The Chinese language has a unique structure and pronunciation system that is vastly different from English. Chinese is made up of tens of thousands of characters, each with its own meaning, and often multiple pronunciations. This makes the language extremely difficult to learn, especially for non-native speakers.
Reading and writing Chinese characters is perhaps the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese. The Chinese written script, called 汉字 (hànzì) in Chinese, is based on the use of "logograms"—single characters that can represent an entire word.
One reason Mandarin is seen as the most challenging language to learn is because its writing system uses characters that might be difficult to grasp for those accustomed to writing with the Latin alphabet, Babbel says.
Chinese and Japanese are two of the most popular languages to learn, Japanese is generally seen as being harder than Chinese due to its writing system and complex grammar structures.
Relatively, Korean would be an easier language to learn. Thanks to its phonetic alphabet and more simplistic grammar rules, Korean is not the most challenging Asian language to learn. Chinese on the other hand is much more widely spoken. This means that finding study materials and practice partners would be easier.
Generally speaking, we might assert that Korean is easier for an English speaker to learn than Mandarin Chinese. But this is very relative. In fact, the US Foreign Service Institute assigns Mandarin Chinese and Korean the same level of difficulty. Both languages are in “Category Four”.
Japanese is another most difficult language for all those who have grown up learning English, Spanish or French but at the same time might be easy for those who are well-versed in East Asian languages.
Learning expert Scott H. Young states that speaking Mandarin is not only harder than speaking Spanish, but it is fundamentally different. Everything from tones, vocabulary, and character is vastly unique compared to the latin languages, and the learning curve would be quite steep.
Given its long history and the isolation of the region in which it is spoken, Wenzhounese is so unusual in its phonology that it has the reputation of being the least comprehensible dialect for an average Mandarin speaker.
floccinaucinihilipilification in Traditional Chinese - Cambridge.
The character biáng requires 62 total strokes to write and contains a 馬 horse, 月 moon,刂 knife and 心 heart plus other radicals. Biáng doesn't exist in Modern Standard Mandarin which only serves to increase the mystery and intrigue surrounding the character.
Regarding the first area, most Chinese are very proud of China's long history as a strong and vibrant culture and as a highly influential political and social entity.
Chinese is the only modern language that doesn't have an alphabet. The writing system is “logosyllabic”, meaning each character represents a syllable of spoken Chinese and can be a word by itself or combined with other characters to create another word.
China is the most populous nation on Earth with around 1.3 billion people. In Chinese mythology, a monster called “Nian” (“year”) comes out to eat people on New Year's Eve. Facebook has been banned in China since 2009. “Chinese” fortune cookies were actually invented in San Francisco in the early 1900s.
Cantonese is by far the more challenging of the two languages, particularly for a beginning Chinese language learner. This is because there are more tones used in Cantonese (Cantonese uses up to nine tones, whereas Mandarin only uses four).
According to Ethnologue, Chinese (and all of its varieties such as Mandarin and Wu) is by far the most spoken language across the world with 1.31 billion speakers. That's approximately 16 percent of the world's population.
Widely regarded as one of the world's toughest languages to learn, Mandarin is considered by many as impossible. Anyone who's learnt this notoriously difficult language is bound to be met with gasps of surprise and admiration when speaking of their accomplishment.
Chinese is one of the easiest languages to learn
It also treats tenses in a very simplistic way. Furthermore, unlike other East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, the language is free from complicated honorific grammar.