Chinese is often seen as one of the most difficult languages to learn. While it does take a longer-than-average time (compared to other languages) to learn, it is not as difficult as many people think it is.
According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) scale, it will take English speakers 88 weeks (2,200 hours of active learning) to reach native/bilingual Chinese proficiency.
Widely regarded as one of the world's toughest languages to learn, Mandarin is considered by many as impossible. Anyone who's learnt this notoriously difficult language is bound to be met with gasps of surprise and admiration when speaking of their accomplishment.
Chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn
Furthermore, unlike other East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, the language is free from complicated honorific grammar.
Japanese is slightly easier to learn. But, Chinese is much more widely spoken. Both languages have their pros and cons.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Relatively, Korean would be an easier language to learn. Thanks to its phonetic alphabet and more simplistic grammar rules, Korean is not the most challenging Asian language to learn. Chinese on the other hand is much more widely spoken. This means that finding study materials and practice partners would be easier.
The language is actually easier to acquire than romance tongues like Spanish or French because Mandarin Chinese shares a similar grammatical system with fewer commonly-used words. There is no conjugation in whatever form. The widely-held view that tones are inscrutable to Westerner ears is a myth.
We drew parallels between Chinese and German, French, Spanish, Italian and even English and we discovered that not only is the pronunciation of Chinese much simpler than French, but its grammar is also more straightforward and easy to learn than German, Spanish, Italian and English.
With the right work and attitude, you can make massive progress in your Chinese learning in three months. And if having a conversation in Mandarin Chinese is your primary goal, it can be achievable with just three months of study, even if you're starting from zero.
If you're interested in learning Japanese with anime, J-pop, or because you love Japanese food and culture, then the choice is easy. On the other hand, for those interested in Chinese history and how it shaped many other Asian cultures, learning Chinese would be a great way to gain more insight.
If there's one language in the world that's worth learning, it's Mandarin Chinese. It's the language with the most native speakers in the world, at more than nine hundred million – and, as the country's economy grows, it's sure to be spoken more widely.
What age is best for you (or your kids) to start learning Chinese? A general consensus is that in order to develop a native accent easily, children should start learning Chinese before the age of 12.
If you are middle-aged or north of your thirties, you may think that it is too late in your life to learn a new language. But the truth is, it is not too late, even for a language as difficult as Mandarin. It is never too late until you are dead.
For those curious on an entirely unscientific attempt at quantifying the difference in difficulty between the two, my current feeling is that learning Chinese to spoken fluency is probably 2-3x as much work as it is for Spanish. If you include reading and writing, then 3-4x isn't an exaggeration.
They are described as “hard languages”. Category V – It usually takes 88 weeks or 2200 hours to reach S-3/R-3 proficiency in these languages. This small group of “super-hard languages” includes Chinese (Mandarin), Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.
Sumerian can be considered the first language in the world, according to Mondly. The oldest proof of written Sumerian was found on the Kish tablet in today's Iraq, dating back to approximately 3500 BC.
Mandarin
As mentioned before, Mandarin is unanimously considered the most difficult language to master in the world! Spoken by over a billion people in the world, the language can be extremely difficult for people whose native languages use the Latin writing system.
The Chinese language (at the risk of stating the obvious) is a very complex language, but a simple way to identify Chinese characters is that they are square and not curvy. Japanese characters look rounder and more curvy. Visually, both Japanese and Korean are also more open and spacious than Chinese, which is denser.
The Japanese language is considered one of the most difficult to learn by many English speakers. With three separate writing systems, an opposite sentence structure to English, and a complicated hierarchy of politeness, it's decidedly complex.