How hard is Chinese?
Well, it’s not a language that is known for being ‘easy’. But if you think it will be too hard to learn, think about the following: (a) Chinese does not have tense; nor does it have gender or other morphological inflections, making its grammar ‘straightforward’; (b) Chinese has the same basic word order like English–subject, verb, object; (c) there are only a couple of Chinese vowels and consonants that are completely new to an English speaker (roughly speaking); (d) we use the romanization system (pinyin) at first to learn speaking and listening; (e) many Chinese characters are pictographs or phonograms (characters with parts indicating sound and meaning), and characters share a limited number of radicals, so learning becomes increasingly easier and can get fun.
