Based on what I've seen and heard, Mandarin Chinese and English are probably the two hardest mainstream languages to learn. I am constantly amazed at how English, using the Roman alphabet, has only 26 letters to represent all sounds in the language. Change a letter or two, make a mistake, mispronounce something, people can usually guess your meaning pretty easily. No problem, right?
Chinese, on the other hand, is a whole different beast. Written Chinese (Hanzi) consists of tens of thousands of characters representing a mixture of ideas, sounds, and pictorial representations that go back thousands of years. These characters evolved from what were essentially caveman pictures carved into animal bones, and over the centuries developed into beautiful but perplexing conglomeration. To make things even worse, many of these characters look very similar, sometimes almost identical. The adding or changing of a stroke, even a slip of the pen, can totally alter the meaning of what you are trying to write. In the eight months that I have been trying to learn Chinese, I have learned a few dozen of the most important characters, and I am able to write a *few* very simple sentences. But for me it takes an immense amount of concentration just to do that.
The Chinese do have a Romanized form of their language called Pinyin, in which the Latin alphabet is used to represent the sounds in Chinese. The large and medium sized cities have Pinyin on all their street signs, and most businesses have at least a little Pinyin on their signs and menus now, so that helps a lot.
From a Western point of view, it would seem that it would make things so much simpler to just adopt Pinyin and stop using the characters. But my impression is that since so many words sound alike and the characters convey ideas and nuance as well (in some cases) the sounds, this would not be as practical as it would seem on the surface.
Fun fact: Most of the Chinese writing you see today is actually considered "Simplified". When the Communists took over in 1949, simplifying the written language was one of their first tasks. (Oy vey).
Spoken Chinese (Hanyu, or Putonghua) is a tonal language. There are four tones I can best describe as 1. high tone, 2. rising tone, 3. falling and rising tone, and 4. falling tone. Additionally there is a "fifth tone" that has no inflection on many words. Change the tone, and you totally change the meaning of the word. For a native speaker of English, as you might imagine, this is something of a nightmare.
One good example of this is illustrated by the fact that the Chinese consider the number four to be highly unlucky, much as many superstitious Westerners consider the number 13 to be a harbinger of misfortune. There are multiple stories and legends as to why 13 is unlucky to us. But for the Chinese, four is simply unlucky because in spoken Chinese it sounds like the word for death. If you get in an elevator in China, you will notice that buildings don't have a fourth floor; They are usually labeled "3A."
Of course, I am referring to Beijing-standard Mandarin Chinese.This is a language I can best describe as "choppy sounding." The words, even if I don't know what they mean, are usually very clear and distinct. But I don't live in Beijing. I live in Shaoyang. The local dialect, or "Shaoyanghua" is a very slurred form of Mandarin where (to myself at least) all the words seem to run together. Instead of sounding Chinese, there have been times where to me it sounds like Japanese, Russian, or even Spanish. The cadence of speech is totally different.
So when I speak Mandarin to the locals, they understand me quite plainly about 75% - 90% of the time, depending on how comfortable I am with the words and whether or not I'm trying something new. But when they answer back in Shaoyanghua, most of the time I am left baffled. I've been here long enough that I can usually pick up enough words to get the gist of what they are saying, but it can be immensely frustrating.
That said, I have come a long way in my understanding of Chinese writing, speech, and grammar in just a few months, and I must say that I am immensely proud of the progress that I have made. Hopefully with enough effort someday I will become relatively fluent!
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