How hard is Chinese?

Some things about Chinese are hard, some are easy.

Hard things:

Chinese shares very little vocabulary with European languages, so speakers of these languages have to work harder than if they were learning another European language. And even though Chinese shares vocabulary with several Asian languages (especially Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese), this shared vocabulary is often difficult to recognize.
The writing system is definitely hard to learn, though there is nothing conceptually difficult about it; there is just a lot to memorize.
Chinese is a tone language--that is, different pitch patterns do not just add emotional color, as in English; they actually distinguish one word from another. How much of a problem this is depends a lot on the individual student: students with a good ear do not necessarily find this a difficulty.

Easy things:

Unlike many European languages, Chinese has no irregular verbs or noun plurals to learn, because words have only a single form, with no suffixes for tense, number, case, etc. (There are some particles which work somewhat like tense endings, but they always take the same form, no matter what they are added to.)
Chinese speakers are usually tolerant of a foreigner's mistakes--perhaps because so many Chinese themselves speak standard Mandarin Chinese as a second language.

And here are some actual numbers...

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, divides the languages they teach into four groups, from easiest to most difficult, as measured by the number of hours of instruction required to bring students to a certain level of proficiency. Here are their figures (from 1973; I doubt if they have changed much ):

	Languages included (Languages regularly offered at the University of Michigan are in capital letters; this is NOT a complete list)	Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency	Speaking proficiency level expected of a student with superior language aptitude, after 720 hours of instruction
GROUP I	Afrikaans, Danish, DUTCH, FRENCH, Haitian Creole, ITALIAN, Norwegian, PORTUGUESE, Romanian, SPANISH, Swahili, SWEDISH	480	3
GROUP II	Bulgarian, Dari, FARSI (PERSIAN), GERMAN, (Modern) Greek, HINDI-URDU, INDONESIAN, Malay	720	2+ / 3
GROUP III	Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, CZECH, Finnish, (MODERN) HEBREW, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, PILIPINO (TAGALOG), POLISH, RUSSIAN, SERBO-CROATIAN, Sinhala, THAI, TAMIL, TURKISH, VIETNAMESE	720	2 / 2+
GROUP IV	ARABIC, CHINESE, JAPANESE, KOREAN	1320	1+

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This page was updated on August 25, 2006.