Is Chinese a difficult language to learn?
People always mention Chinese being a tough language to find out, but learning languages is usually hard, right? Chinese characters look especially difficult, but is that the sole thing that’s difficult? Is Chinese really the toughest language in the world to learn?
What exactly makes a language hard or easy to learn? As a typical native English speaker, I found that there have been elements of the Chinese language that were incredibly simple and there have been other elements that were crazy difficult.
The U.S. Foreign Service created an inventory of the toughest to easiest languages to find out measured by the number of hours of study required for a native English speaker to realize proficiency. The easiest languages take about 24 weeks or 600 hours to find out. The hardest languages, however — Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — take about 1.7 years or 2,200 hours to find out.
Why Chinese Is Too Difficult to Learn!
Chinese Characters
In order to read a newspaper, you would like to be ready to read around 3,000 characters.
It’s estimated that reading a Chinese newspaper requires knowledge of around 3,000 characters. Chinese characters are made from radicals, and there are around 214 radicals within the Chinese language.
Pronunciation of Chinese Characters
Just like any other foreign language, Chinese characters are not phonetic. When you see a new word, you have to look it up in the dictionary to find the Pinyin pronunciation guide.
Is Chinese grammar hard?
Chinese grammar is usually pretty easy, but there are a couple of elements that are a touch challenging.
Chinese Speaking Tones
In Chinese all words have tones. There are 4 tones and a neutral tone. The first tone is high (like singing). The other goes up (like an English question). The third goes down and copy a touch. The fourth tone goes down sharply.
Chinese vocabulary
The reason the vocabulary is difficult is that Chinese and English have few words in common and really few words have roots within the other language.
Finally,
So what is your opinion? Is Chinese Hard to Learn?
Some aspects of Chinese, like grammar and pronunciation of Pinyin, are easy to find out.
Other aspects, like the vocabulary, characters, and tone pronunciation are hard to find out.
Chinese is easy or hard depends to a great extent on what other languages the learner has already learnt.
The most important thing when learning Chinese is to practice a day, even for a couple of minutes.
Also, be patient! The Chinese language takes an excellent deal of your time and dedication.
So Keep learning.
All the best!!!