How Difficult is it to Learn Chinese?

The standard answer provided by people selling language teaching tools is: "Chinese is easy to learn!".

For some very small percentage of the population - whom I would refer to as "language savants" - this probably is true.

But, for the overwhelming majority of us, it is patently false. The language is diabolically difficult to learn.

The basic sounds are hard to understand and pronounce. The tones are difficult to recognize and to speak properly. The large number of homonyms and the light use of pronouns makes it difficult for a novice to express themselves clearly unless the background context for the discussion is already apparent. The sentence structure is often different than English.

That's just the spoken part of the language. Toss the character writing system on top of this, and you can count on throwing away the next 10 years of your life studying the language.

About the only good news is that you don't need to conjugate verbs (I am, I was, You are, You were). So, if you really, really, really hate conjugating verbs, then maybe learning Chinese won't seem so difficult.

For more detailed information on why Chinese is so difficult to learn, see my more recent post here.

For more information on how long it takes to learn Chinese, see my more recent post here.

10 minutes per day? For how many decades?