letmesee

Many foreign friends of mine are complaining that Chinese is so hard to learn: the ridiculously difficult writing system, the confusing four tones, the extensive system of measure words, so a lot of things to memorize… It seems that I should thank God just for being born Chinese. Is Chinese really that hard to learn as a foreign language?

Actually, I don't think so. The Chinese language is really not that difficult to learn as you imagined or heard about. It's just very different from your mother tongue, but difference does not necessarily mean difficulty, right? You might be interested to know more about my opinion here.

fleur chinoise

yeah, you are right. As you said,It's just very different from your mother tongue,not that difficult to learn as you imagined or heard about

Phaelth

any language is the same.
you can master any nation's tongue as if you are human.
because we have the same tongue in our mouth and the same ears on our head.
what you need is just practice.

gao_yixing

But Chinese is quite different from languages with letters. So if you're a native a tonogue of langueges like English, French etc. German must be much easier than Chinese because the similarity.
So maybe sometimes it's true that Chinese is difficult.

demoore

For a french student, it will be much easyer to learn italian or spanish than chinese. Just as for a mandarin speaking chinese who will start learning cantonese.

gao_yixing

Uh......The difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is much smaller.
Cantonese can be regarded as a dialect because it was written in the same way and the difference is just pronunciation and some slangs.

Prof Ookami

Let me offer my opinions:

[1] I am a Malaysian of Han origin [not chinese in the strictest sense] and I speak Cantonese as a dialect and learned Chinese [should be referred as Hanyu] via Mandarin [Putonghua in PRC] which was based on the Beijing dialect [not entirely].

[2] Even as a Han, I had difficulties in getting into higher levels of Hanyu mainly hampered by the lack of practices. Well, mind you, I studied how to speak Mandarin when I was studying in Japan! Thus, I speak with a heavy Beijing accent. I have also met many foreigners [Nigerians, Russians, Arabs and even Eskimos] that could speak fluent Mandarin in Beijing itself, for them being studying in Beijing. So to speak, learning Mandarin can be accomplished through rigourous interactions with the spoken language.

[3] Mandarin [Hanyu] belongs to a family of languages known as "Sino-Tibetan" and along its roots, you can find Thai and Burmese. Thus, it is easier for the Thais and Burmese to pick up Hanyu [or any dialect for that matter] as their languages are also "tonal" which most of the European languages and even Korean and Japanese are very much different. They are mostly polysyllabic and non-tonal.

[4] Hanyu symbols [known as characters or ideograms] are merely representations of meanings attested to them by the society using them. Basically they dont have a fixed pronunciation. Example: 山 [prounounced as SHAN in Putonghua; as SAN in Cantonese; as SUA in Fujianese] whereas the Japanese adopted it to represent the sound YAMA that was created long before Hanyu inference that came about during the 4 century AD. Thus, if England were to be nearby to China, English may be written with such ideograms then mountain would be written as 山 instead of m-o-u-n-t-a-i-n Korean and Vietnamese had been using Hanyu ideograms too before they changed to their respective writing systems about 80 years ago.

[5] I susggest you start with recognising the ideograms and then learn about their combinations. The sequence of Hanyu words are quite standardised now as compared to Classical Hanyu where one ideogram can represent many ideas. Try this: 马 [horse] 上马 [mounting a horse]马上 [immediately]...their sequence and context are regulated nowadays to avoid confusion.

[6] As for tone and word sequence: please be careful...try this: NI HAO MA

NI HAO MA 你好吗
NI MA HAO 你妈好
MA NI HAO 妈你好

In the absence of those Hnayu characters, you could make a big joke even when greeting your Chinese friends.

__________________
Anything that I don't know is not a fact