Is Learning Chinese Hard Or Not?

Interesting things happening in the Chinese Learning Blogosphere. East Asia Student already reported about it yesterday but I am going to share my opinion as well.

It all started when John from WooChinese wrote that Learning Chinese Isn’t Hard. Then two days after another John from Sinoplice answered by reasoning Why Learning Chinese Is Hard.

I think that there is no universal truth is Chinese difficult to learn or not. It depends on who is learning it! I don’t find Chinese being the most difficult language, because I tried learning Latin and that was a real pain in the butt. I hate grammar so that is one reason why Chinese is better choice for me than Latin or German (that I also have studied).

But there are other reasons too why I don’t find Chinese language so difficult. Firstly, I think Chinese is the most interesting language I know. It would have been cool to know Latin but I didn’t really have a good reason to learn it. Secondly, I need Chinese everyday so I have great motivation to learn it. I didn’t want to become an Ancient history researcher so I didn’t have any use for Latin. I also forgot Swedish (studied 6 years) and German (studied 5 years) completely because I never used them.

Learning Chinese isn’t easy, but it’s not the hardest thing that I’ve tried to learn. It will take a lot of time and energy to become fluent, but I know I can do it. But I could have all the time in the world and still wouldn’t understand space physics.