Quote:
Originally Posted by SlavicResistance
Indeed. Same for Mandarin and any other Chinese languages.
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Dober popoldne!
I would like to notice that Chinese is not as difficult as people say. But there are really extremely difficult things in Chinese. In my humble opinion, the main difficulties of Chinese are:
1. Its system of writing - Chinese characters.
2. Phonetic monotone. I mean that the number of possible phonetic syllables is too confined. So it makes speech difficult to perceive. There are 5 tones in Mandarin (and some another number in different local dialects). They are to serve as a tool for helping us to distinguish different words. But in spite of this fact, for foreigners or sometimes for some Chinese persons, who are the speakers of another local dialect, it is still too difficult to perceive other's speech. Moreover, for native speakers of foreign languages, tones often make Chinese even more diffiicult.
But I dare say that, excluding those difficulties, there are no extremely difficult things in Chinese. As for the grammar it is as simple as it may be. For example, it is simplier than the English grammar. There are mostly some particular rules for particular grammar constructions in Chinese. But these principles are not too difficult to comprehend.
For me, there is also one more complexity in Chinese. It must be the third point. So,...
3. Because of the fact that my native language belongs to so-called Indo-European family of languages, I face some difficulties concerned to getting comprehension of the way of thinking and expression of thoughts in Chinese. Sometimes you may know the meaning of each word in the sentence, but you could not understand the idea of the whole sentence. Partly, it is consequence of the fact that one word without any changes may be a noun, a verb, an adjective and so on. As for the simple sentences, there are less such difficulties. As a rule, you may intuitively feel their idea.
I have tried to list the main difficulties of the Chinese language.
If there are no them or even one of them, we would be able to say that Chinese is not difficult, but simple enough.