How difficult is Mandarin?
To anyone brought up with the Roman alphabet, the prospect of learning Mandarin – with 6,000 written characters and four oral tones – might at first sight seem a mite daunting. Brits are such notoriously poor linguists that many of us struggle with our own language, but clearly we are a nation that revels in a challenge. According to a new study by the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Stirling, the number of Mandarin students at UK universities has almost doubled in the past decade. By contrast easy continental languages are in sharp decline with French undergrads down a third and German students plummeting by more than two-thirds. The reason for the shift is unclear. It could be an Olympic side-effect, a spin-off from all those Zhang Yimou films or perhaps the widely held belief that Chinese speakers are on the verge of inheriting the Earth. But how many of the 392 students now cramming their pictograms will master a language that was – in a gloriously oppo
