Mandarin vs English - Which is more difficult?

[xiaocai]

wikipedia may argue that

Wiki doesn't count coz 99.99% of native Chinese simply can't get access to it.

Well I think it really doesn't matter which one is harder, since you still want to learn it right? Otherwise you won't be here discussing whether it is more difficult or not...

[zozzen]

I didn't meet any adult learners who can master a new language. The best one so far can speak, read and write Chinese fairly well, but none of them can do better than the average of secondary school students. (some exception--- they're Koreans and Vietnamese) . The sample size of their counterparts in learning English is much more and I also didn't meet any adult learners who can master English as good as native speakers too.

I think learning language is just difficult. It takes a few years of intensive training to acquire good skills, and a decade or more to master it. And we're all too busy on it.

[renzhe]

I see the logic in your reasoning, but wouldn't your point system, which is based on learning new "concepts," get obliterated when you factor in learning how to write and recognize Chinese characters?

The English spelling system is probably the second most difficult and complex writing system in the world today, the most difficult obviously being hanzi/kanji/hanja.

In a language like Russian, a letter corresponds to a phoneme, so you really do only have about 30 of them to learn before you can read and write anything.

In English, the letters HINT at the pronunciation, but the building blocks are combinations of letters. "o" is read differently from "oo", "ow" in "now" is read differently than in "low". "th" is read as a soft "z" sound in "this", "that" and "though", but not in "think" or "thought", where it is a soft "s" sound. I could go on forever, but you know the difficulty already. It needs almost as much rote memorisation as Chinese characters.

If you add up all the different combinations of letters you need to know before you can read and write all the phonemes and their combinations, you will probably not end up in the thousands, but certainly in the hundreds. Japanese Hiragana has less than 50 for all the possible syllables, just as a comparison.

[atitarev]

Wiki doesn't count coz 99.99% of native Chinese simply can't get access to it.

It was meant that English is not the 2nd most spoken language (1st being Mandarin Chinese) but Hindi or Spanish or another one (depends on the source). English is actually the most spoken after Chinese if we consider people speaking it fluently as a 2nd language (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka Philippines, half of Africa, etc.

Mandarin Chinese being the 1st most spoken language in the world may also be argued, since it is an official language but most Chinese people speak a dialect, although that 800 mln. speak a dialect close to Mandarin (as their a1st language) plus many million Chinese who speak Mandarin as their 2nd language.

[liuzhou]

Mandarin is the largest 'first language'. English is, by far, the biggest language - combining first, second and foreign language usage.

Even the Chinese government admit that only 53.06% can communicate effectively in Mandarin.

[SkyFitsHeaven]

Mandarin is very, very s-l-o-w in the beginning but after two to three years of study it gets much easier. English is exactly the opposite. The beginning lessons are easy but the vast number of English words makes it extremely difficult for non-native speakers.

Bottom line: language acquisition should be a lifelong adventure and it should be fun! Don't get frustrated or you'll never progress. Too many people give up on Chinese after a year. It's a shame.

[blink]

As some people here have hinted at, English isn’t phonetic. I’m a native English speaker, but had a very difficult time with spelling as a child due to the fact that the “sound it out” principle that so many teachers are stuck on doesn’t work with all words. Especially since many English speakers (Americans at least) are lax in their vowel pronunciation and a word can vary slightly in pronunciation depending on the region, even though the spelling remains the same. For many people, including myself, much of learning to spell was memorization so the necessity of memorizing characters (though difficult) isn’t new.

Just my two cents.

What does everyone think about the relative difficulty of measure words in Chinese vs. plural nouns or singular nouns with articles in English?