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

[Meng Lelan]

I liked the comment in #16.

[c_redman]

I find it interesting how new Chinese learners (it seems be around 3 months that they hit the "Eureka" moment) independently come up with the exact same list of reasons why Chinese is easy. To sum up:

1) There is no grammar. Verb conjugation is so-o-o-o hard!

2) Many characters are pictographic. 人 looks like a person and 山 looks like a mountain.

3) Other characters are combinations of these easy characters. 木 is a tree, 林 is woods and 森 is a forest

4) Other characters are based on radicals, and the radicals are pictographic, which gives you a hint to the meaning

5) There are more than 80,000 characters, but you only need 2,000 to read a newspaper; therefore...

6) If you learn 10 characters a day, you can be fluent in less than a year

7) If you want to learn more than 2,000 characters, spaced repetition software will take care of that for you

If you don't care about reading, you don't need characters anyway. Just study pinyin which can be learned in a day

9) Learning to write is not needed, because Google Pinyin IME will convert your pinyin into characters for you

10) Chinese "words" are just compounds formed from the meanings of the individual characters. 恐高症 is acrophobia, or fear+high+disease (in how many other languages can you say you know the word for acrophobia!)

11) Tones aren't really important, because Chinese can figure out what you meant from the context of the sentence

12) Anyway, if you speak really fast, the tones are less distinct so the mistakes aren't as obvious

13) Chinese people are friendly, and they don't mind if you make mistakes

In fact, these notions technically aren't even false. They just mean very different things to a beginner versus an advanced learner.

Rather than debate the points made by the original post, I would just like to encourage all new learners to continue with their studies. It's better to find out for yourself what's easy and difficult for your own abilities, and to discover what's enjoyable about studying based on your own interests. Along the way, you may find some aspects more challenging than you initially thought, and that's what this forum is for.

[JustinJJ]

If you're enjoying yourself it will probably never seem like hard work, but it might take a long time to reach a high level, depending on your standards. I've never tried learning another language properly so I have no basis for comparison but I think the language is so broad that I don't expect it to take me any less than 5 or 10 years to reach a level im really happy with, but I find the process enjoyable so not 'hard' per se.