Originally Posted by chinese_noodles

The reason why Chinese is perceived as a difficult language is due to its history.

Cantonese Chinese is the original form of Chinese language. However there is no such thing as "Chinese".

There is either Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is the language for masses and it is far much easier to learn as compared to the traditional Cantonese Chinese.

Originally Posted by chinese_noodles

The reason why Chinese is perceived as a difficult language is due to its history.

Cantonese Chinese is the original form of Chinese language. However there is no such thing as "Chinese".

There is either Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is the language for masses and it is far much easier to learn as compared to the traditional Cantonese Chinese.

Originally Posted by D-man

Speech perception ......So sometimes it makes speech too difficult to perceive. For example, just one phonetic syllable "shi" (not counting difference in 5 possible tones for it, because the tones often cannot be clearly defined in fast speech) can be written with almost 70 different characters, so, figuratively saying, it may have about 70 different meanings.

Way of forming a sentence, because sometimes you can understand every character in a sentence, but still cannot understand idea of the whole sentence. Probably, the reason is a special syntax that is unusual for people, whose native languages belong to another families of languages. An additional hardship is undeveloped morphology. You may think that simple morphology makes a language easier. Yes, it does, but sometimes it raises some new problems. Sometimes a particular word in Chinese can be a subject (noun), a predicate (verb), an object, an attribute (adjective), and an adverbial modifier (adverb) at the same time (without any changes). Anyway, all words have a certain place in Chinese sentence, so you can see where any of them should be placed, but sometimes still have to guess what author meant.

Chinese characters (ºº×Ö)... Almost everybody heard about them and saw them. Undoubtedly, it is very special and difficult system of writing. People often face many problems regarding to memorization of Chinese characters (both writing or reading). But if you learn well enough, someday you will be able to read even some uknown characters. I would like to say that if you face some known character in a text it is rather easier to remember how it is read than if you need to remember how to write some character. Some people even invent original systems how to make memorization of the characters easier. And the idea of adsc's post can help some people in it. Why not?