Is this true?

[Hedge]

About the 10 years and still can't hold a conversation: I've met many, many Chinese speakers who said the exact same thing about English. Yet I don't think anyone would argue that English is impossible to learn.

I think it has a lot to do with how you are studying and what your motivations are. Like, I did 6 years of french in high school, but I couldn't hold a conversation. I studied it because I had to, not because I REALLY wanted to.

[self-taught-mba]

Don't worry Imron. Was just addressing the mis-quote.

Everyone, keep in mind that we all have it way easier than the old school crowd. When read in that context when every unknown character sent one to the paper dictionaries, the article makes lots of sense.

[YuehanHao]

The point about educated people having difficulty writing "sneeze" made me wonder. So I conducted an experiment, the subject of which was a well-educated Chinese volunteer (PhD, engineering), but who has been in the U.S. for the past 8 years or so and doesn't do much of any handwriting these days. I allowed ten seconds for this individual to write "sneeze" in Chinese, and the result was as follows:

Sort of similar to 打喷嚏, right?

It shouldn't probably change anything, but somehow it makes me feel less inadequate to have evidence that some Chinese people could also have difficulty remembering how to write some of the complex and less frequently used characters in an analogous manner to my struggles with some less difficult and more common ones.

约翰好