1. Chinese doesn’t have tenses, or singularity vs plural. No changes in verbs.
2. One single character for comparative and superlative respectively: 更 and 最. But in English, some time you append “er” and “est” to the end of a word, sometimes you use “more” and “most”. There are thousands of adjectives, so you have to memorize the case for each of them.
3. The number of commonly used characters in Chinese are only 4k, while that of English words is 20K. True that one is character the other is word, but in Chinese you know words automatically if you know the characters, because each character has meanings. For example, who knows what does “**estuary**” means when seeing it the first time? But in Chinese, it is just “river mouth”. Technically, it is a new word, but the effort to memorize it is trivial. As a result, any Chinese users who have received high school education will unlikely encounter any characters that they don’t know on mass media, but English users even with a university degree constantly do.
4. Even you don’t know a not commonly used Chinese character’s meaning, you can have rough idea. Like **鲟**, you can know it is a kind of fish by observing this character’s structure, and that is enough in most cases. But can you speculate the meaning of its English counterpart “**stargeon**”? I don’t think so. Maybe ppl will guess some kind of doctor due to its similarity with “surgeon”.
5. One Chinese word/phrase has only one single meaning generally speaking, while English words have an average of 2 or 3 perhaps. Why “sanction” means both allow and disallow? The word “note” has 10+ meanings… English has to endow a word with multiple meanings, because otherwise, if one word for one meaning only, there will be 60K regular words.
6. ~~One Chinese word has only 2 – 3 syllables, while that number for Enlglish maybe 4 – 5. Like “statistics” and “explores”, one word with 7 syllables.~~ One Chinese word has only 2 – 3 sounds, while that number for English may be 4 – 5. And one sound requires a mouth/tongue/throat movement. Like “statistics” and “explores”, one word with 7 sounds, therefore 7 mouth movements, but in Chinese, one has 3 – 4, the other has 2. So you can speak Chinese at a leisurely speed, but have to rush yourself in English. When listening to English, I feel like I am listening to firecrakers, or someone is whipping the speaker to make him speak fast. And if you look at news hosts when they are speaking, like Jake Tapper, their mouths are like having a spasm. A language is elegant and graceful only if it is unrushed.
7. English has so many “s”, “ds” and “ts” sounds, making it sound like using a spoon to scrape a pot, or a snake hissing, which is really creepy and gives me goose bumps. The pronouciation of “beasts” always drives me crazy.
8. Sentences in Chinese are shorter and easier to understand, while in English sometimes one sentence is just a whole paragraph. That is due to its simple grammar. It cannot have long sentences.
9. You cannot pronounce an English word even if you are staring at it. For example, Uyghur. I saw a video asking English speakers to pronounce it and a large proportion couldn’t. But in Chinese, as long as you can see it, you can pronouce it, unless it is some rarely used word.
10. You cannot spell an English name even if you know how it sounds. For example, try to spell Netanyahu. Why it is not Netan**i**ahu with an “i”? And “Zelenskyy”. If you didn’t memorize it, you will spell it like “Zelanski”. Imagine you want to talk about a celebrity with your friends in a chat but don’t know how to type his name and have to google it first. This is not a problem in Chinese. As long as you know the pronounciations of their translated names, you can write or type them with no problem.
Downsides of Chinese:
1. It doesn’t use spaces between words. This is a huge pain. I wish 100 years ago when scholars introduced punctuations into Chinese they also brought spaces into the language…
2. It has different measure words for different nouns… For flowers, you use 朵; for cars, you use 辆; for airplanes, you use 架. Don’t know why not just use 个 for all of them.
3. The grammar is so simple that most Chinese native speakers cannot speak it correctly due to the lack of regulations and rules. If you watch street interviews of Chinese ppl, most of them speak with tons of fillers and grammatical mistakes.
4. Too many accents, and they are so disparate.
5. Uncommon words are difficult to type. The pinyin gives you a pool of all chars of the same sound, and you have to choose each character one by one from the pool. This is espacially true when typing ppl’s names.
Westerners consider Chinese difficult mostly because it is different from their own European languages. For example, the overlapping between English and French words is 70%. You know English you already know 70% of French words. Of course French is simple to English speakers.
Overall, let me just say I understand your feelings. But from the reverse side 😂. At first I loved Chinese, but I’ve become pretty overwhelmed with it all as I learned more. It feels like many parts of the language are ridiculous to me. But in the end, I still love it.
Not 100% sure, but from this post it seems like you’re native Chinese. In that case, you may be missing some of the parts of Chinese that make it difficult:
1. Largely, you can’t know how to say a character unless you know it. Yes, many characters have a meaning + sound component, but this is definitely not true across the board. I could spend years in Beijing fully immersed, and not really learn any Chinese unless I’m actively studying because I can’t figure out what a character sounds like when seeing it on the street. The only way to figure it out would be to look it up in a dictionary with the radicals or use some software for it
2. I don’t think 5 and 6 are really valid criticisms, these are just parts of the language. In the same way I can say “mandarin has tones, and therefore it’s difficult” because I’m not used to it. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said tones are a dumb part of Chinese. My opinion is different now
3. Homonyms. Chinese has sooooo many characters that have the same sound as another. This is less of a problem when studying actual words, but you largely need to understand context to know what word is being used. This is especially prevalent in music. If I want any idea of what is being said in a song, I have to look up the lyrics
攻击，共计，供给，公鸡
个,哥,歌,各,隔,割,格 etc..
This is even true for names.. if someone tells you their Chinese name, sometimes you need to confirm which character they actually mean
4. I’ve found that the cultural knowledge required is pretty high for Chinese. It’s not very easy for me to tell if this is true for English as well, but there are just many words/phrases in Chinese that seem rather culturally entrenched. This is especially true for many 成语
I think most of your criticisms are honestly due to it being unfamiliar.. most other western languages have the same issues you mentioned, or other issues as well.
French has accents to deal with (also tough sounds for foreigners to make), German can combine words together to end up with stuff like “Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung”, English has weird grammar rules because of its history, Spanish has different sounds as well (can you roll your R?) and so on
I do agree for the most part, I think Chinese is simpler but I wouldn’t say easier
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>English has so many “s”, “ds” and “ts” sounds
Seems like those are similar to a lot of Chinese initials, sorry for your ears.
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>Sentences in Chinese are shorter and easier to understand
Not necessarily, 余华 comes to mind. Just add a whole bunch of 然后 and get a run-on with Chinese characteristics
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>One Chinese word has only 2 – 3 syllables, while that number for Enlglish maybe 4 – 5.
Just looked it up, and actually the average English word length is 1.66 syllables and 5 letters.
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>One Chinese word/phrase has only one single meaning generally speaking
That applies more to characters/reading. I have seen many Chinese conversations resort to one person tracing a character on the palm of their hand because of word homonyms. This wasn’t at all uncommon.
Also, tones deserve some special consideration.
(edited to add a few things when I have an extra moment or two).
Are you native Chinese? Because I think you’ll find everyone here disagrees with you
>One Chinese word has only 2 – 3 syllables, while that number for Enlglish maybe 4 – 5. Like “statistics” and “explores”, one word with 7 syllables.
Sta-tis-tics, ex-plores have 3 and 2 syllables respectively. I wonder if you know what a syllable is?
Uyghur, Netanyahu, and Zelenskyy all aren’t even English words/names lol
Great bait mate lol
> For example, the overlapping between English and French words is 70%. You know English you already know 70% of French words. Of course French is simple to English speakers.
I don’t speak french but I do confess that the majority of technical terms in English have semi-obvious correspondents in my native European language. Amusingly, one of those words is “sturgeon”.
I’ve seen native chinese speakers complain about words like “gynecology” and “dentist” but those are easy if your language already has greek and latin influence.
I’m curious how long you’ve been learning Chinese. It seems like a lot of people feel this way early on (I was once one of them), but as you get more advanced in Chinese you’ll realize it’s much harder than you thought.
My opinions:
1. I agree on this one.
2. It’s not really that hard in English. If the adjective is single syllable, you add -er/-est. If it’s three or more syllables, you use more/most. If it’s two, you can play safe and use more/most. You can just pick the exceptions later on. Also, 更 isn’t the only way to express comparative.
3. Strictly speaking, the characters are not really words but **morphemes**—the “building blocks” of a language. The number 20k is the number of **words** in English, so it shouldn’t be compared directly.
4. I agree on this one.
5. Not really. If you understand the “flow” of the meanings, it’s not that hard. Let’s look at Chinese word first: take 开 for an example. The traditional form 開 shows two hands opening the door, so the original meaning should be to open as in split apart, as in 走开 or 花开, right? What about 开灯? Is the lamp splitting apart? No, it turns on. What about 开始？Is it turning on or splitting? No, but the sense of the words are vaguely similar. What about 开车 and 开心? Now, take the word “note” for an example: to record something down is called note, as in *noting* down the speech. We extend the meaning to something we record, that’s also note, as in taking *notes*. To keep something in mind it’s like having the note in your mind, and that can be called note, as in *note* that this is the case. These kinds of “flow” can be observed in both languages. You see, languages are the way peoples try to organize concepts into little boxes, but whenever we have a new concept, we will try to put those into the categories we had, and that’s how the meanings “flow.”
6. You gave too much attention to a syllable. Try to look at a words in terms of the morphemes. Let’s take the 5-syllables “imagination” for example. The word might look scary, but it basically just imagine + -ation. In other words, most morphemes in English indeed have multiple syllables, but once you’re familiar with those, you can say them freely.
7. I understand that English cluster consonants are hard. I have trouble pronouncing those too. I’ll let this pass.
8. Well, not actually. 在生活当中，中文的确不太会出现又复杂又长的句子，文法上也比较简单，但也不见得没办法把句子弄长。一你抓到了重点，不管是中文或是英文，什么东西你就都可以塞进本来又短又简单的句子里，还可以像我这个样子把两个以上的有相关含义的句子给串起来，让它变得更完美。(That was two sentence.)
9. The same can be said with Chinese, no? Try writing a Chinese sign and put up in the middle of, say, New York city and ask them to pronounce it.
10. I had a friend called Zhì-Hóng Can you guess how the name is written? 志宏？志红？志鸿？治鸿？The answer is 智竑. Given only the sound, both English and Chinese would have trouble writing those down. The differences is that you would use spell them with alphabets in English but tell the meaning or radical in Chinese.
1. I understand your point. I’m lucky because my native language doesn’t even use full stops, so I’m getting used to that. The suggestion I can give you is that you might think of what might come next based on the grammar. Take that monstrous sentence from earlier: 一你抓到了重点，不管是中文或是英文，什么东西你就都可以塞进本来又短又简单的句子里，还可以像我这个样子把两个以上的有相关含义的句子给串起来，让它变得更完美。 When you see 一你…, you can start thinking of 一…, 就… pattern. When you see 不管是…, the examples are coming up, etc.
2. I agree with that. I’m already used to it though.
3. That’s not because of the grammar is too simple. It’s either because the language they used to is not Mandarin or they need time to think.
4. English also has many accents.
1. Yeah, I like this too.
2. It feels like you’re paying a big cost initially when learning to read, but it makes life a bit easier later on when advanced words are easier to read. German is a better choice than either English or Chinese, where it’s simple to learn, and advanced words are more likely to be easily understood.
3. True, but from context you would normally be able to guess roughly what the word means anyway.
4. I haven’t noticed a difference here. It always feels like in your native language each word has one meaning, but that’s just because most of the time you don’t notice all the different ways that it’s being used.
5. ‘statistics’ is three syllables, ‘explores’ is 2 syllables. Four syllable words are common in Chinese for some definitions of ‘word’.
6. Fair, but we don’t have tones to worry about.
7. Although Chinese doesn’t have conjugation, I don’t see that grammar at the sentence level is any simpler. Maybe there is just less of a tradition of formalizing it.
Your whole point sort of speaks to the fact that Chinese characters were partially invented to unify a country with many different languages. That aspect still exists today even when just studying Mandarin.
That said, you haven’t really talked much about the spoken part of language learning. AFAIK, most foreigners struggle with tones, not learning how to read/write.
If you think Chinese is easy, point out the problem of these sentences:(they are not wrong, but they have problems)
我是中文母语者。我骑摩托车打工。我喝茶和看电影。As a native speaker I would not say Chinese is easy.
Regarding some of your supposed “downsides”
> No spaces
This does feels a bit Eurocentric on ur part. Plenty of scripts around the world survive just fine having no spaces. There really isn’t a need for them here so there is no point in changing how millions of people use their script
> Classifiers
I mean English also kinda has this with say “bucket” or “bottle” in say a *two buckets of water*, it’s just that Chinese allows for more distinctions and they are comparativelymore common. Also like you can just use 個 for everything, it’s just that using different classifers may carry additional semantic nuances.
> Native speakers making “grammatical mistakes”
Under descriptivist lingustic paradigms, non-cognitively-impaired, adult native speakers, by their defition, physically **cannot** make grammatical errors. I am curious what examples of grammatical errors you find tho. Fillers is an even moor point. Every language has filler words and they are a necessary part of every language since it allows speakers time to organise thoughts without killing the discourse flow.
> Too many accents
Within any language with a large speaker base, dialectal variation is an unavoidable event. Different communities with limited contact with one another will form and differences in speach will appear. Trying to police these changes is fundamentally impossible.
Ofc if you mean accents you mean stuff lole Cantonese or Shanghainese, that’s even worse, because they and Standarin are not one language. This would be equivalent to calling French and Spanish both “accents” of a single Romance language
There is no “easiest language” and there never will be. Similarly there is no hardest language. This is an ignorant and unscientific post.
1. This does not support your conclusion. Not having tenses doesn’t mean Chinese is the easiest language, and you haven’t supported that with any evidence. Furthermore, a language without tenses will have to do other things. Same for the other points
2. You do not have to memorize for each adjective. There are rules.
3. Irrelevant. You could make the same point here with affixes in English.
4. Cherry picked and irrelevant
5. Wrong. All languages have words with multiple meanings, and Chinese does too
6. Too wrong for me to want to go into detail for.
7. Ignorant.
8. No. Unscientific and ignorant.
9. Wrong
10. Wrong. Netanyahu is Hebrew, so that was a dumb and cherry picked example.
This is as much effort as I will put into your ignorant post.
Hey, who wants to play 3 games with me?
1. You give me one pair of Chinese homonyms, and I give you one pair in English.
2. You give me 10 words in Chinese that have more than one meaning, I will double it and give you 20 in English. It is unfair to me but I don’t mind. I can even triple it.
3. I ask you why an English word has its meaning, and you ask me a Chinese word. For example, why “silt” means mud, and why “larva” means young worm. The one who cannot give a reason loses.
We keep going and see which one of us runs out of words first and lose.
(Note: I mean “words”, not characters)
I can fully sympathize. Objectively english is much harder than chinese to learn, mainly because it constantly breaks its own rules. English is a language that is realy four or five languages blended together, and that is where most of the pain comes from. I remember in school actually, officially learning that every single rule has an exception. Finding out most languages have exceptions listed on one hand was eye opening.
And of course a lot of the things you list are not necessarily hard objectively, but they are very hard coming from chinese. This is something I directly empathize with– going either way on the chinese/english language learning journey has so many things alien compared to your native language. On these subs we always see people talk about the difficulties for english speakers learning chinese. Its good to talk about the difficulties of chinese learning english too. Both are admirable and I feel the latter gets taken for granted since “learning english is the thing to do”.
It may sound weird since its my native language but I would not want to learn english for anything as a second language. Even most natives don’t understand the rules we just absorbed the knowledge intuitively growing up.
Generally agreed. Also throw in that Chinese sentences (generally) all follow the same basic sentence structure, whereas English the entire word order has to be rearranged if its a question (for example).
And there’s no tenses or conjugations based on subject, time, etc…!
English? “Go, goes, going, gone, went, will go, am going………”
Chinese? “去” 😀 Doesn’t matter if its me, him/her, them, past tense, present tense, future tense.. It’s just … 去
“One word only has one meaning”
“Shi” would like to speak to you.
https://chinese4kids.net/a-short-story-made-of-words-of-one-chinese-sound-3/
I stoped reading after 5.
Like you really think Chinese has no ambiguity? LOL.