How hard is it to learn Chinese? Very hard:
Firstly, the script poses problems. There is no alphabet, just thousands of characters. There are so many that no one can give a definitive total, but it is believed to be around 60,000.Secondly, the tonal system is hard for Westerners. While the meaning of English words does not change with tone, the same is not true for Mandarin.
Four-and-a-half tones are used, meaning a single word can have many meanings. Ma, for example, can mean mother, horse, hemp, or be a reproach depending on tone. How tones are used also varies extensively from province to province.
“The tonal systems can result in a lot of ambiguity for people learning the language,” says Dr Weightman.
Westerners have the reputation of using the fourth tone exclusively for all words. It is a sharp falling sound, a little like how the end of a sentence with an exclamation mark sounds.
Pinyin, a system of transliterating Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet, is used by Westerners to learn basic Mandarin. Things get tougher when students start learning characters, but language experts say a person only needs roughly 5,000 to be literate.
It’s not all bad news though:
One thing that is easier in Mandarin is the grammar.“The grammar is not nearly as complicated as many European languages,” says Dr Weightman. “For example there are no verb tenses, no relative clauses, no singular or plural.”