The Chinese language is evil and wants us to suffer

It turns out that the Chinese language is every bit as difficult to learn as people claim. It's not even the tones that are bothering me the most (I can hear the tones now, and reproduce them) nor is it the weird phonemes that most westerners can't pronounce (which I've figured out how to pronounce). No, the thing that trips me up is that everything sounds totally different from every other language I've heard. Take Spanish, for example: words like "comida" (food) and "avión" (airplane) sound like they're just a couple more oddly-pronounced English words to add to my vocabulary. A lot of Spanish words even have the common decency to be cognates of semi-obscure English words. When I hear "comida" I think "comestibles", and I'm home free! Even languages which aren't related to English, like Japanese, are dramatically easier to remember words for. More examples: "shojo" (girl) and "kaze" (wind, as in "kamikaze") certainly don't sound similar to English, but they're enough alike that you can get past the differences fairly easily and remember the words. Plus, Japanese has a fairly simple, easy romanization.

Chinese is different. There's a lot more syllable separation in Chinese, and the words just sound weird. I'd be teasing you if I didn't give examples. A phrase that means "eat something" sounds vaguely like "chr dong shi", all pronounced with a level tone. But my keyboard can't really get across the true pronunciation. For one thing, "chr" is a sound that most people in America have never, ever made. Imagine a typical growly "rrr" sound from deep in your throat, then move it way forward to the front of your mouth and cross it with an "oo" sound, with just a bit of "lll" thrown in for good measure. And stick a "ch" in front of it, and try to get a smooth transition from the "ch" to the weird buzzing that I just described. It's harder than it sounds, and it sounds pretty hard.

And then there's the subtle difference between "tsu" and "tzu", and the way the language makes you sound like you're speaking in a voice that's not your own. And the characters! The writing system was invented hundreds of years ago by people who figured that the logical thing to do was to make pictures to denote words or concepts. So they made pictograms. But they weren't content with that, since it has some obvious problems: how can you tell apart the pictures for dogs and wolves, for example? They make characters for numbers (like 一, 二, 三, 上, 下,etc.), and characters for sounds based off other words that sound similar (yes, ancient Chinese puns), and combined them in crazy ways, and then gradually changed them over time so that they look nothing like the original pictures. Check out how the character for "bird" changed from its birdlike origins to something that looks nothing like a bird:



And just look how crazy some of these Chinese characters are:

鄭眾

Fancy! And ubiquitous, too: Chinese civilization has been around for a long long time, and they've been using some kind of Chinese characters for almost as long.

But the ubiquity of Chinese characters has one problem, one hugely fatal problem: the Chinese writing system sucks. It's a lot more complicated than it needs to be, and the thousands of characters that everybody has to laboriously memorize offer precious little hint to their pronunciation. Sure, you might be able to read partial meaning of a symbol that you've forgotten, by recognizing some of its components. But you might run across a word that by rights you ought to know, like "knee", and have no idea what the character means. In America, well-educated people do not forget how to read and write "tin can". In China, it happens routinely.

It doesn't have to be this way! It's pretty easy to come up with a sensible alphabet for writing Chinese words. In Taiwan, children first learn something called the "Chinese Phonetic Alphabet", which consists of 37 simple symbols. Each symbol represents a single vowel or consonant, and together they denote every phoneme in Chinese. By composing two or three characters from this alphabet with a little slanted line or checkmark denoting tone, we can form syllables. It's shorter and faster to write than the full Chinese character set, and vastly easier to learn. Mainland China has something similar called Pinyin, which uses the Roman alphabet in some rather counterintuitive ways to get a mostly one-to-one mapping onto the Chinese language.

A lot of the younger generation has grown so accustomed to typing on a computer or mobile phone that they've almost forgotten how to write Chinese characters. See, on a computer keyboard there just isn't room for the thousands of symbols that everybody has to memorize. So on a keyboard you just type the word phonetically and choose from a list of symbols that are pronounced that way. This is much easier and more sensible than writing the characters by hand, and it's backwards compatible, so it's been widely adopted by "kids these days".

Now, everybody who's not hugely tradition-bound can see that the Chinese writing system is a problem. Mainland China has switched over to a somewhat less awful system called "Simplified Chinese", which has simpler characters, but still has the same old problems that we inherited from China's ancient history. They've also standardized on the Pinyin romanization system. That's more progress than Taiwan has managed to make; over here, people are still using the traditional Chinese characters, and there are a bunch of nonstandard romanization systems and a phonetic alphabet that no other country uses (and which children are supposed to stop using once they've learned how to obfuscate their writing like everybody else).

Whoever said that Chinese is a difficult language is absolutely right and deserves a biscuit.

Note: after I wrote this, I found an article explaining in detail and with fantastic wit why Chinese is so damn hard. That's its title. It does a better job that I ever could.