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

[Dragon27]

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

Yes, but what I was driving at is that it wasn't named that way because it is an implement for wetting, but because it was made by soaking lime tree bark. Modern мочалка isn't made this way, but it still resembles a bundle of fibers a bit. A big, soft, fluffy beard is sometimes called 'борода-мочалка'.
Nowadays мочалка is a rather specific washing tool. It is used more for scrubbing dirt than 'wetting' something.

[Glossy]

Yes, but what I was driving at is that it wasn't named that way because it is an implement for wetting, but because it was made by soaking lime tree bark.

OK, “a thing that’s been wetted” instead of “a thing that wets”. That sounds plausible.

[sherbert]

In answer to the question, if you learn Russian you will have a lot more words to memorize than if you learn Chinese. That is the key difference.

Because in Russian every noun has an adjective form, which is a separate word. So in Russian, a simple word like "apple" has multiple adjective forms. You can't just say "apple pie" or "apple orchard" like in English or Chinese. In Russian you have to know what adjective goes with what noun and they are not always the same.

Therefore a Russian sentence like "She baked an apple pie from the apples in the apple orchard", because of case and gender and all the variants of nouns and adjectives, is rendered a sentence of Hungarianesque complexity.

So even if you master all the nouns right down to the plural genitive you still may get tripped up on where the stress falls. Every Russian noun has dozens of subsets that you must assimilate somehow.

On the other hand Chinese grammar is nowhere as maddening as Russian grammar and the difficulty of tones is exaggerated because even natives don't pronounce them uniformly. The 3rd tone, for example, which is supposed to be a falling and rising tone, is often pronounced just as a rising tone.

In theory, if you don't learn the Hanzi, it won't take as much time to learn Mandarin as Russian. But both of these languages deserve their reputation as difficult. I am a C level speaker of Russian and a B2 level speaker of Mandarin.

And don't ever let anyone say that Mandarin is not a beautiful language. The mainland putonghua is just as beautiful as Russian. Like a Polynesian language with a melancholy Altaic or Siberian overlay.

[Glossy]

And don't ever let anyone say that Mandarin is not a beautiful language. The mainland putonghua is just as beautiful as Russian. Like a Polynesian language with a melancholy Altaic or Siberian overlay.

I’m learning Mandarin and have some Cantonese-speaking coworkers. To me Mandarin sounds better. I wonder if it’s because I’m much more familiar with it. If my distance from them was equal, would I still prefer Mandarin aesthetically?

[Glossy]

When listening to ChinesePod lessons I rarely ask myself “what tone was this?” Much more often I think “was that a zh or a j, a c or a z, a q or a ch, a fan or a fang?” I distingush x from sh much better than the above pairs.

I never told myself to not concentrate on tones consciously. I think I’m just doing what works best.

[David1917]

In answer to the question, if you learn Russian you will have a lot more words to memorize than if you learn Chinese. That is the key difference.

Because in Russian every noun has an adjective form, which is a separate word. So in Russian, a simple word like "apple" has multiple adjective forms. You can't just say "apple pie" or "apple orchard" like in English or Chinese. In Russian you have to know what adjective goes with what noun and they are not always the same.

Therefore a Russian sentence like "She baked an apple pie from the apples in the apple orchard", because of case and gender and all the variants of nouns and adjectives, is rendered a sentence of Hungarianesque complexity.

So even if you master all the nouns right down to the plural genitive you still may get tripped up on where the stress falls. Every Russian noun has dozens of subsets that you must assimilate somehow.

This is presented as if the case markers and adjective formations are all completely random. You don't have to master "dozens" of forms per noun - perhaps just a couple dozen morphology patterns for the language as a whole.

On the other hand Chinese grammar is nowhere as maddening as Russian grammar and the difficulty of tones is exaggerated because even natives don't pronounce them uniformly. The 3rd tone, for example, which is supposed to be a falling and rising tone, is often pronounced just as a rising tone.

This is generally true. However, they must not be ignored, and a beginner with bad tones must never ask a woman for a pen.

In theory, if you don't learn the Hanzi, it won't take as much time to learn Mandarin as Russian. But both of these languages deserve their reputation as difficult. I am a C level speaker of Russian and a B2 level speaker of Mandarin.

I'm still not convinced of this being in any way easier, especially to move beyond a middle school level of comprehension/speaking. In fact I would consider it a hindrance due to the limited number of phonemes and the inability to understand how words/roots are related.

[vonPeterhof]

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.

A bit off topic, but Chinese characters may be just as good at obscuring etymology as they are at revealing it. The non-Han origin of place names like Qiqihar and Hohhot may be obvious, but less so with names like Jilin or Kunming, not to mention certain generic nouns like 胡同 or 茶. It's even worse in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, where it can be hard to tell whether a particular place name is an original Chinese-derived name, a Chinese translation of an older name or a Sinicized transcription of a native name. And then there's places like Kaohsiung, whose name is apparently a Chinese translation of a Japanese approximation of an older Taiwanese aboriginal name

[aquarius]

Hi folks,

thank you for your interesting comments.

I've translated the sentence

She baked a plum pie from the plums in the plum orchard.

into Polish:

Upiekła ciasto śliwkowe ze śliwek ze śliwkowego sadu.

In fact, there is some grammar stuff to be considered, as sherbert pointed out:

Upiekła --> She baked, irregular conjugation.
śliwkowe --> adjective derived from śliwka (plum), neuter accusative singuar (regular adjective declension).
śliwek --> genetive plural of śliwka, a bit irregular, because an e is put between w and k. This is often done in feminine nouns in genetive plural when there are 2 final consonants, but not always.
śliwkowego --> neuter genetive singuar (regular adjective declension).
sadu --> genetive singular of sad (orchard), you must memorize for all inanimate masculine nouns whether genetive singular is on -u or on -a.

[lichtrausch]

One approximation of this can be found from comparing the English proficiency of international students who are native speakers of Russian vs Chinese. In my experience, the Russian speakers generally have considerably higher English proficiency, which suggests Russian is easier than Chinese for an English (or Germanic) speaker. This also lines up with my own experience studying Chinese and Russian.

[reineke]

How do Mandarin natives fare with Russian vs English?

English proficiency:

Brazil scores worse than China or Russia.

13 Poland
30 Hong Kong
40Uruguay
41Vietnam
42Russia
43Ukraine
44Macau, China
46Chile
47China
48Taiwan
49Japan
53 Brazil

https://www.ef.com/ca/epi/

I'm guessing that the relationship between the three languages is some wicked acute triangle the longest side representing Russian/Polish-Chinese followed by English-Chinese and finally by English-Russian/Polish. And that's if we ignore writing. If we were to replace Russian or Polish by Bulgarian the initial learning load would shrink on respective sides.

Based on my cursory research, it would appear that students of Chinese are busy with phonology, vocabulary, and basic expressions in the begginer stage. Grammar study as we know it occurs in the intermediate stage while advanced students need to master collocations and idiomatic expressions. I would assume that these language chunks are numerous and not easily translatable into English. By contrast cases are frontloaded and the declension tables represent a visible learning obstacle Vietnamese is in the same group as Russian but according to FSI it requires some additional time to learn. Vietnamese is a tonal, alphabet-based language with no verb conjugation, gender or case system.