Chinese is one of the easier languages. Why do people say it's hard?

[mulans]

I've studied Chinese mandarin for a few months now and before I started people scared the living daylight ouf out of me.

"oohh Chinese is so hard yada yada yada"

*Chinese does not have verb conjugations at all.

*After I learned how to pronounce the syllables and tones, I now know how to pronounce and spell every single pinyin word in Chinese. In other languages there are often multiple ways to pronounce a word, not in Chinese. Tones accurately describe how to pronounce the syllable.

Then they scare you with characters.

People say there are thousands of characters etc. Well they forgot to tell me that the pictographs and ideographs are really easy to remember if you know the story behind them.

Then they further scare you and tell you that almost all characters are phonetic compounds. But they forget to tell you that the majority of the pictographs and ideographs are usually very commonly used characters. So even though they only take up 10% of the characters, that 10% is used A LOT.

They also don't mention that phonetic compounds are almost all based on radical trees and do have some sort of meaning behind them most of the time.

They also don't mention that many words are combinations of other words. This rarely happens in other languages. But in Chinese many words are not only composites, they are very often compounds, you already know both words and both characters, all you have to do is combine them and you just learned a new word. I have never acquired so many words so quickly as in Chinese.

It's crazy that people keep saying Chinese is so hard or insurmountable, my biggest problem has not been the characters, or tones, or grammar. It's been simple things like word order that changes when you add in time and location.

Compared to my german grammar book that has a bazillion and one grammatical exceptions, Chinese is not all that bad.

It's not as easy as English, but it's not as hard as some other languages.

[muyongshi]

I disagree with it being not as easy as English.

That being said, this topic has been rehashed so many times and frankly I don't see any "new" points being brought up that you may be more benefited to read the numerous debates on the topic in other threads. (In other words, I see this being closed or merged pretty soon.)

[ChTTay]

Yeah.... real easy

:|

[anonymoose]

After I learned how to pronounce the syllables and tones, I now know how to pronounce and spell every single pinyin word in Chinese. In other languages there are often multiple ways to pronounce a word, not in Chinese.

But Pinyin is not Chinese. It is simply a way of transliterating the sounds. Obviously two words with the same pronunciation will have the same spelling in pinyin. And it is simply not true to say that Chinese doesn't have multiple pronunciations for a word. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but there are many characters that have multiple pronunciations. There are also many words that have variations of pronunciation from region to region and person to person, such as 熟悉 (shuxi vs. shouxi), 纤维 (xianwei vs. qianwei) and so on.

If you really find Chinese easy and can quickly reach an advanced level, then congratulations. But your post has elements of 内行看门道，外行看热闹 to it.

[mulans]

I mentioned pinyin in my quote though.

English has multiple possibilities to pronounce a word, maybe you don't know this if you grew up with it.

Example: kiwi....someone learning English has no idea how to pronounce this...it could be keewee, or kiwi or any other tonality.

Another example. Cavalry....in my language (Dutch / German)...this could be ceevalry or cavalry or caavalry. There is no way of knowing.

Another example: CAR and DAD...the A is pronounced differently in both words. The A from CAR is aspirated, the A from DAD is higher pitch. Until you hear the words, you have no idea how to pronounce them.

Our dictionaries have Phonetic Spelling to counter this confusion. Chinese dictionaries do not.

Pinyin removes tonal ambiguity.

In Pinyn this confusion simply does not exist. Every syllable and tone has exactly one way of saying it, not 2 or 3...1.

Once you know the syllables in Chinese, you can say every word. Not so in other languages. The tonality can differ completely and there is no way of knowing outside of practice. Pinyin gives you the tonality.

You are right that Chinese characters miss any form of tonality, but most people start out with Pinyin and learn through Pinyin and then learn the characters. The fact you can pronounce every word after you learned the syllables is a big benefit that makes learning Chinese not as hard as people make it out to be.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I thought so for a moment, too, but now I'm at the stage again where I think it's hard. No verb conjugations, really? So do the Chinese verbs always come in their base form? No, they do have suffixes, prefixes and infixes to express aspect and possibility, and that is, after all, conjugation.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Inflection

I know that is contrary to older opinion. But I find conventional grammar is prejudiced - as in, describing indo-european languages as having these amazing sophisticated features, and other languages as lacking those.

And about the pronunciation, as anonymoose said - currently it seems every second word I am learning has multiple pronunciations.

I am not sure what you mean about the tonality and pronunciation. Maybe there are such ambiguities in Dutch, I know too little about Dutch unfortunately, but there aren't any in German. English on the other hand is infamous for its spelling not being phonemic, in fact English is so "bad" in this respect that it really is an exception.

[anonymoose]

In Pinyn this confusion simply does not exist. Every syllable and tone has exactly one way of saying it, not 2 or 3...1.

Once you know the syllables in Chinese, you can say every word. Not so in other languages.

But you are confusing abstract syllables with real words. If you break English words up into syllables and use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent the sounds, then you can also correctly pronounce every word in English.

As I said before, pinyin is not Chinese. It is just a representation of sound, and therefore of course if you know pinyin, you will be able to pronounce it correctly every time. But that will not help you when you come to reading real Chinese written in characters. Can you pronounce correctly 穿着过薄，着凉了，流着鼻涕? If you need to resort to pinyin to be able to read it, then that's no different from having to resort to IPA to read English.

[realmayo]

Maybe it's not hard, just takes five times longer

[Lu]

I've studied Chinese mandarin for a few months now

Yep, at that point it's easy. I studied all of Chinese grammar in the first year of uni. Wow, I thought, that was a piece of cake! No enless verb conjugations, no aus bei mit nach seit von zu, nouns never change, and those tones aren't nearly as hard as everyone says! But that there is only one grammar book and that's it doesn't mean Chinese only has a little bit of grammar, it means that most of the grammar hasn't been described (or at least not in a way that is easily accessible to a starting student), so that you're stuck with just trying things out, and half the time Chinese people will shake their head and say 'that's not how we say that' and you're left to trying and figuring out how people do say it, and why, and in what other cases you're also actually saying it wrong.

Anyway. We shouldn't be discouraging you, Chinese is definitely more rewarding in the beginning, when squiggles suddenly become words and the tones are not that hard, and that is good thing. Keep at it, it gets harder but also more interesting!

[Demonic_Duck]

The A from CAR is aspirated, the A from DAD is higher pitch. Until you hear the words, you have no idea how to pronounce them

Well, you certainly won't know how to pronounce them if you describe one as "aspirated" and one as "high pitch".

It sounds to me like you have learned a little Chinese and are still in the "honeymoon" period where you notice those parts of the language which seem wonderfully easy/logical and overlook the other parts which present greater problems. To what extent can you carry on a conversation using only Chinese? To what extent can you understand native-level written or spoken materials?

[Ruben von Zwack]

I've re-read your post, and I think you might want to look into linguistics, because you seem genuinely interested, and some things might clear up for you.

For example, the fact that the "a" is pronounced differently in two different words has got to do with its position in the word and the consonants and vowels that surround this "a". It's not arbitrary. "car" is analogue to "far", "dad" to "mad". It follows rules and is perfectly predictable.

And this occurs in Chinese (and, I bet, any language) too. Think about how, for example, "o" is pronounced differently in 我, 婆, 紅, 中.

I'm repeating myself here, but English is not a meaningful background against which to point out the advantages of pinyin, because almost any given language's writing system will be more "logical" than English.

[Meng Lelan]

What's ironic is when the schools here rolled out American Sign Language all the kids flocked to it thinking this would be an easy foreign language offering. The reality as they soon found out proved otherwise so the enrollment is dropping. Maybe those same kids will feel Chinese should be the easier choice.

[renzhe]

This is such a common topic that it really should be in an FAQ.

Beginners often feel that Chinese is easy because it's different from the languages they know: no conjugations, no tenses, no declensions, seemingly logical word formation from lego blocks...

Then, when they are more advanced, they feel that Chinese is very difficult because it's different from the languages they know. Tones! Aspects! Classical Chinese phrases! Writing! Understanding fast speech!

Once you get past "Cat leaves house" and into advanced language, Chinese is very difficult indeed. For a European, it is considerably more difficult than German or English.

[WestTexas]

I don't see how car and dad having different pronunciations makes English more difficult than knowing, say, that 请、青、情、精、静、and 倩 have different pronunciations. You seem to be missing the point that pinyin is just a means of representing sounds, so of course you can know how something is said if you have the pinyin. You could do the same with IPA for English, but that's not English.

When you know all the variant pronunciations of the most common 2000-3000 characters, and only need to look at pinyin for rare characters, come back and say it's easy.

Also, it's not accurate to say that no case endings or declensions means no grammar. English doesn't have declensions and has few case endings, but that doesn't mean that its grammar is simple. If you think English grammar is simple, try to teach it to someone, or try explaining even a fairly simple sentence like, "I don't get that that could have been the answer." What does each 'that' do? Can you omit the first one? The second one? Why? What kind of verb tense is this exactly and what does it indicate? What register is this? How do you know? etc.

[renzhe]

Mulans, in a different thread, you said:

I was able to speak and read novels in English after one year of study.

So the real test is if you can speak and read novels in Chinese after one year of study. If it's one of the easier languages, surely this should be no problem. You can try reading some of the novels from our "Book of the Month" project over in the Art and Literature subforum.

There are so many people who start learning and claim that it's so easy, but so precious few who actually manage to read a book comfortably so there must be something difficult lurking out there.

[Kelby]

I think you share a decent point OP in the way that people, often those who want to sell to you, talk up Mandarin as if it is impossible to learn. Yet, to say it is easy is just looking at the same thing from a sunnier perspective. Chinese is just a language like any other and one that we're all quite partial to I think, otherwise we wouldn't be here

Whether the dead horse is being beaten or not, thanks for the quick reminder of why I like Mandarin so much.

[realmayo]

I disagree. What roils me is books that say "here is a new easy way to learn Chinese in just 10 minutes a day" or something which not only misleads people about how much time and effort they need so spend to learn the language, but also takes their money from them too.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I totally agree that Chinese is a language like any other, and that it is preferrable to be positive, but it's just nice to base that opinion on facts, not misunderstandings.

*(except that learning to read and write is an immense pain, but as a German saying goes: no beauty without pain)

[Pingfa]

I did type something detailing why Chinese is not easy in the later stage, but then I read Ruben's post and feel it's not in the spirit of "it is preferable to be positive" In short, I don't think it would help you at this stage to go in-depth as to why Chinese causes many people distress.

Maybe it's not hard, just takes five times longer

This just about sums it up.

[roddy]

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

Mark Twain