Is Mandarin Chinese The Hardest Language To Learn?

Growing up, I always believed that Chinese is the toughest language to learn. In this video I ask a couple folks on the street in Yangshuo what they think, then I break down some of the basic components of the Chinese language (Mandarin dialect) to see just how tough this language is compared to English.

Top Comments:

1. As a native Chinese speaker, I think your explanation makes a lot of sense. Great job!
2. I’m not sure if Chinese is the hardest to learn, but sure Chinese character is beautiful.
3. I studied French for a decade and also lived in France for 2 years and I still feel like my Chinese is better than my French after 3 years of studying
4. Chinese haven’t created a new word for a few hundreds years .but still keep up with the development of science and technology of the world ..no mater what is happening or discovering in the scientific field .Chinese characters can name it and express it .
5. It depends on what proficiency level you are talking about. Chinese is a fairly easy language to pick up if you just want to be able to communicate in your daily lives, certainly a lot easier than, say, Russian or Polish, either of which easily puts the Germanic and Romance languages to shame on difficulty. Mastering Chinese, on the other hand, is very difficult. The differences in the expressiveness of somebody proficient in Chinese and somebody highly proficient in Chinese are night and day, whether you are talking about casual conversations, written vernacular works, or just your garden variety League of Legend shoutcasts.
6. Thank you for posting this video. As a native Chinese speaker, I’ve always complained about the complexity of English when it comes to naming. One of the biggest challenges for me: it is almost impossible for me to understand 100% what my family doctor is trying to tell me, as I get lost in the complex terms used. Most of the illnesses or conditions have specific names and to me they are not descriptive. For example, diabetes, which is actually called “sugary-urine disease”. Leukaemia, which is called “white-blood cell illness” in Chinese. I had so much hard time when just trying to fill in the in-take form when I first registered with a clinic. Another strange thing I can think of is in geometry/math. In english, there are “triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, …”, in Chinese, there are “three-sided shape, four-sided shape, five-sided shape, six-sided shape, seven-sided shape, …”. You get the idea. The same goes for “months” and “days in a week” (January as opposed to Month One, Monday as opposed to Week Day One). To me, the Chinese language system is more like a building block system: you learn the basic, and once familiarized, you can understand and create new elements easily as all you need is just the foundation (we have 3500 common characters and these are all you need for almost everything including in academic studies). English, even though it does have some “building blocks”, to fully master it requires a way larger vocabulary. Also the sentence structure in English makes it very difficult for one to follow when it comes to describing complex ideas. Take most of the legal documents as examples (i.e. contracts). However, I can see why learning Chinese is hard for beginners, as all of the elements are very foreign for a Latin based language user. To associate a pronunciation with a character could present quite a bit challenge to start. English, on the other hand, how it spells is how it sounds (usually), creating a way smaller barrier for beginners.
7. I think this really comes down to how close your language is to Chinese. I, for example, am from Vietnam, my only mother tongue is Vietnamese and I’ve been learning English for roughly 10 years now and Chinese for more than 1 year. To me, English is definitely the harder one since its grammar and vocabulary are completely foreign, it took me like 5-6 years to be able to hold a normal conversation and to be able to listen and understand what others are speaking. On the hand, Chinese and Vietnam share deep roots: most of Vietnamese vocabulary came from Chinese, our language has 6 tones, our pronunciation bears similarities to Chinese dialects like Minnan and Cantonese and even Mandarin. Not only that, our grammar structures are basically the same and also idiom (成语) has some that are the same. Right now I can understand to a certain extant what a Chinese person is saying after just more than 1 years, a lot faster than my English learning experience
8. Spoken Chinese is simple, tough part is the reading one and the written one. Bcz what you hear is disconnected with what you see.
9. as italian i can say: learning english was “ok” but a mess at the same time. The biggest obstacle was definitely the inconsistency, especially phonetically speaking. It sometimes felt as if every word had a rule of its own. Very frustrating. Now I’m learning chinese and i realize what it means to take the first steps in a language that has no roots in common with yours. i’ve always admired all those people who once arrived in europe learnt to speak our difficult languages ​​so well, now i admire them even more
10. I like your video. Actually I am learning Chinese currently. On my observation Chinese is really very logical and much simple. It is difficult to remember hieroglyphs, but once you did that, you can see how much simple is reading and speaking process comparing to English. First of all, when you read in Chinese the text takes much less space on paper than English does. So it takes much less time to perceive ideas. It is so comfortable and once you become able to read some basic sentences in Chinese, you can understand why China does not refuse hieroglyphs and does not change them by pinyin. It is ridicules in the eyes of any Chinese person. And the pleasure of reading in Chinese can become a motivation to continue learning.