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did you know that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is the combination of their word for 'danger' with their word for 'opportunity'? Really makes you think, doesn't it?

Not so much

And it is one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult language for children to learn, taking them up to twice the time to learn their own language compared to children in languages using an alphabet.

(See for example http://pinyin.info/readings/te...)

How hard is it to learn Chinese?

Very.

Depends on what you mean by "learn Chinese". If you're only talking about the spoken language, then I'd argue -- from first-hand experience -- that Chinese will be easier in many respects than, say, Japanese or Korean. Just off the top of my head: Chinese is conceptually and grammatically quite similar to English: for simple utterances, like "I go to the store," the words parse almost as-is into Chinese as "I go to store" (only missing the article "the"), but translation into Japanese or Korean requires a major conceptual reworking into "store to go" (where articles are missing, prepositions are postpositions, verbs come at the end, and person is often implied by context). Chinese has no grammatical number or tense or person or gender, and verbs don't conjugate: and anyone, but anyone, who's struggled with "der/die/das", "está/estaba/estuvo", "touchez/touchons/touchent", "mouse/mice" and "goose/geese" but "moose/moose", will find Chinese incredibly easier in this regard.

Reading the linked article, I really have to say the author comes off as a horrible whinger. Of the nine concrete examples he tries to explain:

1. a full four are complaints about the writing system (these could all be reduced to one long-winded complaint, and all are irrelevant to the spoken language),
2. one complains about romanization schemes (again irrelevant to the spoken language, and generally only a real challenge if you start trying to learn different dialects of Chinese, like Taiwanese and Cantonese in addition to Mandarin),
3. one complains about tonality (at least the author has the sense to realize he's biased on this one),
4. one complains about a lack of cognates (laughable -- may as well say the same thing about any non-Indo-European language),
5. one complains about classical Chinese (ridiculously irrelevant -- may as well bitch about Beowulf),
6. and one complains about different cultural contexts (again, you could say the same about most non-European languages...).

Basically, he comes across as a whinging, unworldly boob.

Even allowing for writing system issues, Japanese uses several thousand Chinese characters, with the added bonus that many of them have multiple, often quite different, readings, depending on the context. Imagine if the prefix "pre" was sometimes read as "fore" in some words, "pre" in others, and "front" in yet other words, but was always spelled the same. Chinese occasionally does that, but nowhere near as often, or as complicatedly, as Japanese.
Fail.

Japanese itself has at least three romanization schemes that I commonly run into: Hepburn, which most of us in the US will see and recognize as romaji (closest to "phonetic" spelling from an American English perspective); Kunrei, which the Japanese government uses on public signage in Japan to help foreigners (which has oddities like "zyo" for the sound spelled "jo" in Hepburn, and pronounced like the common given name "Joe"), and Yale, which was invented by academics for phonemic accuracy, but is horrid to try to read. So yeah, guess what? Languages not historically written in the Latin alphabet, and that have sounds not found in European languages, are a bitch to romanize. Have a look at the wild variations of Latin-alphabet spellings for Hebrew or Arabic words some day.
Fail.

Tonality? Even English has tonality, after a fashion. Try enunciating the difference between "record", the thing, and "record", the action, without changing your tone. Sure, Chinese has a lot more of it, and the truly tone-deaf must first learn to

How hard is it to learn Chinese?

Very.

In the long run, I don't think the Chinese writing style stands a chance in the global economy long term. Spanish/English will win out for the simple reason that learning to read and write English/Spanish, heck, even Russian is FAR easier than Chinese.

A good essay I found awhile back. http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html/

Learning Mandarin is probably a good idea, I've been doing it myself, but don't expect it to be easy. It is very hard, and not because of that stuff about tones. See How Hard is Chinese or Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. It has also been a lot of fun and you pick up a lot of Chinese culture along the way.

The GP is a nice troll, but he does have his points.

That's because he copied his points from this paper without giving credit. The paper makes much better reading than his post.

An English speaker (and for that matter a speaker of any other non-East Asian language) is likely to find Chinese harder to learn than any other reasonably common language, except possibly Japanese. David Moser's paper "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" may provide a useful reality check. He wrote it in 1990 while he was a student of Chinese. (He later got his doctorate in Chinese Studies and is currently Academic Director of the Chinese Studies staff at CET Academic Programs, an American study-abroad organization with a strong Chinese focus. He lives in Beijing with his Chinese wife.)

You might be good at it, but many people aren't (and an awful lot of Chinese are functionally illiterate owing to their byzantine writing system).

This says it all really: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

I think your usage of the word "ideogram" points to a fundamental misunderstanding. Your assertion that it's "possible to absorb a lot of information very quickly when you look at ideograms" points in the same direction (even if you're not the originator of it). Maybe the question is better phrased as "is there a significant difference in the cognitive effort required to memorize a new ideogram versus memorizing the spelling of some obscure english word?". Chinese characters are not words in themselves, and using the term "ideographic" to describe them is - it could be argued - wrong.

Basically, it's my understanding that the line between "ideographic" and alphabetic writing systems is thinner than you'd think. If you are interested in the subject I would recommend browsing around a bit at this site, in particular The Ideographic Myth might be of interest, an excerpt from a book by John DeFrancis. It's a much better source of information than my short rant above.

I think your usage of the word "ideogram" points to a fundamental misunderstanding. Your assertion that it's "possible to absorb a lot of information very quickly when you look at ideograms" points in the same direction (even if you're not the originator of it). Maybe the question is better phrased as "is there a significant difference in the cognitive effort required to memorize a new ideogram versus memorizing the spelling of some obscure english word?". Chinese characters are not words in themselves, and using the term "ideographic" to describe them is - it could be argued - wrong.

Basically, it's my understanding that the line between "ideographic" and alphabetic writing systems is thinner than you'd think. If you are interested in the subject I would recommend browsing around a bit at this site, in particular The Ideographic Myth might be of interest, an excerpt from a book by John DeFrancis. It's a much better source of information than my short rant above.

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard.

The article mentions that the Chinese youth rely heavily on pinyin (to those who don't know what it is, it is Roman script with tone markers).

I read once that it takes six months at least to learn how to search a word in a traditional dictionary (in: Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. The Chinese youth, having the technology at their fingertips, prefer the new, quicker way (pinyin look up).Thus, it's not only the lonely learner form the West who think pinyin is good - their own youth depend on it!

It would be greatly beneficial for trade and cultural exchange if, in this century, the Chinese authorities make pinyin "official", that is, accept it in print. Of course, there's the problem that there are many "spoken Chinese", the tones differing in places and even numbers (5 for mainland, 9 for Hong Kong?, for instance, is that it?). But countries in Europe went through the same unification. In Germany and Italy, what we now take as "official" was but one of the dialects. Having a single language for the country does not mean dialects will go away, though. For instance, the Wikipedia lists Nnapulitano, Occitan, Piemontèis and Plattdüütsch as tier-2 languages.

This is just about the only way Chinese will become a language the world will want to learn. Traditional Chinese script, though beautiful, is too hard and counterproductive for commerce and scientific exchange (*)

All it takes is a government decree... ;-)

(*) (But I'll 'fess up that I'm an Esperanto fan - I have free weekly lesson with an 84 year-old dame - so learning Chinese, Russian, Japanese, German, Arabic all look like madness for global communication to me. I think that the endless iteration in translating Wikipedia articles is a wasted effort - and proper English is too damn hard, irregular, unpronounceble for most world citizens, and a moving target (*)). Plus, there's the problem that, with natural languages - as opposed to auxiliary languages - the person born into it is always an expert, and the second-language speaker is always in an inferior position. And not to speak of the politics of languages, often associated with "colonialism" or cultural domination (i.e., English and the way business deals kills local film and music).

Oh, that's rich. A suggestion from a Westerner on how Asians can improve their culture. I'm shocked at the audacity, well-done, sir. I note your education level as well, apparently you are totally unaware that they already thought of the idea and rejected it. I also note that you labor under the misinformation that German has 27 characters when it actually has umlaut-a, umlaut-o, and umlaut-o as characters that don't appear in English. Please stop talking about this subject, you have no idea what you're saying.

This looks like a perfect opportunity to highlight this recent post at the Pinyin News blog, closely related to the issue at hand! (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the blog in any way, but as a former student of Japanese I can relate to the general message.)

"In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day. I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"?"

Quoted at length from Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. If you like this, go read the whole thing.

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me "My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can't read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life." This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers
2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet. Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American. Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader.
3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.
4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates. I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.
5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated. One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:
   FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT TH

Hey everybody,

thank you very much for your contributions. I really appreciate the time you spend to discuss that question.
Some clarification:

• My kids are 10 and go to the Catholic High Primary School in Singapore, Primary 4 level.
• They speak Chinese to their grand parents who don't speak English.
• What they are learning is "higher Chinese" (AFAIK a term not used outside the Singaporean educational system) that is supposed to put them on equal footing with native speakers on university level at end of Secondary 4.
• They learn Chinese since Kindergarten.

So we are beyond the stage of the first 500 chars -- and it is still a chore. Therefor I was asking.
Summing up responses so far (in no particular order):

• Flash cards (the physical thing)
• Rosetta Stone
• Anki
• Nciku
• Buzan
• Dating Chinese girls (I like that one)
• Mnemosyne
• Zon (the MMO to learn Chinese while playing) read a review
• Found some nice books: Fun with Chinese Characters
• iFlash for Mac (I wonder is there a Linux or OLPC version too)
• PinYin Info
• ByKi
• Zhong Wen (for unaware readers: that means Chinese in PinYin notation)
• WenLin Software
• SuperMemo (with a comparison to Anki and a store to buy Chinese content
• VeryPracticalChinese (found via this blog
• Skritter
• I found ChinesePod. Not sure what to make of it
• Lao Shi (Chinese for "Teacher") - OpenSource

Again, thx a lot! (and sorry for the caveman English -- don't get it? Read the comments)

On the same subject, I think every student of Chinese and Japanese should be forced to read this . :)

There is often a correlation though, but it's not always reliable and you might need to know quite a few characters to "get the hang of it". At least that's the case in Japanese where the readings are based on the old Chinese readings, so I guess the same is true in Chinese. (phonetic radicals etc.)

As usual, I recommend everyone to read around a bit on this site, in particular I recommend this excerpt about the "ideographic myth" :)

There is often a correlation though, but it's not always reliable and you might need to know quite a few characters to "get the hang of it". At least that's the case in Japanese where the readings are based on the old Chinese readings, so I guess the same is true in Chinese. (phonetic radicals etc.)

As usual, I recommend everyone to read around a bit on this site, in particular I recommend this excerpt about the "ideographic myth" :)

A better example would be say Dutch. Translate the OP from English to Dutch and back to English (i.e. a worst case scenario), and you end up with this:

"The company has an automatic system for translating texts on computers, sweetened by scanning millions of multilingual websites and documents. Until now includes 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google has a system telephone speech recognition that allows users to query websites by speaking commands into their phones instead of typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to software to understand voice of a caller and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language to produce. "

This is perfectly legible to me, and vastly better than what you got when babelfish was introduced 11 years ago. There is a good TechTalk about the topic at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PzPDRPwlA which should be required viewing before making fun of google's machine translation efforts.

Voice recognition is harder, but for continuous untrained speech recognition google voice is pretty cool - I've gotten some barely intelligible voice messages on my google voice number, and where google voice is sure (i.e. black text) it is 95%+ correct, where it is not sure it is maybe 30% correct, but for another 30% it is not possible to figure out what was said, except when taking context into consideration. Google Voice transcribing a call from a mobile phone is better than what you got with Dragon Dictate 5 years ago even with a good microphone, so it is not unlikely that in a few years it will be better than naive human transcription. Humans will be better at guessing based on context thought.

Basically, in 5 years the kind of system google is talking about will work good enough to successfully flirt with a french girl (see http://www.youtube.com/user/searchstories) :P

[*] This is why you should always bring a mobile phone, and have the number for the place you're going.

How exactly was mandarin invented?

And what exactly do you mean with "the written form"?
The written form is basically just a way of writing the spoken language, it isn't language on its own.

I recommend reading for example this . There's a lot of other great stuff to read on the same site.

Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them.

Actually it is the other way around in terms of cause and effect. The Chinese Script (Kanji) evolved because there are very few phonetic variations in the spoken language and they needed a way to make sure that you can mean different things even if essentially the same sounds are coming out of your mouth. Ditto for Japanese as well. The phonetic range is severely limited compared to say English or Sanskrit. You may find this interesting

Kanji is the Japanese word for characters--- not the Chinese one.

I can't bother to RTFA so I sure as hell can't be bothered to read your link, but I have to say that Chinese characters didn't evolve phonetically, but were actual representations (ie drawings) of the word they represent (more complex ideas being made up of combinations of simpler concepts). But as a speaker of Japanese, not Chinese, I only know the history of the characters in Japan, which is not the country of origin.

To the best of my knowledge, this theory is widely discredited today. DeFrancis' book "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" is a good read, there is a relevant excerpt online

Over 90% of all Chinese characters have a strong phonetic component in it. Only a tiny number of characters are either true pictographs or a combination of true pictographs. The characters originally developed from pictograms, but soon they were used as a sort of rebus, where pictographs were substituted to represent words that sounded exactly the same. This happened with other pictographic scripts too, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, where most of the pictographs were used phonetically.

Most characters in existence have a phonetic part + a semantic part (radical). In Japanese, the phonetic connection is not always obvious, and in Chinese, you sometimes need to look at several dialects or reconstructions of middle Chinese to see it. In short, Chinese characters are a complicated and inaccurate phonetic writing system.

Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them.

Actually it is the other way around in terms of cause and effect. The Chinese Script (Kanji) evolved because there are very few phonetic variations in the spoken language and they needed a way to make sure that you can mean different things even if essentially the same sounds are coming out of your mouth. Ditto for Japanese as well. The phonetic range is severely limited compared to say English or Sanskrit. You may find this interesting

I accept your point, although "Asian" includes several Indo-European languages, most of whom are gender-inflected (or did you mean "Asian" in the US sense, i.e., East Asian?).

In any case, learning Mandarin as a 2nd language to avoid the rigours of English orthography seems ... misguided, because you've only traded one set of problems for a another, bigger set of problems.

Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was largely phonetic, contrary to what is surprisingly common belief here. Some signs were logographic or ideographic, but the majority of signs were phonetic.

In fact, there is an increasing awareness that ALL written systems are, in fact, phonetic, including the Far East ones.

Here is a good article with references, which covers hieroglyphs too.

Unfortunately John Kennedy was wrong about the Chinese word for crisis.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One stands for danger; the other for opportunity

Languages are anachronisms, the only reason we have more than one is the physical distance between locations and difficulty travelling allowed them to evolve independently. Well that isn't the world we live in any more and the different languages actually make communication far more difficult now. They're no longer beneficial. So get rid of them, insist on a common language. The most popular happens to be English at the moment. I could live with Spanish, but for those of you about to suggest Chinese, read this before deciding: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Languages are more than a means to convey information. They're identity. Why do you think Ireland, Wales, and Scotland are dusting off dead languages are nameing all their cities and trying to teach it school? (The irony that literally no one knows how to spell these words or even what words should be used, should not be lost.) It's a big ol' wankfest to try and to assert national identity to nations that either already exist, or ceased to exist more than 1000 years ago. The Jews did the same thing with Hebrew in the 19th century and then again in the 20th when they needed words like "telephone,"

Yeah, I speak English. Yeah, I'm an American. And yes, trying to dictate a language through legislation and "academies" is a pointless attempt at nationalism. When you're own people don't even speak the language you've lost. Give it up.

Hasta la vista.

"Yes, countries that use non-English characters should be able to interact with the rest of the world using their natural language."

Why... No really. You speak as if this is a good thing. Why should they be able to use their natural language rather than English? Why shouldn't they be restricted to a limited area of local language speaking people?

The reason the Internet is useful is because everyone speaks TCP/IP. Incompatible protocols are to be actively discouraged because they balkanise the network. Language is exactly the same. The reason the Internet is useful is because everyone speaks English, the more divided it becomes the less useful it becomes.

Languages are anachronisms, the only reason we have more than one is the physical distance between locations and difficulty travelling allowed them to evolve independently. Well that isn't the world we live in any more and the different languages actually make communication far more difficult now. They're no longer beneficial. So get rid of them, insist on a common language. The most popular happens to be English at the moment. I could live with Spanish, but for those of you about to suggest Chinese, read this before deciding: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

We should be using this opportunity to actively get rid of languages.

Gore is wrong again, of course.

'Those who purvey the doctrine that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of elements meaning "danger" and "opportunity" are engaging in a type of muddled thinking that is a danger to society [....]' -Victor H. Mair [emphasis added]

Oh, and for the record, given how willing you are to correct other people, I have to point out that the claim in your signature is just plain untrue. Apart from the character requiring more than two brushstrokes, the underlying claim is false and even insipid.

You're welcome.

1) Bush isn't really a Texan.

2) As another poster said, the month name thing goes back to Latin, not English's history, per se.

3) What you said about Chinese was almost completely incorrect. Read pinyin.info for a more detailed explanation, but rest assured, Cantonese children have to learn to speak Beijing Mandarin as a part of their education process.

Well, there is only one space character in English. There are more than 2000 kanji. If that's the main reason for their existence, I believe anyone would consider that crazy. There are certainly many trivial and far easier ways of breaking up text into something more intelligible than peppering the text with thousands of distinct characters that are a pain to study and learn. If you want to argue that the kanji are useful to distinguish the many homonyms of Japanese, I believe that it has been cogently argued that Japanese (and moreso Chinese) has so many homonyms mainly because their use of Kanji/Hanzi has allowed them to get away with it.

Don't get me wrong; I'm studying Japanese now and I find the study of kanji absolutely fascinating. In the same way I suppose that a crack addict would find that smoking it makes him feel better. They're paying a very, very high price for sticking to tradition, methinks, when they've had a simple way out available for many centuries.

Well, there is only one space character in English. There are more than 2000 kanji. If that's the main reason for their existence, I believe anyone would consider that crazy. There are certainly many trivial and far easier ways of breaking up text into something more intelligible than peppering the text with thousands of distinct characters that are a pain to study and learn. If you want to argue that the kanji are useful to distinguish the many homonyms of Japanese, I believe that it has been cogently argued that Japanese (and moreso Chinese) has so many homonyms mainly because their use of Kanji/Hanzi has allowed them to get away with it.

Don't get me wrong; I'm studying Japanese now and I find the study of kanji absolutely fascinating. In the same way I suppose that a crack addict would find that smoking it makes him feel better. They're paying a very, very high price for sticking to tradition, methinks, when they've had a simple way out available for many centuries.

John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.

Firstly, spare us the gratuitous superlatives, such as 'one of the best books...'.

Secondly, this John Gray appears to be spouting off about Chinese orthography with out any real knowledge of it, and is thus exposed as a fool. Chinese orthography is simply not 'iconographic' and thus the whole basis of his argument is erroneous.

dvdeug has already posted a good rebuttal to your posting. For some more complete rebuttals of this chinese 'iconographic' myth that you are helping to perpetuate see : Ideographic Myth and Difficult Characters

John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.

Firstly, spare us the gratuitous superlatives, such as 'one of the best books...'.

Secondly, this John Gray appears to be spouting off about Chinese orthography with out any real knowledge of it, and is thus exposed as a fool. Chinese orthography is simply not 'iconographic' and thus the whole basis of his argument is erroneous.

dvdeug has already posted a good rebuttal to your posting. For some more complete rebuttals of this chinese 'iconographic' myth that you are helping to perpetuate see : Ideographic Myth and Difficult Characters