It’s common to hear people arguing over which language is “the hardest” to learn. The answer is: all of them — and none of them. People are often scared to learn a language that is vastly different from their own, and this makes certain languages seem more difficult than others.
You may fear learning Chinese simply because it has few sounds similar to our own, and because it has such a different writing system to the English alphabet. But did you know that, in Chinese, you don’t have to worry about plurals or verb conjugation?
In other words, a verb — for instance, chī (to eat) — stays in the same form no matter whether you’re saying wǒ chī (I eat), tā chī (he/she eats), tāmen chī le (they ate), wǒmen chī guò (we have eaten), etc.
And to make a noun plural, you don’t have to change its form at all (unlike English — car/cars, goose/geese). For example, take a look at the following words in Chinese:
qìchē (car)
yī/yí (one)
wǔ (five)
liàng (measure word for automobiles)
Now look at these words used in sentences:
yí liàng qìchē (one car)
wǔ liàng qìchē (five cars)
The word qìchē (car) didn’t change its form, even when talking about more than one car.
Furthermore, Chinese also doesn’t use gender or articles. That means no worrying about saying the equivalent of le grand chat but la grande baguette, like in French, or using “the” or “a/an” at all.
Of course, there are other issues that make Chinese complicated for English speakers to learn — measure words like liàng, for example, which change depending on the noun being counted — but sometimes half the “difficulty” is looking past these differences and seeing the simpler side to learning a “hard” language.
