The difficulty with Chinese isn’t the grammar or even really the vocab… It’s the cultural difference. Syntax is relatively simple and straightforward, some hiccups with particles and sentence structure with more complex sayings but not as difficult as korean or japanese in that sense. However, communicating with people at an advanced level is a long road of cultural understanding. All their expressions and sayings are so far away from those in european languages, like “where, where” is how you say thank you. I have heard some people say chinese is very easy and others say it’s impossible… and I would guess that depends on how much you are enjoying the cultural journey.
Very interesting post. The one thing that DEFINITELY seems to be true is that older languages are MUCH more difficult. Classical Chinese, ancient greek, “modern” standard arabic (which is actually classical arabic from over 1000 years ago). I could imagine it would be really difficult if we had to teach english learners to learn the english written in the cantabury tales.
Top 5 difficulties with Chinese, imo, in descending order :
- disinformation on the internet on how to learn languages, and Chinese in particular
- overall pronunciation,
- learning characters,
- engaging material to build a large enough vocab base from,
1.5000) lots of daylight
- listening, at a C2 level, to a tonal language which has a lot of topolects
No other major world language has point 1).
Difficult language Interpretation is respectable Impassive method of successful terminology, nonetheless once you are resorting to creation slopes.