Current Events > Mandarin Chinese is reportedly the hardest language to learn for english

(+) Yeah! (+)

not at all

not at all

English: Learn the unpredictable spelling, forget about the grammar for now

Spanish: Learn the tenses, articles, and conjugations

Arabic: Okay, at least you can use some Hebrew cognates...

Mandarin: Logographic alphabet AND tonal language

Japanese: Here's a dozen pronouns for different statuses, 3 different alphabets, including a suspiciously Chinese one

Wtf language do you think is harder

"not at all surprising" is how I took it.

Wtf language do you think is harder

Not at all surprising, completely different language structure and rules than germanic languages.

There is very little reason to learn Chinese when they are so authoritarian. Chinese movies and books are all censored, who tf wants that?

There is a ton of good Chinese media. Even excluding the PRC, you still have Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia producing Mandarin stuff. We watch Taiwanese dramas on Netflix a lot.

Fuck Kanji all my homes hate Kanji

Kanji's better than trying to translate whatever word they adapted with katakana.

there's so many loan words that are simply annoying, not to mention sometimes wrong even if there are arguably better syllables to use for it in their own system.

Didn't they basically stop adding native words to the dictionary and start just doing Katakana?

Nah, I already knew this, but that's because I've been learning Spanish for months and have been learning little facts about other languages along the way.

Not really. Like the word for selfie is , tons of science and medical words are still formed with kanji (I study at a university in Japan). Katakana loanwords are very prevalent yes, but it's mainly in technology related fields (IT especially).

Not at all surprising, completely different language structure and rules than germanic languages.

Just looked up the 2022 trending words with high school students to see what the katakana loanword situation looks like. Here's the top 10:
3
1 32.5% (This is not a loanword)
2 Z 27.0%
3 www 26.0%
4 25.5%
5 24.0%
6 22.0%
7 15.0%
8 12.0% ( is a loanword from the English chill, but in both cases it becomes combined with the Classical Chinese derived loan or becomes a Japanese adjective, so it's a partial loanword)
9 9.5%
10 9.0%

yeah, im somewhat overreacting, generally fine once you encounter the word a few times, I just dislike it more than their other systems in the language.

Fuck Kanji all my homes hate Kanji

Wouldn't Latin be the hardest to learn? Or Ancient Egyptian? Since neither have any native speakers, and Ancient Egyptian has even less understanding, only understanding bits and pieces of the alphabet because of the Rosetta Stone which had Ancient Greek on it (which does have close to "native" speakers, numbering 5000).

Neither Latin, nor Ancient Egyptian have any guidance on pronunciation, so us "speaking it" would probably be totally alien to a native speaker (if we had time travel).

Id have thought any language using symbols instead of letters would be difficult. But I dont know enough about any of them to say something like Chinese is more difficult than Japanese

Every language is using symbols. Chinese uses logograms, most of which are phonosemantic compounds, but most of the base elements are pictographic. Japanese uses those and then also uses two syllabarys and also the English version of the Latin alphabet, because why not?

Don't forget using all of them at the same time in a single sentence.