Difficulty of Lerning Chinese vs. difficulty of learning a Slavic language

[aquarius]

I'd like to ask all the people, who are (or who were) learning both Chinese and a Slavic language, and whose native language is neither Chinese nor a Slavic language: Which one did you find more diffucult to learn? And which type of difficulty did you prefer dealing with?

I'm learning Polish, and there is a whole lot of grammar to learn. I haven't learned Chinese yet, but I imagine that I would have a lot of trouble with the tones. Personally, I prefer dealing with grammar.

And I'd like to add a question about Chinese: Some people say that using the right tone is essential for beeing understood when speaking Chinese, even for a beginner, and others say that's not true. What's your experience about this?

[tarvos]

I didn't find either much more difficult than the other. I found the Russians more penetrable from a cultural point of view, though, and this has meant that I speak much better Russian than I do Mandarin. Often the difficulty factors don't really have anything to do with the grammar.

As for the tones, you can sometimes be understood without using them correctly, but it depends on how many you get wrong. If 90% of your tones are off, fuggedaboudit. If one tone is off in a sentence of a hundred or so, context will tell the Mandarin speakers everything they need to know. It's no different from being incomprehensible in any other language.

That said, in my experience, people have always understood my Mandarin fairly well. Not that my tones are perfect or anything, but they do the job in most cases, so I suppose I'm qualified to make that statement.

But my Slavic languages are better, although this mostly has to do with the level of exposure received to them. I have been using Russian for years, and you can ask Serpent and several others whether my Russian is OK or not

(In terms of Russian, it's often said that people consider me to be someone who emigrated from the Soviet Union at a very young age, but having retained the ability to speak the language. That's often how I sound to them, or to someone who clearly knows the language but comes from a slightly different background).

[Axon]

I strongly prefer the difficulties of learning Chinese.

To me, learning Slavic languages is a puzzle of learning lots of rules and then knowing how to apply them automatically to everything you want to say. It definitely becomes automatic with enough practice, but it's always something in the back of my mind that I'm second-guessing.

Chinese is more like learning how to make lots of different sounds and then just learning and combining various phrases to get to where you want.

For English speakers, there's a huge amount of shared vocabulary in Slavic languages, even more so if you know some other European languages. You don't start to get vocabulary bonuses in Chinese until you've learned enough words that you can start breaking down new words into their roots.

In Russian, the word for "washcloth" is мочалка. If I hear someone say "Do you have a washcloth?" in Russian, I have no idea what they mean if I don't know that word. In Mandarin, the word is 洗脸布, literally wash-face-cloth. Last night someone asked me "do you have a washcloth" in Chinese, and I understood it without ever having heard that word before - but only because I knew those three components very well.

This is just one example, and honestly I believe that achieving true mastery of any language is likely to take a similar amount of time just because of how complex languages are.

As for pronunciation, there are lots of words that differ only in tone, like glasses and eyes, buy and sell, Chinese and Korean, juice and paper, "to admit" and "grown adult." In the context of a conversation, some people will be better at understanding what you mean with mistakes and some people will simply shut down and have no idea what you're saying. Sentence flow and prosody is also a big part of speaking Chinese (or any language) well, and that can help even if your tones are off.

[SGP]

I'd like to ask all the people, who are (or who were) learning both Chinese and a Slavic language, and whose native language is neither Chinese nor a Slavic language: Which one did you find more diffucult to learn?

None. Chinese is tonal. But tonality also exists in e.g. English and German, for emphasis and so on. Slavic languages have got their "Mazes of Cases". But if anyone told me that German would be (really) difficult because of those four cases, I'd politely disagree.

And which type of difficulty did you prefer dealing with?

Both, as long as I currently have a reason to do so. #OnDemandLearning

[tarvos]

мочалка

This is also pretty logical though. мочить means to soak or to douse. мочалка is something that's small and soaked - a washcloth!

[Jean-Luc]

They are a lot of differences between Slavic languages. Bulgarian is easier than Russian and easy if you have a knowledge of Russian. Polish is a non Cyrillic slavic language (but Cyrillic is a 15 days' learning problem learning Russian...)
The same way Korean with a "syllabic Hangul alphabet" is by far easier than Chinese.

Russian grammar (German is easy compared to) has a lot of difficulties with verbs'aspects and declensions and Chinese is so easy in that field.

In short all languages have difficulties and facilities. Forget about comparing and start instead learning the one that attracts you

[Glossy]

Axon, reading your comment I thought “does мочалка derive from мочить?” The Russian Wiktionary confirmed my guess. Мочить means “to wet”. The -алка part is informative too. It denotes an object or a person of the female gender, in the nominative case, which performs some action. Here the action is obviously wetting. A thing (or a woman) that wets. In real life a мочалка is always a thing though.

I think Chinese words are more transparent on average than European ones though. Most Chinese placenames, for example, are transparent in the way that Oxford or Novgorod (new town) are. Nobody knows anymore what London, Moscow, Paris, etc. meant originally. The Wikipedia usually presents half a dozen theories on questions like that.

[Dragon27]

Axon, reading your comment I thought “does мочалка derive from мочить?” The Russian Wiktionary confirmed my guess. Мочить means “to wet”. The -алка part is informative too. It denotes an object or a person of the female gender, in the nominative case, which performs some action. Here the action is obviously wetting. A thing (or a woman) that wets. In real life a мочалка is always a thing though.

Nevertheless, it seems like мочалка was probably derived from the word мочало (by adding a diminutive suffix), which is a kind of a bundle of thin strips/fibers made out of lime tree bark soaked in water. Another (dialectal) word for мочалка is вехотка, which is related to the Polish word 'wiecheć'.

[Glossy]

Nevertheless, it seems like мочалка was probably derived from the word мочало (

The Russian Wiktionary cites Vasmer:

“Суффиксное производное от глагола мочить, далее от праслав. , от кот. в числе прочего произошли: ст.-слав. мочити (βρέχειν; Супр.), русск. мочить, укр. мочи́ти, белор. мачы́ць, болг. мо́ча «мочусь», сербохорв. мо̀чити, мо̀чи̑м «мочить», словенск. móčiti. чешск. močiti, словацк. mоčit᾽, польск. mосzуć, в.-луж. močić. Связано с моча, мокрый. Использованы данные словаря М. Фасмера. См. Список литературы.”

Мочало and мочалка could independently derive from мочить. Or мочалка could have originated as “little мочало”, which itself likely derives from мочить.

[tarvos]

I already guessed that it did. And I'm not even a native speaker of Russian