Is Chinese more difficult than European languages

[jbradfor]

You are correct, to a point, that when one says "learning Chinese is hard", you need to ask "compared to what?" and "for whom?". It is certainly harder for a native English speaker to learn Chinese than it is for a native English speaker to learn, say, French or Spanish. However, it is probably easier for a native Japanese speaker to learn Chinese than it is for a native Japanese speaker to learn, say, French or Spanish.

Why harder for a native English speaker? Here's my take:

• There are more differences, so all you've learned with your native language helps less.
  
• The grammar is different. You stated that Chinese grammar is easy; that might be true in an absolute sense, but because it is so different than English grammar, it is hard for native English speakers.
  
• Chinese tonal, English is not.
  
• The culture is different. I found one difficulty is just what what I expect people to say, based on English / western conversation, is sometime different than what Chinese would say. You could argue that this is a culture vs language issue, but I don't separate the two.
  

All that said, I think there is some aspects to Chinese that makes it hard in an absolute sense.

• The characters. You said "But there are just 4000 of them in common use, or less. It is work, but should be doable in a year." You must be joking. Maybe a year of doing nothing by learning characters you could learn that many in a year, but I doubt it, and you still probably couldn't read text, let along speak.
  
• Characters vs words. The lack of spaces makes it harder to read. And even if you "learned" 4000 characters, you still would probably not be able to read a you won't know the words.
  
• "I could say all phrases out loud and it sounded OK to my ear" -- have you had a native speaker comment? I mean one that would give you honest opinion? Are you recording yourself?
  

That's my take. I know there was a thread about this somewhere already....

[tooironic]

@dreamon Yeah I guess you could memorise 10 characters a day over the course of a year and you'd get there. But then of course after that you'd have to start learning actual words.

I think this blog entry summarises the difficulties well.

Your enthusiasm and optimism is cute though.

[renzhe]

European languages from different families do have very different vocabulary when it comes to common everyday words. However, the vast majority of technical, philosophical, medical and otherwise high-level vocabulary is basically the same, deriving from either Latin or Greek. This means that you get a huge amount of vocabulary for free.

Also, the grammar, deriving from Sanskrit, has very similar concepts in many languages. Cases, tenses, conjugations, articles, grammatical genders, etc. If you've learned Latin and Greek (which many people do as kids), you've covered about 90% of the grammar any European language will throw at you.

As a native speaker of a Slavic language (not Russian, but related), I can assure you that I found English, German and Spanish considerably easier than Chinese. At the same time, a Vietnamese friend of mine picked it up in three months by playing cards and dominoes with a group of Chinese students, and this was a cause of much grief and frustration (and pure envy) from my side.

[dreamon]

The article "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" is a tongue-in-cheek article written on the 80th birthday of DeFrancis, and it primarily focuses on the difficulty of writing the characters. But one can attain a pretty good level of fluency in speaking and reading even if he forgets how to write some characters. So, that article doesn't explain it to me.

renzhe, what was the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese to you? Why was it much harder than with English? I find it hard to believe that the Latin and Greek academic words save the day here, because they don't play a prominent role in common speech or writings, and I would expect that their Chinese equivalents are also not random: there must be rules to aid their intepretation or guess their meaning.

[jbradfor]

But one can attain a pretty good level of fluency in speaking and reading even if he forgets how to write some characters. So, that article doesn't explain it to me.

Then read it again, only 2 of the 9 points are on writing. [Just because it says "writing system" doesn't mean that it's about writing, it can be about reading too.]

[rezaf]

It is not just the grammar and vocabulary. The hardest part about this language is the relationship between the words and sentences in a certain context. There are lots of hidden connections in a certain context that I have never seen in the other 4 languages that I know. That's why most of the time when you take one sentence out of its context it easily loses its meaning. My teacher always says that the difference between a westerner's mind and a Chinese mind is like the difference between anatomy and physiology. Western languages are based on solid and detailed facts that's why they can be analysed easier and often they produce solid constructions but in Chinese the attention is on actions or in other words the liveliness of the words. That's why it is vage but more alive. This difference can be easily seen in literature but it also affects the normal daily language that people use. The difference is is in the system of thinking, that's why it is difficult for a westerner to learn it.

[Jan Finster]

(let me just for fun necro this thread to share an observation rather than starting a new one)

 

After studying Chinese in my part time  for 1 year now, I thought it would be nice to try out languages other than Chinese on Lingq.com today. I tried so called "mini stories" in French, Spanish and Portuguese. I could not believe I could basically understand 99% of French, 95% of the Spanish and 90% of the Portuese without looking up words . I did study French in high school for a couple of years, but hated it and had no contact with it for over 15 years. I never studied Spanish or Portuguese. Yes, Chinese is crazy difficult compared to romantic languages! I remember reading those mini stories in Chinese 1 year ago and understanding exactly 0%. Of course I kind of knew Chinese was difficult, so maybe the real realisation today was how easy romantic languages are.

[mungouk]

1 hour ago, Jan Finster said:

the real realisation today was how easy romantic languages are.

 

Or maybe how similar the Romance languages are... 

If you already studied French then Spanish is pretty simple. Plus, knowing the Roman alphabet and a few diacritics you can already read all the Romance languages and most of the Germanic group (Icelandic has a few characters of its own).

 

One of my favourite books of all time, which I bang on about at length whenever I get a sympathetic ear, is The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer.  It compares the major Romance languages and the most common Germanic languages as two groups, with all the similar vocab side-by-side.  It also has quite an extensive discussion of the contribution of Latin and Greek to modern European languages. 

 

One of the most inspirational books I ever read, which is saying something considering it was published in 1944.

Edit: It's online at archive.org. Most of the fun (IMHO) is to be had in the "Language Museum" at the end.