LogFAQs > #960956068

Wetterdew posted...

I don't think it's nearly as hard as people make it sound. Learning the characters just takes time but it's not challenging.

Learning the tones isn't hard either. Once you've done it for a bit, your brain will earn some folds and you won't need to consciously think about how to use the right tones, the tones will just become part of the word. And the grammar isn't hard in chinese.

Grammar is definitely very easy in Chinese. Probably easier than English and sentence order is largely the same as English. Verbs don't conjugate, particles are rare, for some reason it's become acceptable to just use to count everything. Compared to Japanese or Korean it's a walk in the park.

Characters are indeed not that bad since they usually only have one way to be read and if there is more than one way to read them it has some logic behind when to use what reading. Compared to Japanese it's night and day (Japanese readings are made up and the rules are mere suggestions that will be wrong at least half the time).

Tones I think are extremely hard to learn as a second language. I disagree on that part. I think that's the only aspect of Chinese that is harder than Japanese. Japanese is very easy to pronounce, Chinese is not. You are correct that you just learn them as part of the word, but I think it's very difficult for a second language speaker to actually master the tones. I often watch videos of these people showing off on YouTube and they still make mistakes (though you don't know that if you're in the target audience for white guy amazes natives with his Chinese videos).