What is the most difficult language for an American to learn?”
That’s probably Chinese. The reason why I think Chinese is the most difficult to learn, is because it the Chinese language consists of many different characters (symbols), which differs highly in structure from ‘western’ languages. Even if you learn well over 1000 characters, you will still be troubled to perform even the most basic conversations. Further, the exact intonation of each character is highly important, shifting the meaning from ‘love’ to ‘dog’ with only a minor change in intonation. Also, many of the Chinese ‘vocabs’ highly differ from western ones. So, we are not always capable of reproducing the correct sounds. Another complicating factor is that China is very big, and has many, many different dialects, and in fact only 70% of all Chinese themselves can speak Mandarin, the official Chinese language.
