What is hard about the Chinese language?

[vapid shard]

As a learner of Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese languages), which aspects of the language do you think takes the most amount of time to master / reach a satisfactory level according to your own learning standards and preferences? Why? As a native mandarin speaker, I have asked many people in VCs this question. I am asking it again here because I seem to have never interacted with the text chat learners community. Just curious. I do not yet know if this is the right place to ask this question. Let me know your thoughts!

[short berry]

i dont think its too hard

[vapid shard]

My phrasing could be better in the title, but I did add "takes the most amount of time to master". In my head, "hard" could mean taking more time than other languages to reach a similar level.

[short berry]

i would say learning large amounts of vocab (not characters) takes the most time but that also applies to most languages

other than that finding learning material for dialects other than mandarin is hard

[wheat star]

understanding the differences between similar vocabulary

and understanding the differences between similar grammar points

cuz those are mostly related to context

learning vocab u can always spam it

i would say prolly that and also getting used to listen to those words in native content

[torpid ginkgo]

just learning an entirely new writing system and memorizing characters. the idea that chinese is hard beyond that is overblown. japanese is the scary one

[rancid breach]

Yeah

grammar is harder than people think

but the rest are not as hard as their current impression

[edgy nebula]

I don't think it's hard - ironically, beginning to learn Spanish in university, I've found it a bit harder, despite the reputation being easy.

The main thing is that it's tedious. There's very little lexical similarity between Mandarin and non-East Asian languages, and this means you're going to have to learn to talk again. If I pick up, say, German, Yiddish, or Norwegian, I have plenty of very basic words to quickly form sentences. I can express a decently complex sentence in these languages within weeks, just because of that. If I pick up Spanish, I have a ton of Latin vocabulary to convert, and can (poorly) discuss government matters almost instantly. With Mandarin, I have to sit down for a while, maybe work through a Swadesh List...so on, so forth.

Beyond that, nailing down tones is difficult if you don't have anything to compare it to. It's a new habit you have to internalise everywhere, just like, say, conjugations in European languages. The retroflex sounds (zh and friends) also require a bit of tongue exercise to nail, mine actually hurt starting out.

I think it's important for new learners to develop a mindset that all languages are for communication, and find out why the speakers want to hear certain parts of the language. Otherwise, Mandarin really does look like it doesn't make sense. There's always method within the madness (yes, even for English), it's just a big hurdle.

There's nothing that makes it harder than any other language, it's just that the new habits you have to develop are very esoteric.

Of course, this is all from an English perspective. From a Welsh perspective, the grammar is horrible to get the hang of...but that's another story.

[rigid parrot]

IMO tones are really hard even if you speak more than one Chinese variety already, although the thing that really hammered this point home for me was trying to learn to speak reconstructed Middle Chinese

for which there isn't much reliable/consistent audio, and almost zero chance of interacting with a live speaker

[rancid breach]

The tones were probably different in different places for MC tho

[woeful cove]

你要學方言你乾脆搬到那個地方跟當地互動就好 不用課本、教材啊

[short berry]

但需要钱呀

[woeful cove]

那就認真工作吧
已經有能力

一定會有

[ancient mist]

漢字？

[rustic flame]

beause it's different from language from Indo-European language family

语法结构，表音和表义体系和印欧语系都不同

[olive yoke]

中文难学的原因主要在于其复杂的文字系统、特殊的语法结构、多变的语音语调以及丰富的文化内涵