English must be pretty damn hard, too. When I studied conversational Mandarin a few years ago, it gave me a real sympathy for native Chinese speakers learning English. Basically, in Mandarin, there are no verb tenses or cases or persons. I go, you go, he go, they go, or I is, you is, he is, they is. You don't know when it happened. Today, yesterday, tomorrow. You get the timing from the context. How hard it must be to understand that it's a different word if I went yesterday, we are going tomorrow, he might have gone, if we could have gone....I can't do more than basic conversation in Mandarin, but studying it really helped me to understand the challenges some of my friends and coworkers have faced.