Some Western people say: “Chinese is not so difficult to learn” They are wrong. Other Western people say: “Chinese is impossible to learn, just too difficult”. They are wrong too. I think it is possible to learn, but takes really a lot of time. Many Westerners can learn a second or a third Western language, just by putting some efforts and by using their linguistic intuition. But when we learn Chinese, linguistic intuition doesn’t help, because Chinese is so different from all Westerners know. When learning Chinese, all aspects of the characters must be learn apart: the writing, the pronunciation, the tone, the meaning of the character. After some time, you can lose one part of these. That is really frustrating. It takes time, repeating, repeating, repeating all over again. About the tones: Some Westerners have really no feeling for the tones. They will never learn it. For many Westerners though, it is possible to pronounce correctly two or three characters with their correct tones. But when it comes to read loud a whole sentence, or say a whole sentence, suddenly it is impossible to use the right tones, and it becomes a mess, using a lot of second tones...haha. Just a small part is able to learn the right tones by using them correctly in long phrases and reading a text correctly. I think Chinese is worth learning, because it is beautiful and it opens a new world to Westerners, with a very interesting culture.... But you need to put a lot of time in it. There is no easy, short way to learn it.

Hello Eve, For me it is writing ,reading and pronouncing.

feeling

Hanzi

Chinese has the appearance of a tough language, but I don't believe it's as tough as it looks. I'm not very advanced in my studies, but I'm already getting a feel for what's hard and what's easy about the language. Grammatically, it is far simpler than European languages such as English, French, Spanish, Italian and German, and also much simpler than Japanese. From a European perspective, learning Chinese grammar is much simpler than learning Japanese grammar. This is because Chinese is essentially an SOV language, unlike the backwards-functioning Japanese. When it comes to speaking, Chinese is hard, but certainly not impossible. Unlike Spanish and Japanese which are phonetic, Chinese is similar to French in that the pronunciation must follows certain rules, in this case tones. Whilst the tones of Chinese are tough for the beginner, anybody with a good linguistic or phonetic brain should not have too many problems with them given long enough to study. The reading and writing of Chinese is of course very difficult, and this is the most time-consuming part for the learner. However, I guess the PRC government's decision to simplify the writing system in the 1950s and 1960s has made things a little easier. Learning Traditional Chinese would be even more difficult! So, I would say that some aspects of Chinese are easy, and some are hard, but this is true of any language.