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[chaz47]

what's the most difficult part of learning Chinese?

thanks...

[Girl Scout]

I would say speaking. My reading is fine, my writing is acceptable, I can even understand people when they speak to me. However, I have great dificulty making myself understood when I say something.

Speaking is frustrating. I am never sure what I'm doing wrong. I often feel that they are not trying to understand me.

Sorry, started to vent there.

[andyscott84]

I've never managed to pick up Reading/Writing so far, so I don't know how easy that is. But, speaking and listening isn't so bad. At the beginning obviously it all sounds like gibberish, but after a while you start picking up one or two words here and there. It all depends on how much you practice. Learn a couple of new words everyday and then use them as much as possible. Eventually you can't forget them. I like to go out everyday and speak some Chinese with my close friends. That has helped a lot. Now we can have pretty good conversation and I'm now able to use my own sense of humour in Chinese. It's a great feeling.

[pierre]

When I was struggling with Japanese many years ago, I discovered ( I think someone pointed it out to me) that the problem with being understood was that people in the street were expecting you to be speaking English at them. So the blank stare was often caused by them trying to make sense of what you were saying, based on their knowledge of English. They just never expected a foreigner would be talking their language.

Also my pronunciation was crap

[tw]

From a Chinese person's perspective, I've noticed that many people learning Chinese have difficulties with the 4 tones and with some sounds, e.g. the Chinese "sh" sound.

[andyscott84]

That's so true! The amount of times when I've been communicating with a taxi driver or shop assistant who reply to me in Chinese 'I'm sorry I can't speak English.' At first you try to lay the fault with their hearing, but the amount of time this would happen meant that I had to give myself a real evaluation. Hasn't happened so much since then.

[kev7161]

Don't get me started! Yes, granted, the tones can make it difficult to make yourself understood . . . but give me a break! Usually (USUALLY), when someone comes up to me with broken English, I can make out what they are trying to communicate. However, it drives me crazy that many Chinese citizens can't seem to piece together that I'm a foreigner and they can't get the "idea" of what I'm trying to say.

For example: The other day I'm in the local grocer asking if they have rice (mi fan - not sure of the pinyin spelling, sorry). Well, I find out later that there is a - VERY SLIGHT - difference from cooked rice and uncooked rice. Yes, some of you Chinese scholars out there are probably laughing at my ignorance but, up until now, I didn't know. However, when I asked the salesgirl for help, she just looked at me as if I'm from the moon. She DID understand that I was asking for rice (cooked, obviously) because she said "meiyou" (my least favorite words in the Chinese vocabulary). Now, if I was working in a grocery store and someone asked me if we had cooked rice, I'd probably say "no, but we have uncooked over here". Finally, I did find it on my own, picked up a bag and brought it to that salesgirl. She says "mie fan" (or whatever). Gee, sorry for my stupid foreign tongue.

Also, why is it I can get into a taxi cab one day and say the name of my school and the driver takes me right there while, the next day, using the exact same pronunciation, the driver has NO IDEA what I'm talking about! Maddening.

Also, if someone came to me with less-than-average English and tried to, haltingly, talk to me - - maybe asking directions - - I wouldn't start jabbering a mile a minute, assuming that, why, this guy has perfect English, so I know he will catch every word I say if I respond at a rapid clip.

It's just that everywhere I go, there's Suzhoese, Shanghaiese, Bejingese, Guangzhouese, Hangzhouese . . . give me a break. When I moved from Hangzhou to Suzhou, a Hangzhou friend helped me out. We were eating dinner at a local restaurant that night and he told me he couldn't understand what they were saying at the next table as they were speaking "Suzhouese". It's like if I travelled from Kansas to Texas and couldn't make out a word of their "Texasese". Yes, yes . . . England has some English words that are a bit puzzling to my American brain, as does Australia and maybe even Canada (as well as the Bronx, NY) - - but this TOTALLY different language in every city you go to seems a bit much.

I just give up on trying to learn this language and rely on the kindness of English-speaking strangers whilst I pick up a stray Mandarin word here and there.

[vikdk]

Learning Chinese gives a great insight on how you�re your students pick up (or should pick up) English.

Andyscott wrote -

[bdawg]

heh heh heh...Kev....I have the same problem too...most notably with Taxi drivers.

It's strange, I can have these strange little conversations with cab drivers about families, jobs etc...but when I'm at a tea bar I cannot seem to order green tea (lu:4 cha2). That goes to show the sheer difficulty of the language.

I don't find reading or speaking terribly difficult (they still are, but relative). Writing is hard. My characters look nice, but I just cannot remember the stroke orders. I guess you could say I can read, but not write. For me, its a time-efficiency thing. If I'm able to write on the computer it is ok, to learn to write by hadn fluently takes ALOT of time. Time I'm just not prepared to invest.

Listening is tough for me. But like a previous poster said, it gets easier. Instead of one big word, you start to make out individual words. I'm still not a sponge level though, so I'm still translating in my head what is going on.

Tones are tough, but just slow down. Talk to kids too. Their pronunciation is amazing...you can pick out every tone. I talk to some old guys...man...I have no idea what they are saying. Even common simple things. Their pronunciation and intonation is so rough.

[Super Mario]

Kev, going into a grocery and asking for mi fan is akin to asking for french fries in a western vegetable produce store. Da mi would normally work for uncooked rice. Pointing and saying zhi ge works even better.
I got "ting bu dong"-ed nearly to death in China, but hell, its their language. Just hang in there buddy.
BTW, I was amazed at how often people understood without even blinking, Shanghainese speaking taxi drivers included.

[Gregor]

If you think you are "speaking perfectly" but no one understands you, it's not them being obstinate. It's you not speaking perfectly.
I know how frustrating it is. But this is why Chinese is SO difficult. It becomes at least a surmountable task once you can recognize that the problem is with YOU, not the native listener.
The main problem is one of allophones and phonemes.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can alter the meaning of a word; /d/ in "dog" can become /k/ in "cog." Allophones are sounds that can replace one another without altering the meaning of the word, such as the short "A" sound in "can't." I would say that word differently from a British person. But the difference doesn't alter the meaning.
Well, in Chinese, they have completely different allophones. The way they pronounce their "x" for just one example, was for a long time indistinguishable from how they said the "sh" sound. And those are close distinctions. BUT! the "sh" sound and the "s" sound can be allophones! My Shenyangese nieces often say "s" for "sh" and it always amazes me that they can get away with that. In other regions, they may get laughed at, as I did for that in Shanghai, but they'd be understood perfectly (as I was, in Shanghai).
And the difference between a character dictionary (字典) and a word dictionary (词典) sound even more similar, but they couldn't be more different to Chinese ears.

The you have the tones. There are SO MANY possible interpretations to the same syllables depending on what tones you use. It's really easy to think, "Why can't they figure it out?? It's SO CLOSE," but new Chinese students of English think the same thing when we don't understand.
The truth is, some Chinese people are used to speaking crap Chinese with foreigners, and THOSE people CAN figure out what you mean. But so few foreigners speak Chinese with market stall holders and the like that they can't be expected to learn your own personal Chinese. Even taxi drivers - sure, as far as YOU can tell, they seem to have foreigners in their taxis all the time! Why, there's one there EVERY SINGLE TIME you've been in a taxi!
Well, they have many, many more Chinese clients. They don't have anything more than passing experience with non-native Chinese. In fact, they are FAMOUSLY dense - a Chinese visitor from out of town can confuse a taxi driver, and that's true everywhere, with the possible exceptions of Beijing and Shanghai.

As for the OP - the hardest part is the tones. For newbies, the hardest part is figuring out how to make the sounds. I had to have my niece (non-English speaking) to tell me that to make the "r" sound, you have to touch the back of your tongue to the back of your throat. I never knew that! So forming the sounds WAS hardest, but certain tone combinations are really, really tough for me still. Like "Shang4 hai3 ren2." That combination, plus that funky "r" right there in the worst possible place, is one of the toughest phrases for my mouth and voice to get around.

[Roger]

Someone said (I believe in this forum, some time ago) it takes 3 times as long for a Westerner to master Chinese as it takes a Chiense to "master" (!) English...
I read the exact same claim just a couple of days ago (not paying too much attention to the author of this claim, but it was an Aussie linguist or educationalist).
This is comparing likes to unlikes, or apples to pineapples.

I feel Chinese is EASY to UNDERSTAND, but DIFFICULT to WRITE and READ. Maybe easier to read than to write (a claim I can corroborate from my own experience!).

The difficulty is the result of differences in how we articulate language; tones do not carry meaning (except hints of anger, enthusiasm or other emotions), so learning Chinese which requires us to consciously use tones in order to make semantic distinctions is an art we need to practise for a long time.

Ditto for WRITING. The fact that the romanised version helps even Chinse come to grips with their own Chinese characters shows how important it is to learn pronunciation through phonetically correct writing. But learning to write Chinse characters is a time-consuming, and often frustrating exercise that even Chiense give up on long before they are reasonably literate.

A language is the conveyor belt of thoughts of native speakers; thus it acts as a MIRROR. The way Chinese transform thoughts into oral utterances differs in many structural ways; English thought is different in ways that are taken care of by grammar.
Chinese learners' main hurdle in learning English is grammar, for us it is the Chinese calligraphy and tones.

[Midlothian Mapleheart]

Edited to remove offensive content.

Middy

[vikdk]

not just in China - once in southern Denmark (where they speak a dialect of Danish) - i got on a bus which had a big sighn on the front saying Faverup - the place of destination and my destination. The local dialect pronounces that v as d - in dialect destination is pronounced Faderup.
Asking for a ticket to Faverup had no effect, so I eventualy had to drag that driver out of his seat - point to the bloody Faverup sighn before he said - ahhhhhhhhhhh faderup heres your ticket!
Since this was the only place the bus was going i was totaly amazed - this situation has seemingly give me a slight tollerance over similar problems here

[jg]

Speaking well consistently is a tough one for me - not that the other parts of language acquisition are so remarkably easy. Reading and writing are difficult but not crazy difficult, the problem is just one of the time it takes to memorize charactersand stroke order, remember their tone, and build a good vocabulary of character combinations.

Listening is actually close to easy after awhile, as long as the speaker doesn't slur their words unreasonably.

I wonder sometimes how constructive learning through the use of pinyin is after the beginning stage, perhaps it might be more challenging but better for the learning process to just omit pinyin after awhile?