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Chinese is not relatively easy to learn compared to Japanese and Korean. Where did you hear that?
They are all about the same difficulty level. To learn basic, Chinese is lot more difficult than JApanese and Korean.
Also, considering how long it took for English to become a global language, there's no chance in hell that Chinese will surpass English in our lifetime. Also keep in mind how simple English basic is to learn.
Learning Mandarin basic can take few years.
I'm just saying that some people seem to be scared of having to know Chinese, which they shouldn't.
Chinese grammar is simplistic, even easy. The difficulty of Chinese comes from mastering the tones and the idioms in the language.
Japanese grammar is difficult, with conjugations, particles, etc up the wazoo. Korean is similar to Japan grammatically. This makes both Japanese and Korean VERY difficult to learn. Anyone can sit down and learn hiragana and katakana or hangul in two-three days, but grammar is another boat.
Note that English is also a complex language grammatically.
Anyone that's seriously learned a foreign language will tell you that understanding of grammar is key to mastering a language.
TLDR:
Chinese has a steep initial learning curve, but becomes way comparatively easier. Japanese has an low initial learning curve, but is extremely difficult to become fluent in.
I got bored with the article, because it keeps saying over and over, in different ways, how difficult the writing system is. Unless I quit before he mentioned it, he says nothing about how easy the spoken language and grammar are. Furthermore, he spends a LOT of time talking about how hard it is to read a newspaper or even a random library book. He doesn't mention that journalistic language in ANY language is difficult! Especially in Germanic languages, and to some extent, Slavic. Learning to read newspapers is an entire course in itself, in some university language departments, only tackled at the 3rd or 4th-year level, sometimes at the graduate level. The same holds true for scholarly work in a foreign language. These different aspects of language are sometimes taught in graduate courses in "stylistics".
Meh. I suspect that the article author just isn't good at languages in general. He picked the wrong one to put all his foreign-language effort into. At least he gave it a good try, though, and stuck with it for awhile.
Chinese grammar is simplistic, even easy. The difficulty of Chinese comes from mastering the tones and the idioms in the language.
Japanese grammar is difficult, with conjugations, particles, etc up the wazoo. Korean is similar to Japan grammatically. This makes both Japanese and Korean VERY difficult to learn. Anyone can sit down and learn hiragana and katakana or hangul in two-three days, but grammar is another boat.
Note that English is also a complex language grammatically.
Anyone that's seriously learned a foreign language will tell you that understanding of grammar is key to mastering a language.
TLDR:
Chinese has a steep initial learning curve, but becomes way comparatively easier. Japanese has an low initial learning curve, but is extremely difficult to become fluent in.
Grammatically it depends.
If you are a German speaker, Japanese and Korean are relatively easy to handle. Their grammatical structure is the same: Subject + Object + Verb. And of course German has the notorious der, die, das; which makes Japanese seem like piece of cake.
Moreover, unlike Chinese, neither Japanese nor Korean is a tonal language. But both languages have different levels of honorific language that take years to master. And both languages have tons of loan words from Chinese, English, German,.......etc.
Chinese seems easy in term of grammar to English speakers. But because it is tonal, unless the learners are totally immersed in the environment, it is very difficult for them to manage the right tone.
Nope, a Chinese owned factory does not care you know Chinese or not. It would be nice if you could speak the language of the management team in order to negotiate better but nowhere it says you have to learn Chinese or Japanese.
I think it's very hard for Americans to learn an Asian language but it's much easier the other way around. People who are native Spanish speakers can learn Asian languages quicker because similarities in grammar and speed. English is a very slow pace language compare to Asian languages that are fast pace.
Seriously? I learned Spanish which shares some similarities to English in terms of Latin root words. I had started taking free Mandarin lessons at the local university (taught by a native speaker) and found that it was not similar. Take the words Mǎ and Māmā for example. They look very similar, but that little accent mark above the a makes a huge difference in the pronunciation. It indicates how to pronounce the sound as well as how long to hold the sound. It means the difference between calling your mom mother or horse.
Chinese seems easy in term of grammar to English speakers. But because it is tonal, unless the learners are totally immersed in the environment, it is very difficult for them to manage the right tone.
If you have an even moderately musical ear, it's not hard. A good argument for giving kids music lessons at a fairly early age! Good for ear training.
If you are a German speaker, Japanese and Korean are relatively easy to handle. Their grammatical structure is the same: Subject + Object + Verb. And of course German has the notorious der, die, das; which makes Japanese seem like piece of cake.
Moreover, unlike Chinese, neither Japanese nor Korean is a tonal language. But both languages have different levels of honorific language that take years to master. And both languages have tons of loan words from Chinese, English, German,.......etc.
Chinese seems easy in term of grammar to English speakers. But because it is tonal, unless the learners are totally immersed in the environment, it is very difficult for them to manage the right tone.
I really don't think German speakers will find Japanese and Korean easy.
Korean grammar is difficult because of suffixes. You add suffixes to just about every words in Korean.
Hell lot more difficult than German suffixes. I know this because I speak Korean.
Japanese also has complicated suffixes, but not as much as Korean. Japanese is difficult because of grammar and Chinese characters.
I know someone who lived in Korea from age of 20 to 30 and his Korean isn't that good.
After that he lived in America for 3 years (3o to 33) and his English is so much better than Korean.
It's kind of a bizarre idea to claim that because a language uses the same basic word order as your own, it is going to be easy to learn. That totally depends on the language because there is vastly more to grammar than basic word order.
English is S-V-O and German is S-O-V. But the difficulties that English-speakers have with German have very little to do with remembering where to place verbs in a sentence. That's one of the easier parts of German.
English and Chinese are both S-V-O but that does not help speakers of one very much in learning the other, because there is a whole lot more to most sentences than simply "subject, verb, object."
If you want your children to know Mandarin, they better have a way to USE it. What's the point of going to Chinese school every day for 10 years when outside of class, you end up speaking English with your friends and watch English TV? And you don't know any Mandarin speakers to speak it with?
Parents always say they want their children to learn another language (doesn't matter what, but Madarin, since that's the topic here), but when I see those children, they're speaking English for 8 hours a day at school and then speak some more English with their friends and they don't have any immigrant friends with whom to speak Mandarin anyway.
I have friends who went to school to learn a second language for some 10 years, yet I speak the same language better than they do, and I've never been to school!!! Why? Because I actually use it, more than they do!!
That's the only thing that bugs me about learning a foreign language. And yes, if you're an English speaker, an Asian language will be very hard to learn. Better off learning Spanish or Italian or some other language closer to English.
As was said, there are multiple languages in China - Mandarin is one, Catonese is another. There is also traditional vs. simplified Chinese characters. So which one does one select when wanting to learn Chinese?
Mandarin with simplified characters because the majority of China uses it, but only HK and Canton province know Cantonese. I work in Int'l business and HK people, especially the younger generation, all know Mandarin. Even Canton people can speak Mandarin.
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Good for ear training.
