I have heard a lot of people say that Chinese is the most difficult language to learn. What are your views? Do you believe it is accurate to assume that Chinese/Mandarin really is the most difficult language to lean comparing to all the world languages?
Please share your thoughts!
Regards
I totally agree with Nael Hijjo and I strongly believe that any serious linguist would. Nevertheless, it is always positive challenge to discuss about it. First of all, we should define "difficult to learn", in terms of oral aspect, written aspect, grammar etc. Mandarin Chinese is an analytical language (grammatically isolating), which uses little or no inflection to indicate grammatical relationships, so from this point of view it is considered one of the easiest languages to learn. But then we have tones, and phonetics and things get more complicated. So one should specify "difficulty" with clear scientific criteria. If we step out of the strictly objective scientific area, should I be asked to make a list in order of "difficulty", and following my own multilingual experience, Mandarin Chinese would definitely be in the middle. I would probably top list Japanese, Hungarian and Slovenian, for almost exclusively grammatical reasons.
Well, I believe that the answer to this question is always subjective. It varies from a person to another. It depends on many factors that constitute and structure one's language learning experience. I do not think that there is any empirical study that concluded that language X is the most difficult/easy language to learn. To me, I learned spoken Mandarin and it was a piece of cake.
I totally agree with Nael Hijjo and I strongly believe that any serious linguist would. Nevertheless, it is always positive challenge to discuss about it. First of all, we should define "difficult to learn", in terms of oral aspect, written aspect, grammar etc. Mandarin Chinese is an analytical language (grammatically isolating), which uses little or no inflection to indicate grammatical relationships, so from this point of view it is considered one of the easiest languages to learn. But then we have tones, and phonetics and things get more complicated. So one should specify "difficulty" with clear scientific criteria. If we step out of the strictly objective scientific area, should I be asked to make a list in order of "difficulty", and following my own multilingual experience, Mandarin Chinese would definitely be in the middle. I would probably top list Japanese, Hungarian and Slovenian, for almost exclusively grammatical reasons.
Dear @Nael Hijjo and @Christina E. Valaki thank you for sharing such invaluable insights about the issue!
Hello,
I agree with everything that has been said previously. I'd just like to add an extra piece of information : as @Christina E. Valaki said, difficulty needs to be clearly defined. Most of the time, if a language is considered "simple" on one aspect, for example from a syntactic viewpoint, then it's gonna be more complex on another aspect, with an huge vocabulary for example, or the presence of phonological phenomena like tones. Also besides the functional behaviour of a language, if you try to see the problem from a second language acquisition perspective things get even trickier. You have to take into account plenty of factors, as @Gadi Matouq mentioned, but also, the linguistic knowledge the learner already has. It might be easier for you to learn a language if this language is closed/similar to one you already speak. But the proximity of two languages can also be a source of confusion and mistakes. To sum up, I just think the question is not well defined. A language always is complex, but then depending on the learning context, your background and so on, you could form a judgment. But I don't think it can be so easily generalised.
No resulta fácil afirmar categóricamente lo que planatea, pero, desde una perspectiva general, cualquier escritura ideográfica es, por motivos de su propia concepción, mucho más compleja y opaca que una lengua alfabética. Por su parte, el castellano es, con diferencia, la más transparente de todas las románicas.
No--some other South Asian languages have more than 4 tones, and other languages use characters, too, although perhaps not as many. Chinese speakers' reliance on characters may change as cell phones rely on pinying for input, followed by characters for disambiguation. And Chinese syntax is closer to English than some other languages'--for instance, Japanese.
As @Christina E. Valaki writes, different aspects of a language may be more or less complex. You will find a language difficult to learn also depending on how much each of these aspects (phonology, writing system, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, politeness etc.) is similar to the languages you already know. When I learned Japanese as a foreign language, I struggled very much with the writing system, vocabulary and politeness rules, but had no difficulty with its phonology, which is very similar to my native Italian dialect. My Korean classmates, on the other hand, struggled with pronunciation but easily learned the rest.
Regarding the complexity and opaqueness of ideographs as compared to the alphabet, mentioned by @Antonio Díez Mediavilla, I agree that the Spanish writing system is very systematic and simple to learn, but English spelling can be even more cumbersome to learn and use than Chinese. Florian Coulmas, writing about the simplicity of writing systems (Evaluating merit - the evolution of writing reconsidered, Writing Systems Research 2009 vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5-17 [http://wsr.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/1/5.abstract]), notes that while thousands of Chinese characters are composed of a few hundred building blocks, English spelling uses more than 1700 graphemes and grapheme combinations to represent 40 phonemes in different contexts.
My point of view is I agree that Chinese Mandarin one of the difficult to learn based on my own experience. I learned English, Arabic and Chinese, but Mandarin was the most difficult in term of pronounciation its words, writing and so on.
But the language could easily learn through practices.Depends on your surounding and environment that will support your learning.
Another factor is whether you are learning the vernacular and informal forms, or more formal forms (e.g., scientific, literary or written vs spoken new delivery).
Thank you @ Ghadi Matouq and @ Mahault Garnerin for the wonderful contributions.
Than you @ Antonio Díez Mediavilla and @ Sara Morton for scholarly insights.
Proximity is definitely a factor as Mahault Garnerin points out. For first language speakers of Italian French and Spanish are easier to learn than German and Dutch, but for first language speakers of Swedish it is the other way round. Than there is the issue of spoken and written language: learning t speak Mandarin is easy, most Chinese babies master it pretty quickly and I haven't seen any study revealing Chinese babies take longer to than English babies to express their needs and feelings in spoken language. Written Mandarin is a different piece of cake, even educated Chinese adults often still struggle.
Yes, I think so, although some variables are relatively simple, for instance no problem with inflection.
Mandarin is an easy language because it is built with traces forming designs with several meanings.
~I
Mandarin is an easy language because it is built with traces forming designs with several meanings.
If I write a character composed by - sky - walking it means aircraft. That is all condensed in a single character followed by another characters that compose a phrase.
Mandarin is classic Chinese and in China there are hundreds of dialects all diferente from mandarin.
Mandarin is an easy language because it is built with traces forming designs with several meanings. If I write a character composed by - sky - walking it means aircraft. That is all condensed in a single character followed by another characters that compose a phrase.
Mandarin is classic Chinese and in China there are hundreds of dialects all diferente from mandarin.
Hi Abdullah, Hi everybody. I think the question is tricky. We have to engage our brains to find the correct answer, or the correct answers (plural).
Read the comments of the respected scholars who shared their thoughts. Some agree Mandarin is the most difficult language to learn. Others disagree. However, both parties are right and support their answers with good justifications. In this case, we are dealing with facts and opinions. Since readers disagree, we can conclude that your assumption is not a fact, and it is not correct ( please check facts and opinions and you’ll love it, you’ll broaden your mind : http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/factsheet/en06opin-e3-f-fact-or-opinion
I think your question should be reworded as follows: Please, is there anyone who has conducted or read a comparative study on Mandarin language learning and other languages? I want to know whether scientifically speaking, Mandarin the most difficult language to learn?
Answers which are based on the scientific method are reliable. Still, it is my opinion! Thanks!
For most Koreans, Chinese is the easiest language. The difficulty of a foreign language is relative.
I would agree that Chinese (Mandarin) is a very difficult language to acquire, but would disagree with it being the hardest language to learn, and would have to top Japanese as a "harder" language. Reasons being:
1. Kanji: Essentially the same characters (usually less simplified) as Mandarin, but what's different is that most Japanese symbols are read in multiple ways and generally have to be remembered by context. Even with simple phonetic alphabets like Hiragana and Katakana, Kanji is a major part in Japanese for coherence and stylistic reasons. Where most characters have both a Onyomi (Chinese-ish reading) and Kunyomi (Japanese reading), many have many more ways to read. But not only that. Characters used in names in many cases have very different readings from their usual reading. For example, the character 洋 is read "you" most of the time, but in names can also be read "hiro", which is clearly different (this is used in my name).
2. Grammar: Particles and conjugations. We'll leave conjugations because they're still memorisable. But particles. Particles in Japanese hold very subtle meanings at times and slight incorrect usage of them can completely flip the meaning of the sentence. Even the difference between the particles は (wa) and が (wa) has so much subtle meanings that there's numerous books that try to cover all the different usages for them.
3. Pronunciation: Where Mandarin is known to be one of the harder languages to pronounce because of it's tones, Japanese "doesn't"? While the Romanised form of Japanese, compared to Chinese Pinying, won't have tones shown, Japanese still has standard pronunciation and tones within words that aren't necessarily taught, and if you have them incorrect, they'll either think you're speaking with a dialect (which they'll probably still understand), or they'll think you're from a foreign country.
Even if pronunciation isn't too much of an issue to "learn" Japanese, the Characters having unknown reading variations and particles that are the foundation to Japanese grammar will make Japanese a very very difficult language to acquire.
That's my opinion, and if you disagree or would like to input anything else I might be missing, please reply to my message:) Thanks for your time.
To learn to speak Mandarin well begins with learning the proper phonetic and practicing. Alphabetic phonetics do not work as it is not an alphabetic language. The main phonetic system, as Mandarin is a syllabic language, is Hanyü Pinyin. As it is a 'system' itself, it has rules that must be learned properly and one cannot use an English or other phonetic pronounciation when using it. One of the best examples of how this system is badly used is when many English speakers pronounce the Hanyü Pinyin spelling "Beijing" or "bei-jing". I often here it being pronounced "bay-zshing" - awfull! A useful analogy is that in learning a musical instrument one must learn the musical scale as applied to the particular instrument. Mandarin is actually not a difficult language to learn as it has a rather simple straight-forward and logical (usually) grammar. As a proficient speaker (I teach in Mandarin at an advanced level), I find it was one of the easier languages I have learned and is one I also started to learn without any basis or reference points from the languages I already spoke at a relatively late age. The rest to learning Mandarin is learning its 'music'. This means learning how the limited number of syllables in Hanyü Pinyin are actually pronounced, learning the four intonations and then practicing its flow. Learning the four intonations is probably the most difficult part but it is like learning to sing a song: if one sings the odd note flat or off-key it may not sound pretty but one should be able to make out the song. With more practice the song should sound better even with people who do not sing well. The same applies to learning Mandarin. Just listen, repeat, listen repeat until you get it right or close enough. Realise that even native speakers will sometimes have problems with the music of the language.
From my experience as an international students I would say that there is a bias towards Chinese language that it is difficult to understand. I think the latter perception could lead to the assumption that Mandarin is most difficult to learn. Real life example, I witnessed an instructor critique a group's PPT presentation and in commenting, the group's crowded slides was liken to the Chinese language to indicate that the slides were difficult to read. Not a very culturally sensitive remark, but this really happened.
Many thanks,
Debra
I don't think that Mandarin or Chinese language is difficult to learn if someone has high learning motivation and interest in mastering the language and also for those who has a talent to learn a language will be easier and quicker for the language acquisition. This case can happen in Bali my hometown which is popular for tourists iancluding the foreign tourists where lots of people can speak more than one foreign languages because they are acquired for their utility in order to be able to communicate with the tourists for obtaining income in tourism industry. I myself can also speak Russian for that purpose. Therefore, there are many people now in Bali learning Mandarin in order to be able to handle the Chinese tourists who getting higher in the quantity of their visit to the island.
Well, I think any language can be easy and difficult to learn. As far as I am concern, one should stay in China and other countries to master and learn the language well for a certain time.
It depends on your natiave langauge, too. Those whose native language is European may find learning Chinese difficult, while those whose native one is tonal would find it rather easy.
Thank you dear colleagues! It is a delight reading your answers to the question.
Oral languages are subjected to the same universal determinants, varying from each other just in surface structures. Objectively there are no significant distinctions among them, so that, in principle, learning or teaching any oral L2 involve the same complexity. Written languages, however, may vary in each case, once are dependent of cultural and historic determinants. So, learning or teaching written languages, no matter if related to L1 or L2, always involves a complex set of extra-linguistic circumstances.
Any assessment of difficulty will depend on the learner's first and other languages. There is also a conflation of 'taking longer to learn' with 'difficult to learn'. They aren't the same. Characters are laborious to learn but not intellectually difficult to grasp as a concept, whereas the case system of Finnish is devilishly complex and difficult for an English speaker at least to get a grasp of.
The Foreign Service Institute in Washington DC considers Chinese and Japanese both to be in the category of taking the longest to learn [see bigthink.com/strange-maps/how-long-to-learn-that-language-heres-a-map], - but their challenges are not the same. More characters are needed to be even averagely competent in Chinese and tones take time and effort to master. Chinese vocabulary is much harder for English speakers to learn because the words are short, very similar and, even exactly the same (shì, shì, shì, etc) ad so many begin with x, y or z. Japanese words are mostly multisyllabic and use lots of different sounds + there are a great many cognates with English. But Japanese grammar is something else!
Every language has different grammatical and lexical structure. For instance, Turkish and Korean resemble each other, because they both are examples of agglutinative languages. But English is different compared to these two. So a person who is native is English might say: “Korean is hard to learn” but that cannot be generalised. Because the structure of his language is different from Korean. Briefly, I do not think there is a straight answer to this.
I would say that it highly depends on the learning ability and personality of the person trying to acquire Mandarin as a second language; from an objective standpoint from a linguist, Mandarin would be difficult for someone who's native language does not have a similar syntax or grammar to it - conversely, languages with similar syntax and/or grammar are easier for people to pick up.
Example: As a Japanese language tutor at a college, many of my Korean students have an easy time learning Japanese due to the similarities in certain vocabulary words, and sharing the same sentence structure format (Both Japanese and Korean are Subject-Object-Verb languages). On the other hand, my students whose native languages are English or Spanish have a much harder time learning Japanese , mainly because of the order of components in a sentence, but also due to the particle systems and differences in phonology.
So all in all, it just depends on what an individual may already be predisposed to, and/or the effort one may put in to learning a language.
Thank you Dr. Ceyda Sismanoglu and Dr. Minami Kurosaki for your scholarly contributions.
The truth is that Mandarin is a very difficult language for foreigners to learn. Mandarin in tone language. The syntax is so different and even with the help of “pinyin” it is still hard to communicate the accurate pronunciation of the tones. For those of you that don’t know, Chinese has four tones: “ā”, “á”, “ǎ”, “à”, and the pronunciation rules into the figure below, where the red line demonstrates the rise and fall of the intonation of your voice when saying the word:
“Wǒ ài nǐ.” “③ ④ ③” “I love you.”
Generally speaking ② and ③ are relatively difficult to pronounce for foreign students. But actually it isn’t difficult to master individual syllables based on icons and teacher's guidance.
In addition to the rules of these 4 tones there are also a lot of subtle rules , such as “a” (yi) and “no” (bu) and so on.
If you really want to understand the tones and how they work you really need the help of a native speaker (or just ask me).
Writing Chinese Characters
Chinese writing system is the biggest challenge for most non-Chinese learners. Many Mandarin learners tend to be proficient in spoken Chinese, but then know little about the characters and are struggling with writing them. Hanzi is one of the world’s oldest unique texts. For Westerners, it is very difficult to understand and learn to how to write Chinese characters properly. However, once you start learning to write and you can understand the meaning behind the Chinese characters, you’ll find that the composition of Chinese characters is actually very interesting.
Each Chinese character has both a pictograph and a Phonograph and this is usually very interesting for students to learn.
Thank you Dr. Suo Yanju for your contribution and sharing your thoughts.
Hello gentlemen, all researchers.
I think that learning a language depends on the amount of everyday practice, but learning a language with regular grammatical and grammatical origins is easier in learning than the language of hearsay and irregular rules, and that does not mean that it is impossible to learn.
Aprender una lengua implica la capacidad para usarla eficazmente como herramienta de comunicación oral y escrita. Dejando a un lado las variantes orales del chino mandarín y sus dificultades prosódicas o gramaticales, la dificultad más significativa del idioma chino radica en su uso escrito. Podemos considerar una lengua "más sencilla" aquella que resulta más transparente, es decir, aquella lengua cuyas modalidades orales se reflejan de manera más directa y precisa por escrito: las lenguas más transparentes son lenguas de fundamentación alfabética y de representación directa (sonido/grafo). El chino mandarín está lejos de estas características por su propio origen, antigüedad y desarrollo. He ahí una de las dificultades más claras y evidentes del aprendizaje del chino mandarín, al margen de su configuración como lengua de enorme compejidad pues a pesar del esfuerzo de modernización, mantiene formas y estructuras analíticas muy complejas.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Psychology
- Mental Processes
- Learning