Chinese is not hard

Yeah, you heard me. Though a brief explanation is in order. Early in my study of Mandarin, I told people that “Chinese is the hardest language I’ve ever studied.” Recently, I have clarified in my mind a cause to retract this statement. Which is to say that I’ve begun to get the hang of the language, and I can see some of its structuring. About my revision, here it is: “Chinese has the steepest learning curve of any language I’ve ever studied.”

The true substance of language is revealed by what I’ll call “colors and grays.” The color of a language entails its flair, comprehensiveness, and flexibility. The “grays” are the nuance, the ability to differentiate between similar ideas in life’s array of complexity. Mandarin Chinese possesses little of either. Daily vocabulary is predictable (I laughed out loud when I learned the verb “to cook” was simply “zuo fan” – “do rice”), and as for fine distinction, for example, there is only one word for chips, crackers, cookies, wafers and biscuits. "Bing gan" covers them all, whether they're bitter, salty or sweet.

Chinese is a tonal language; it has 5 tones, which means one has to say each syllable at a certain pitch or it means something completely different from what is intended. Mandarin is actually the easiest of the Chinese dialects. (e.g. Taiwanese has 6 tones, Cantonese has 9.) Yet saying the syllable "shr" can convey at least 40 different ideas. Mastering the five tones, and the unusual sounds of Chinese will, admittedly, take quite a bit of time. But once the basics are out of the way, the grammar is rather elementary.

To most language learners, this is actually good news. The reason English is commonly regarded among linguists as the hardest language in the world is its compulsion to break every rule applied to it. English has hundreds of rules, a complex tense schematic, senseless spelling principles, a superfluity of metaphors and slang, and so many exceptions and inconsistencies that it could make even a proponent of moral relativism dizzy. Just to enlighten you on the scope of English, I’ll quote Bill Bryson, in his book Mother Tongue:

“It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000).”

And regarding the ability to make fine distinctions:

“English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. ‘Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist.’”

So the poor inhabitants of other lands are the ones who have it hard. I think that everyone I’ve talked to over here believes Chinese is harder than English. Perhaps they are thinking of the writing system, which involves several thousand pictograph characters. They win, hands down. But the spoken language is a much simpler affair.

English, Russian and Latin have much harder grammar and comprehensive nuance, and that appeals to language purists such as myself. My roommate Eliot put his finger on it when he remarked a couple months ago, “I think you like learning languages for the sheer essence of learning them.” I didn’t realize it until then, and neither had I asked for the aforementioned purism. I remember in junior high school I wanted to take Spanish and French as my two 7th grade electives, but they wouldn’t let me take two languages at once. (I should be thanking them actually; if I knew French I might inexplicably develop a virulent contempt for America.) But this decision might have catalyzed a desire to learn language early on.

My interest in learning languages, if you were interested, wasn’t truly realized until college. Five semesters into the Virginia Military Institute, I had studied piles of physics and astronomy, and I had taken every math class required of my major (all 18 hours of them). Switching majors halfway through my junior year in college - from a prestigious B.S. in Physics (with a minor in Spanish and Astronomy) to an easily attainable B.A. in Modern Languages and Cultures - was one of the more difficult decisions of my life. It was around then that I felt compelled to study every language that remotely interested me. But I digress.

Chinese isn’t as hard as you think it is. If you are truly interested in learning a language that will soon be of global import, choose Mandarin. Think about it; your resume will veritably glow, and, more practically, local Chinese restaurants might give you free Kung Pow chicken.