Hacker News Reader

I don't think I'd call these criticisms so much as _reasons_ why Chinese is so damn hard (for a Western speaker). It’s not like there's anyone around who designed the language to complain to.

Anyway:

Reasons 1-5 aren't about the many languages used in China (if French & Spanish are different languages, then I consider Mandarin & Cantonese to be different languages). These difficulties are due to the lack of a concise phonetic alphabet (like the roman alphabet used in English, French, Spanish…, or the hiragana alphabet used in Japanese). If the Chineses languages all used a common (small!) phonetic alphabet of some sort, many of those difficulties would dissolve (and there is no particular reason why that could not be done, technically, except that it throws out a huge part of their culture). Even if only Mandarin existed, those first 5 difficulties would remain.

Edit: OK, so using a phonetic alphabet would mean that each language would be written differently... except that this is already true, essentially. You can actually write in Cantonese in a way that a Mandarin speaker could not understand (using the same characters), and there are those who do this. I think he says this in there (I read this a long time ago), that the Mandarin writing system is just that; Mandarin. The whole country knows how to read it (without necessarily knowing how to pronounce it), so it's more about the non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese people having 2 languages that they use: their own for speaking, and Mandarin for writing. Using a purely phonetic alphabet may make this bi-lingual usage more difficult... or not. The existing writing system is already pretty painful, whether you're a native or not (though natives have more time to get used to it before they're expected to be able to use it, I suppose).

Reason 6: this isn't like reading Shakespeare (Modern English, though an earlier version of it), as far as I understand. It seems more like trying to read The Canterbury Tales (Middle English) or Beowulf (Old English, more like German than English, really). You're completely correct about it not being relevant to practical usage of any of the Chinese languages, though.

Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) actually isn't that bad, it just looks that way. If you read it aloud, you can understand it pretty easily. Old English or Anglo-Saxon actually looks more like Danish than German and is a totally different language from modern English - modern Spanish has more cognates and other similarities.

As a Chinese and English speaker, I assure you that it is far easier to learn English than Chinese.

I grew up with Chinese and still consider myself a learner, despite being surrounded by the language for the first half of my life time. I spent only a few years with English before I considered myself fully fluent and 'native' at the language.

The 'families' of the language do not much matter. Chinese is just not designed/evolved to be learned by non-native people.

No, I think my point was misunderstood about the "families" of the languages. I know English, so picking up French is easier--they have cognates, and considerable overlap in the set of sounds, and they share a lot of grammatical similarity. This similarity is due to their both being Indo-European languages.

Now, I would have a much harder time learning, say, !Kung, because !Kung comes from a very different language family, Bantu. The first problem, and a very big problem, would be learning how to do glottal clicks. If English had a lot of those, it wouldn't be such an issue, but since English is descended from a very different set of languages, I'd find it extremely difficult to pick up !Kung.

Now, given my background in Shanghainese, I'm going to find it infinitely easier to pick up Mandarin or Cantonese than someone who speaks only English. It's not that any language is intrinsically more difficult, but if you start out knowing a language that's quite unrelated (English to Chinese), it will seem much harder than learning a language that is related (English to French).

So, you don't have to be a native speaker of Chinese. If you know a closely related language, you would pick up Chinese (spoken, at least) fairly easily, with whatever ease an Englishman has picking up French. Chinese isn't "made" only for native speakers. That's just a wrong statement--all babies are born not knowing anything, after all.

And that's why I hate this article whenever I see it pop up on reddit.com or HN. Most of the problems this guy has are because he was born speaking an Indo-European language. Of course he'll think anything from the Sinitic family is difficult.

And I am also a Chinese/English speaker. I can't read or write at all, but my verbal fluency is quite good, and it's damn good considering I can only talk to my parents and I hardly ever hear Shanghainese outside my home. Perhaps your issues are due to not being surrounded by enough Chinese people, and not because Chinese is magically harder.

Language family actually doesn't have that much to do with it because the differences within families are so coarse. One of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn is Bahasa Indonesia, and it definitely is not an Indo-European language. Most Indic languages, like Hindi, are much harder despite being Indo-European.

that's very interesting, I mostly find seo garbage trough google, any links to more on this?

http://indonesianlanguage.net/learn-bahasa-indonesia

Additionally, 8 (and somewhat 9) are the only ones that apply to speaking/listening to Chinese. The rest are fully restricted to writing and reading.

I only spent 6 weeks studying Chinese so I'm sure I have some misconceptions, but speaking Chinese (and to a lesser extent hearing it) were actually pretty easy to pickup. Most of my classmates just threw up their hands and quit on intonation, but it's not THAT hard especially if you're just speaking slowly. This might have been a consequence of short study of the language, but grammatically I thought it was vastly simpler than Western languages particularly in respect to verb conjugation.

7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names.

My sister uses bo-po-mo-fo a great deal - but then she's in Taiwan, not mainland China.

Yes, English is also a pain. "The bandage was wound around the wound". From the famous article "Dumb English" (copy here: http://www.beautifulperth.com/dumbenglish.html)