"How much harder is Chinese? Again, I'll use French as my canonical "easy language". This is a very rough and intuitive estimate, but I would say that it takes about three times as long to reach a level of comfortable fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Chinese as it takes to reach a comparable level in French. An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese."
-David Moser, in his article "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard"
The gist of what I gleaned from this incredibly long article: As a native English speaker, you have to be pretty determined to study Chinese, for sure. But you also have to be pretty crazy as well.
you have a little advantage cuz u already speak canto!
ReplyDeleteYou just happened to choose the winners eh? Japanese AND Chinese. I personally think Japanese is a little bit easier. but just a little bit.
ReplyDeleteOne comment about these blogs... their anti-bot tests are so annoying. I fail at least once everytime.
P: True, mainly in terms of listening. In terms of reading and writing, no help at all :P
ReplyDeleteAlex: I think you're braver for attempting Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. IMO, Chinese pronunciation is harder, but Japanese grammar is crazy! For beginning native English speakers though, I think Japanese is easier to learn, simply that you can be understood by locals in a much shorter time.