Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

What’s Hard About Languages?

I met an interesting Canadian guy the other day who has studied both Chinese and Japanese. I asked him which language he considered more difficult, and he said that it depended. "On what?" I asked. He replied:

"Well, in Chinese it's difficult to get even decent at the language. But once you've reached a certain level of competence, getting very good isn't all that difficult, because the grammar is relatively easy. In Japanese, getting decent is pretty easy, but if you try to get really good, it takes an enormous amount of time and effort mastering complex grammar rules."

I've never studied Japanese, but what he said about Chinese strikes me as plausible. In the beginning, learning Chinese is a nightmare. The characters are inscrutable. The vocabulary has few cognates with English or other European languages. Learning to write well takes a lot of practice and maintenance. And even when you think you say the right words in the right order, using the wrong tones can make it impossible for others to understand you.

Eventually, though, you get the hang of the characters, and the tones, and the grammar. For me, as an intermediate student, the biggest challenges are vocabulary, idioms and other expressions, and dealing with regional accent variations. These have and will continue to take up a lot of my time. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. I know it's only a matter of time before my vocabulary and command of the language improves to an extent that I can express pretty much anything I want.

Romance languages are different. Vocabulary isn't really a problem, since so many words are related to English. Pronunciation (particularly in Italian) is very straight-forward. The grammar, though, can be difficult to master. In this way, perhaps learning Italian or Spanish is similar to learning Japanese.

What about other languages? I'd be interested to hear from those of you who have studied Slavic, Germanic, or other tongues. How does the learning curve compare to Chinese?