, so you can basically do it however you want. Mandarin on the other hand has (I think) five different sounds (and words) you can make from "ma". So it's very difficult pronunciation wise.

So I guess Mandarin/Cantonese/any other Chinese Language is easy if you can get a hang of the pronunciation.

 

[talideon]

Mandarin is no more difficult to learn as a language than English. In some ways it's significantly easier. From a phonological point of view, English speakers might not realise how much trouble stress, vowel length, and English's rather baroque collection of vowels and diphthongs cause language learners, but they do. The biggest problem with Mandarin, aside from learning to read and write Han characters, is getting an ear for tones. Once you get that, you're good. In fact, English speakers have an additional advantage in that they should already be familiar with r-colouring (erhua), as the phenomenon occurs in English

 

[Ferisar]

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.

Ok, I don't know where you got the idea that Korean and Japanese are Sinitic languages, because they most certainly are not. While both Korean and Japanese have borrowed a lot from the languages of China, including Han characters and substantial amounts of vocabularly, they are not actually related to any of the Sino-Tibetan languages.

Current linguistic thought is that they're isolates, but that they may be part of the Altaic group of languages, which would make them very distantly related to Mongolian, and Turkish. This notion is controversial as it depends on a small number of basic historical cognates.

Just because a language shares vocabulary and a writing system doesn't mean they're related. Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet, but isn't related to any of the languages of Europe that use it. Similarly, English borrowed large amounts of vocabulary from Latin and Greek, but is only very, very distantly related to it, while it's very closely related to Dutch and Low German, in spite of surface appearances.

Isn't... the whole... "Just because they share x and y doesn't mean they're related" is kind of like saying "Just because they're related doesn't mean they're related? I mean... You know? Maybe they don't have the same exact roots, but that sounds pretty damn related to me.

OT:
I have no idea. Given that English is my second language though, I can tell you that it was the simplest thing on the planet to learn. This is probably because of Russian being hard enough to efficiently use even by those who were born in the country. (It's the one class I always got a B on whilst growing up. So much shame.)

Much like any language, if you are forced into an environment where people use it, you'll have to pick up on it sooner or later. Also, all languages have certain advantages. English is extremely flexible in terms of grammar and structure, whereas a lot of Germanic or Eastern European languages are very rigid in terms of grammar. I can rely on myself, in Russian, to create a sentence using newly learned words without being too concerned because of understanding of what revolves around those words, whereas in English, any new word's pronunciation/usage in sentences can be completely off the rails. And, as you say, Mandarin may have some advantages, too. Context is king.

 

[Chemical Alia]

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.

Yeah, when I got out of the military, I was really annoyed that I knew how to describe "how far away the torpedo was" but didn't know how to properly order mapo tofu. They did, however, force us to sing and dance this Richie Ren pop song in front of some high ranking people to show off CULTURE STUDIES.

"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.

Or wu or min or xiang or hakka or any of the other nine million local variations of each. There's far more to Chinese than just mandarin and cantonese, but it's still fair to call it all Chinese even if it's not the most specific...

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.

Yeah, I was at DLI from late 2000 to early 2002. There were very few mandarin linguists then, and we were moved around a lot and eventually stuck in a company with all the other rando languages like Tagalog and Japanese, after being with the much larger Korean linguists for the longest time. After 9/11, Arabic obviously ramped up even more.

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

I think I'd be totally lost trying to go from a language that is so context-heavy (yet meaning is conveyed just fine) to something with such a complex system for verbs, tenses and cases. If I compare "I'm going tomorrow to x" but "I go tomorrow to x", the meaning is understood the same and it makes the extra grammar seem almost pointless 0:

 

[BeeGeenie]

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.

Ok, I don't know where you got the idea that Korean and Japanese are Sinitic languages, because they most certainly are not. While both Korean and Japanese have borrowed a lot from the languages of China, including Han characters and substantial amounts of vocabularly, they are not actually related to any of the Sino-Tibetan languages.

Current linguistic thought is that they're isolates, but that they may be part of the Altaic group of languages, which would make them very distantly related to Mongolian, and Turkish. This notion is controversial as it depends on a small number of basic historical cognates.

Just because a language shares vocabulary and a writing system doesn't mean they're related. Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet, but isn't related to any of the languages of Europe that use it. Similarly, English borrowed large amounts of vocabulary from Latin and Greek, but is only very, very distantly related to it, while it's very closely related to Dutch and Low German, in spite of surface appearances.

Isn't... the whole... "Just because they share x and y doesn't mean they're related" is kind of like saying "Just because they're related doesn't mean they're related? I mean... You know? Maybe they don't have the same exact roots, but that sounds pretty damn related to me.

No really, they're completely unrelated. Japanese just borrowed Chinese writing and some vocab, kind of like how English borrowed vocabulary from pretty much every language on the planet.

 

[Goulashsoup]

I have read all posts so far, learned a bit too. Maybe Mandarin's "simple" grammar can make it quite hard with so much homonyms. A little morphological grammar seems preferred by most European posters, but then again it is relative; a Thai told me Chinese is easier for himself because there are tones in Thai and both do not case, inflect, or use tense. But the characters are hard for everyone though and Chinese has many modal particles for things.

 

[Moronical]

Being grammatically easy barely is kinda irrelevant if you consider the fact that you have to remember the thousands of unique characters and their different pronunciations

At least with Japanese you could spell out the Kanji with hiragana/katakana

 

[freakonaleash]

The difficulty of learning a language depends more on what your native language is than how "hard" the language is. If you speak english, chinese will be hard for you because asian languages are so much different. Likewise, if you speak chinese, english will be hard for you to learn.

 

[unindexedsearchengine]

I lived in china for three years. The school I went to there had this obsession with it (it was a British international school), so we had a Chinese lesson every day of the week.
I can safely say that the Chinese's grammar is near-enough nonexistent. All you need to do is learn the words and characters, and boom, you know Chinese.
However, I warn you, that for foreigners (even ones very good with languages), it's very easy to forget. One and a half years have passed, and I barely remember anything anymore.

Captcha: Have courage.
Yeah, you'll need that if you're trying to learn Chinese.

 

[Ferisar]

No really, they're completely unrelated. Japanese just borrowed Chinese writing and some vocab, kind of like how English borrowed vocabulary from pretty much every language on the planet.

I guess I'm missing how that makes the languages unrelated. English is still the weird cousin of pretty much every European language ever. It -is- related to a lot of them in that sense. That's like saying French or Italian "borrowed" from Latin. :L

Or how Cyrillic letters were adapted from the Romans, because religion and shit.

Oh well. Guess I'm just looking at it a bit side-ways.

 

[Quaxar]

Yeah, when I got out of the military, I was really annoyed that I knew how to describe "how far away the torpedo was" but didn't know how to properly order mapo tofu.

There is no need to know much Chinese if you can tell them that the snipers on the hill have them in their sight.

 

[triggrhappy94]

I'm currently studying Japanese. The two languages are almost completely separate except for some loan-words and the Kanji (I'm not sure what they're called in Chinese).

As opposed to languages that use Roman character (English, Spanish, Italian, and so on), it may take you longer to really start to speak the language because you'll have to get familiar with the "alphabet" first (it's not technically an alphabet). Once you get that, things should start to take off.

As per the Kanji, however, be ready to study. They're a blessing and a curse. They make it easy to read and find individual words (and are often the only sign of where a word begins or ends). There are thousands of them though, many without any way of knowing how to read them before hand. Study the radicals! It'll help you remember the characters (you learn new Kanjis by parts and not strokes, which is nice when Kanji start having 20 strokes).

 

[Goulashsoup]

Think it is possible to use characters with English or Afrikaans? They are simple enough maybe too and it would be a funny joke. English may well get rid of all the old european stuff and become more Chinese like, or should we keep in the inflections?

 

[DasDestroyer]

I know Russian and English and am currently learning Japanese, and while it certainly isn't the same as Chinese, I've noticed some factors that affect how difficult it is. All of the sounds used in Japanese except for the l/r sound are used in English and/or Russian, so getting the pronounciation down at a basic level was a breeze for me. You certainly need much more memorization, since it's usually impossible to know how a Kanji is pronounced based on how it's written(at least to my knowledge, I'm only at the stage of memorizing the Kanji and their meanings at the moment). So if you're diligent and have good memorization skills, it'll be significantly easier than if you don't.

 

[yamy]

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.

Ok, I don't know where you got the idea that Korean and Japanese are Sinitic languages, because they most certainly are not. While both Korean and Japanese have borrowed a lot from the languages of China, including Han characters and substantial amounts of vocabularly, they are not actually related to any of the Sino-Tibetan languages.

Current linguistic thought is that they're isolates, but that they may be part of the Altaic group of languages, which would make them very distantly related to Mongolian, and Turkish. This notion is controversial as it depends on a small number of basic historical cognates.

Just because a language shares vocabulary and a writing system doesn't mean they're related. Indonesian uses the Latin alphabet, but isn't related to any of the languages of Europe that use it. Similarly, English borrowed large amounts of vocabulary from Latin and Greek, but is only very, very distantly related to it, while it's very closely related to Dutch and Low German, in spite of surface appearances.

I guess evolved wasn't quite the right word? What I was trying to say was that they're related, in so far as the writing system anyway. Like you said Japanese borrow many of the words from Chinese so for them they'll have an easier time transitioning, and vise versa. Much more than say from a Latin based language where there are little similarities.

Again, I'm not an linguist so I'm not making any claims. This is purely from my personal experience of the Asian languages mentioned.