Chinese a difficult language? Tell me why.

From my opinion chinese is hard for beginners for the reason you stated: it is difficult to write and remember precisely on how to write a specific character. Strokes that are used to construct a chinese characters can be split into five main ones only but there are way lot of combinations. Unlike the alphabets that form most of the world's language which have a clear suggestion on how the word is pronounced, you'd only see very vague hints (or none at all) about how to pronounce a chinese word. Grasping the first 1000 words is critical in learning chinese, it takes hard work to memorize the basic words, but when you make it pass that, you'll improve real fast and find it to be a very grammatically flexible language to command.

You have a got point there about chinese having less words than English. The chinese beginner's dictionary which I have consists of 2500 commonly used words and 1000 secondary commonly used words which makes 3500 words together. (That's basically all you need to learn to communicate). This would mean if you learn 10 chinese words a day, it barely takes you a year to grasp all the commonly used words. In comparison to Oxford Junior's Dictionary (2007 Ed.), which features 10,000 entries (about 3 times more than chinese!), at elementary level it is kind of true that chinese theoretically should be easier. However, I should note that in practice, things get pretty difficult when it comes to memorizing the structure of a character, linking the character with pronunciation (which a good number of them have variation in tones)...etc. Learning one single Chinese word may be harder than English in that sense.

To a certain extent, I believe that theories about learning Chinese is not as well developed as English, which makes teaching and learning Chinese less effective. Every language is unique in its own way, if we can grasp the uniqueness of a language, learning it will become much easier. For example, each Chinese character/word maybe unique, but they share similar building blocks. These building blocks can be hints of what the word means and how it is pronounced. Familiar oneself to the building blocks and you'd be able to comprehend and recognize chinese characters easier. I can personally understand the pronunciation difficulties. When I learn Japanese (which also have different tones), I struggled quite a bit to get it right. My lecturer always frown at me for mispronunciations. ^^

I am a chinese too, and I love the language a lot. Where are you from? Thanks for sharing your opinion. I'm rather curious why you think that Chinese is easier than English? Mind telling me more about your views?

I think the things that make English hard are a) the huge amount of verb tenses and their periphrastic constructions and b) the irregularity. Chinese does not have either of those problems. It compensates for its static words (they don't conjugate or decline) and relatively small vocabulary with a writing system that is very hard for us Westerners and pronunciations completely unlike Indo-European languages.

good wingsanctuary, you in other response mentioned that you belong with kuala lampur, Malasia, and here up for the response bennon you mentioned that you belong to china, how may citizens you have with? now what i accept your remarks?