Our culture is at times such an insular echo-chamber that there are some rumors that make their round-abouts without even the least amount of criticism. Falsities that become so widely believed become conventional wisdom and then self-validating if not questioned.
It
annoys me a bit when in conversation the topic comes up that I know a
good bit of Chinese. It's annoying because knowing Chinese instantly
evokes some kind of undeserved mystique and veneration. To many
students, Chinese is the untouchable language, an impenetrable fortress
whose threshold is never assailed save by the most valiant.
But as someone who has a good use of a handful of languages and good grammatical and phonological knowledge of several more, I can say with all confidence that Chinese is the easiest language I have ever taken time out to study. Not just that, but it would be hard for me to imagine a language much more simple to learn than Chinese.
People are afraid of Chinese characters, they are afraid of Chinese grammar and they are afraid of the fact that Chinese people sound like whirring and beeping heavy machinery when they speak their language. But the idea that the Chinese language is a difficult one is an illusion and a myth that really needs to be put to rest.
I'm sure you've read factoids
about how it takes considerably longer to learn French or Spanish than
Chinese; it is superficially true, but at a deeper level it doesn't mean
much of anything. French and Spanish aren't easier languages, they're
just closer in terms of vocabulary to English. Even if you've never so
much as even heard a word of a Romance language, you already know about
60-70% of the vocabulary which is common to all languages in Europe.
That is basically everything that ends with -tion, -ity, -ar, -ous, -al,
-ate, -ize, etc.
But when it actually comes to the grammatical core of the language itself, Chinese wins the easy-content hands down. You may hear students of Spanish and Italian whining about conjugation or students of German and Latin complaining about declension, but you'll never hear that of a Chinese student because Chinese lacks all of those fundamentally confusing examples of markedness in language.
One of the standard trends of language evolution is that civilized areas, areas with large influxes of immigrants and areas with extensive trade see gradual simplifications in their language grammatically. This is why widely-spoken languages like Indonesian are significantly less complex than its quasi-aboriginal and regional cousins; it's also why English lost its case system with the Viking and Norman invasions. Chinese, the evolving language of the oldest continuous civilization in the world, has certainly, I would think, benefited in terms of simplicity from years of invasions, immigration, interconnection and exchange.
You'll never hear a Chinese student complain about a lot of things that are ubiquitous in other languages. They never have to complain about grammatical gender or irregular verbs or irregular noun endings or subjunctive mood or that god-forsaken "do" support. Really sometimes I have the feeling that Chinese isn't so much of a language as it is a series of sentence patterns that can really be shuffled in any which way. Chinese syntax is intuitive, variable and the language is incredibly expressive.
You will hear some complaining from Chinese students, but only really because they know that others expect it to be hard. If we want Chinese students to understand exactly how easy they have it, we could easily establish one semester of grammatically intensive Sanskrit as a requirement for Chinese 101. I don't think any student could conceivably winge about the harmless bèi construction having conjugated Sanskrit verbs in the desiderative medio-passive periphrastic future tense.
Now
of course I've been speaking mostly about grammar, which although is
probably the key element of the language, doesn't bring all the
potential difficultly.
Chinese is a strange sounding language
with an interesting inventory of sounds. Although Chinese culture is
long-lived and its reach expansive, we've only ever borrowed from their
language several dozen words in common usage. I would attribute this to
the fact that Chinese phonology is so different from all other languages
that it's simply difficult to loyally transcribe sounds from one
language to another. Chinese has always had the habit of coining calques
or neologisms to describe foreign objects in place of borrowing
difficult to pronounce words. We do the same with theirs.
But although the sounds of Chinese are rare and idiosyncratic, they are regular, easy to learn and again easier than Western languages'. Chinese lacks the complex consonant clusters that English deals with; English speakers may take it for granted, but words with multiple consonants in every syllable are incredibly difficult to pronounce for non-natives (think of worlds, strengths, and offsprings). While the absolutely most complex Chinese words are made up of one consonant + one vowel + (sometimes) another consonant.
As
for the sounds of Chinese themselves, about three minutes of phonetic
instruction could teach any student the proper pronunciation of of the
most strange phonemes. The Chinese <sh> is like the English
<sh> with the tongue further back; <zh> is just the
affricate form of <sh>, that is with a <t> sound at the
beginning similar to <ch> or <j> in English. <ch> in
Chinese is simply <zh> with extra breath and aspiration and then
the strange sounding <r> in Chinese is really just <sh>
pronounced while moving the vocal cords.
Now one of the things
I continue to dislike about Spanish is its lack of economy. Whenever I
say a sentence in Spanish, I have to use about twice as many syllables
as in English. Chinese isn't like this at all. Words rarely are more
than two syllables ever, and if they are they're usually just compound
words. You can get a lot of work done with one word and a particle and
for a language that's not confusingly marked, that's impressive.
Oh and one additional thing about tones: Every
English speaker can pronounce all tones in Mandarin without ANY
difficulty, students only refuse to do it because people always"feel
stupid" for violating their native phonology. To rectify this
they should be shamed and laughed at for not pronouncing tones! It's
silly for English speakers to say they can't because they do inflect and
shift tone in their voice 24-7; the only "weirdness" is learning to
associate tones with meanings.
Yes, properly speaking Chinese
or any language may make you "feel stupid" at first, but you'll sound
infinitely stupider trying to pronounce Chinese tonelessly. There was
once a girl in a Chinese class of mine who hated writing Pinyin because
she never remembered the appropriate tones because she never pronounced
them. She was absolutely wasting her time in class. Saying you
purposefully don't remember tones is the same as saying, "Oh I'm going
to learn English but never remember the first letter of every word."
Tones are fundamental in distinguishing words in Chinese; they are
mandatory, but they are easy.
Of course I've saved the worst for last. For all my rhetorical skill, there's absolutely no way I could say that the Chinese habit of writing in non-phonetic semi-semantic characters makes learning Chinese easier. What I can say is that (1) the difficultly is overblown, (2) poor knowledge of characters won't inhibit you too much and (3) there is a sort of magical fun in them.
As to the first point, learning
characters is burdensome, but the burden lessens exponentially over
time. In Chinese 101, a student is usually overwhelmed seeing basic and
common characters like 我 which seem to be incredibly complex. As times
goes on however, the learner realizes that (1) basically all characters
are made of memorable components that explain either the meaning or the
sound of the word and (2) the human brain is a lot more miraculous than
people give it credit for. The more characters you learn, the more
similarities you can interlace and understand; your brain exhibits
economies of scale: the more you know the much more easily you can
commit even more to your memory. Don't buy into the mythological idea
that sometime your brain will run out of hard-drive space; there are
amateur Chinese scholars with knowledge of near 10,000 characters
(historically there may have been 10 times that many) but for whatever
your purposes are, you won't need more than a paltry couple of
thousands.
The second big mitigating factor of the difficulty of characters is the fact that you need to know even less
to actually get along in China. When I was there, my spoken abilities
could always make up for any deficiency in my ability to identify a
character. One of China's dirty secrets is that their literacy rate is
deceptively high; sometimes people who read only a hundred or so
characters are still classified as literate. Like them, you can get
around very well without the ability to fully read a newspaper and the
big cities are plastered with bad English anyway. In this day and age
whether you're there for business or school, anything you write up will
nearly inevitably be done with the aid of an auto-correcting computer
anyway which will lessen your need to know every stroke like the palm of
your hand.
Lastly, although I do hate to sound like a children's motivational book, learning Chinese characters is, for lack of a better word, fun. I can't fully explain how without you experiencing it yourself, but there are admirable patterns that show a lot about classical Chinese culture and life. Every character tells a story and sooner or later you'll be knocking those phono-semantic compounds down as if they were nothing.
FSI Free and Thorough Audio Course in Spoken Chinese
John DeFrancis's Beginning Chinese Try your local university library, but it's worth the price threefold.
NOT Rosetta Stone