What's harder to learn: English or Chinese?

Question

if the USA and China are such huge partners now, i guess well all be required to learn both languages in like 30-40 years into the future. So whats harder to learn from a foreigner's point o view? Also, would it be a different case if your very first language was phonetic (like English) or based on symbol writing (like Chinese)??

Answer 1

Chinese, from a written perspective: you need 10,000 characters to be literate.
Engish is by no means phonetic, but it is easier.

Answer 2

It would definitely be harder for English people to learn Chinese, instead of Chinese people to learn English. There are multiple reasons for this: 1. The Chinese language has an infinite number of words, so much so that even adults in China don't have an expanded vocabulary to be able to utilize more than perhaps 80%, while the English language has a considerable number of words, but definitely less. 2. Similarly, the English language has an alphabet of only 26 letters, meaning there are a limited number of words you can create from those 26 letters, compared to the fact that there is NO Chinese alphabet -- just many, many, many, words. 2. If a Chinese person were to learn English but retain an Asian accent, the words would still have the same meaning. If an English speaker were to say something in Chinese with the wrong accent, since there are different tones for each 'vowel' in the Chinese language, they would mess up the meaning completely and change the word to something that is completely different. There are a lot more reasons why it is harder to learn Chinese, but then I'd be typing a novel. Feel free to ask if you have more questions, through email or by IM'ing me. Hope this helped!

Answer 3

There is no definite answer to this question. Its like asking which is cuter, a dog or a cat.

For Westerners, English is obviously easier to learn since most of the languages are related. For East Asians, Chinese is easier.

English and Chinese are difficult to learn in different areas. For Chinese, the hard part is to learn the thousands of characters and the different tones. Different dialects have different number of tones. Mandarin has 4 tones. Hokkien has 6 tones. Cantonese 6. There are many many more dialects- hakka, teochew, sichuan etc. For English, grammar is difficult and in many instances redundant. In English, you have present tense, past tense, present perfect and so on. So for a simple word like "eat" you can have "ate" "have eaten" and other forms. In chinese, its just the same form "chi" throughout and its still perfectly comprehensible.

Luckily for both Chinese and English speakers, the overall grammatical structure of their sentences are very similar.

Answer 4

English if i was chinese if you mean by a "foreigner's point o view" but its really "point a view".

Since I am an American, I would say Chinese because first of all, its the sysbols, their are very hard to understand in the first place and I can't make out the pictures by looking at it.Then, it would be porbably learn the vowels, words,phases,sintinces,essays,pargraphs, and so on in this language.

Answer 5

It depends on the language that the "foreigner" speaks. If they speak German, Italian, French, or Spanish, then Chinese would be more difficult to learn than English. For someone Japanese, both Chinese and English are difficult, but learning how to read Chinese is easier than learning to read English. Speakers of Thai would probably find Chinese to be easier because they are tonal languages.

Answer 6

It would definitely be a different case if you first language were phonetic or character-based.

Most Chinese people find Korean and Japanese easiest to learn (they're like the Spanish and French equivalents for English), and vice-versa. Plus, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese (plus other Asian languages) share a common root language (Chinese).

And of course, many Western languages share common roots (Latin, Greek, etc.).

I speak both and I think Chinese is the one that's a bit harder to grasp. But English also has difficult to understand grammar and what I like to call "English-isms." Chinese has idioms and other cultural things equivalent of "English-isms". One could call them "Chinese-isms." =P

Of course, the Chinese I'm talking about is Mandarin, the main language and the one that everyone in China's required to know. Remember that China's a huge country and most dialects sound nothing like the other. For example, there's a few Arabic-based dialects in the northwest, weird Mongolian-Mandarin hybrid dialects in the north, and Cantonese in Hong Kong and Guangzhou areas, just to name a few. And they're all considered Chinese.

Answer 7

Both will have problems in trying to master each other language.
But I think it is far more difficult for the English speaking people to master the Chinese language if you include writing out the characters. But if it is only the Latinized writings called the Pinyin, I think it is easier to learn Chinese than English, because you have a fixed way for pronouncing each letter in the Pinyin.
English is far more complicated. For instance the letter "a" is not always pronounced as the word "ah", and the letters "ch" can be pronounced as the "ch" in "cheese" and "chocolate" , but at other times you read it as "k" for instance in "character" and "charismatic" or "choir" and "chorister". So are the other letters: "o" can be read as "o" as in "long", "e" as in "station", "a" is in "ton".

Answer 8

I would say Chinese, only because they are many different characters and such that you need to learn.

Any language is hard to learn, I am trying to learn Italian now, and it is not that easy.

Answer 9

For me it's Chinese. There are normally 6 different tones possible for each word. Memorizing is not so bad but pronounciation is going to kill you if you wanted a Pepsi and ended up with Yellow Piss instead.

Answer 10

Chinese is harder!!!! I hear it every day but i can't deal eith it. It;s need a lot of practices