Is Chinese more difficult than European languages

[geckex]

Hi,

I went to China in the Autumn and while I was there I started learning Chinese and had a really excellent teacher for a couple of weeks.

However after that I moved on and I really struggled to apply the very rudimentary skills I had in any sort of every day context, which really concerned me and I think kind of made me give up on learning Chinese a bit.

I am Scandinavian and I speak and understand most northern European languages, and I normally find that if I go to for example Italy I can fairly quickly pick up some basic stuff and then build on that quite quickly, but this just did not happen with Chinese at all.

I cannot pronounce Chinese, I don't understand it and tbh the whole sign story I am not even contemplating yet, so I have obviously had a bit of a dent in my language buff image.

Is it just me or is Chinese just really really difficult compared to European languages?

[renzhe]

Chinese is a difficult language, and it is very different from all European languages. I don't think that it is considerably more difficult than, say, English, but you have a huge head-start in learning English, as it shares most of its vocabulary and grammar with Scandinavian languages.

It's relatively easy to pick up languages similar to your own, or from the same family. European languages have all borrowed heavily from Latin, so Italian and Spanish are easy to pick up due to the huge overlap in vocabulary. Many of us have been through the desperation phase when faced with Chinese and the glacial rate of progress.

A couple of weeks is really not a suitable time frame for expecting to learn anything. The fact that you don't understand anything is completely normal. It would be absolutely abnormal if you had rudimentary skills after a couple of weeks.

Chinese is a challenge for language learners, but a really rewarding one. You will need to measure your learning time in years instead of weeks though.

[untearbird]

I am just lucky that my mother language is Chinese

[heifeng]

no it's not just you...look here. it should take someone (well, actually someone who is an english native speaker) nearly 3-4x's longer to learn something in a tier III language, such as Chinese, compared to something in a tier I language...but I think that what you can't put on a chart is one's general willingness to learn a language. I studied 3 years of forced Spanish in HS, and I think I definitely learned much more in Chinese during 3 years...but that was probably the whole HS vs. college experience. (However I feel like I formally learned many many more verbs in Spanish than I did while studying Chinese...which is weird, b/c Chinese certainly loves using verbs)...oh, I've gone off on a tangent haven't I

[Guoke]

I believe it's equally difficult for the Chinese to learn English or any other European languages.

[roddy]

Certainly not just you - I can think of a couple of Europeans I've met - one a Polish woman who spoke English and Russian fluently, had lived in Ireland for years, and had a whole list of other European languages she could also speak pretty damned well; another an English woman who'd grown up in France, had a degree in Russian and again could communicate happily with most of the continent - who hit problems in China.

Seems to me that some European linguists learning other European languages, it's often easy to get into a 'language learning is easy' mindset. Which is fine as long as you're in Europe. But land in China, and suddenly you've come across something new - a difficult language. Tones. Characters. Vocabulary which doesn't sound like vocabulary you already know, but just with different vowels. That can be a bit of a blow.

So yes, it is more difficult than other languages - at least for you, and in comparison with the ones you've come across before - and it isn't just you. Whether that means you say 'too difficult, I'm going to Italy' or 'Hmmm, here's an interesting challenge' is up to you . .

[gato]

You are expecting too much after 2 weeks.

[PLA 機器人坦克 Squad]

I think it depends on the individual's own strengths and weaknesses. I don't believe Chinese is particularly difficult, learning new characters can be a bit tedious, but other than that Chinese seems pretty simple (in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary). I also had some trouble organizing my thoughts and what I wanted to say in correct grammatical form at first, just because it was a bit different from English, but that's the case with any new language.

From the ages of about three to six I heard Chinese almost exclusively at school, so maybe that made a difference. But I was also around as much French as English from one to three and find it (French) much more difficult than Chinese. Maybe my prior exposure to the language cemented the sounds in my head and has skewed my view on it. I don't know.

Edited May 13, 2009 at 07:57 AM by PLA 機器人坦克 Squad

[Artem]

Chinese is only more difficult than European languages, if you speak a European language to begin with. Not because either languages are harder, but simply put you already have a solid base in the same family of of European languages.

That's why you find so many Korean and Japanese students advancing a lot faster than a lot of the European students. (Not to say that's always true.)

I mean at the very basic level European languages sounds like mispronounced versions of each other. (Of course grouped into similar languages, for example Eastern European languages sound similar, Western European languages sound similar, Northern European languages sound similar, etc)

[Don_Horhe]

Objectively, I think Chinese is easier. Characters and tones are something you can get used to, and its grammar is simpler than that of any European language.

Edited May 14, 2009 at 03:41 AM by Don_Horhe

[gato]

I mean at the very basic level European languages sounds like mispronounced versions of each other.

Dialects of each other would be a more polite way of saying that.

[BrandeX]

This guy thinks so:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/16134-worlds-greatest-polyglot-says-mandarin-is-the-hardest-language-in-the-world&highlight=polyglot

[HashiriKata]

Personally, I'd say that Chinese is in essence a very easy language to learn (if not for the writing system that makes it 3 times harder to remember : )

[roddy]

Easy, maybe. But easier than French if you're an Italian; or Hungarian if you're Finnish? No chance.

[renzhe]

I don't think that Chinese is an easy language to learn at all, or that it has simple grammar. If it were very easy to learn, we'd have pinyin-based speakers all over the place instead of a 99% dropout rate in the millions of Chinese classes all over Europe. If it had simple grammar, we wouldn't be having discussions about 了, 过, 的, 得, 地, tone sandhi, etc. years after finishing advanced-level textbooks.

But I agree with most of the other comments. Chinese people find English just as hard to learn as we do Chinese. Vietnamese and Korean people seem to pick up Chinese much faster than Europeans do. And your prior experience with languages makes a huge difference.

[skylee]

I mean at the very basic level European languages sounds like mispronounced versions of each other.

Dialects of each other would be a more polite way of saying that.

This reminds me of Bill Bryson's remark about Dutch and English.

[geckex]

Hi all, thanks for the many replies - all made me feel slightly better.

I suppose it is logic that the shared germanic/latin heritage of the western european languages makes it easier to learn these.

Another thing is I am going back to China this summer and I wondered if perhaps the easiest way for me to learn is to take lessons while I am there - always seems more effective and intense when you are actually in the country - but does anyone know or recommend a good place or a good teacher in China?

[Hofmann]

"A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot" is how Max Weinreich would put it.

For English speakers, the Foreign Service Institute thinks Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean are most difficult, with Japanese being the hardest. The Defensive Language Institute thinks Korean is hardest.

[BrandeX]

They're nuts Japanese with no tones, and a complete phonetic "alphabet" that only uses pictographs for shortening words up (think writing in english, but drawing a picture every few words to replace long words) is far easier than a tonal language that is 100% pictographic, and you (essentially albeit over-simplifying the issue) just have to memorize what the pictures mean. As for Korean, I agree that it is pretty hard, I tried to learn a little bit, my friend and most of my clients and students here in China are Koreans, and it is a bit difficult, however again, having a complete phonetic "alphabet" this IMO still puts it ahead of Chinese on the learning curve.

[chrix]

Japanese has tones, but they work differently than they do in Chinese (more like the tones in Swedish), but tones are never taught to foreign learners of Japanese... it leads to funny accents of people with Sinitic languages as their mother tongues though...