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

[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
About tones, yes you need them or you will say another word. The best way to learn Chinese is to avoid pinyin at start and even tons' marks to dive in the Chinese language (but with the right methode) and train your ears.
Tones are vital:https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-mandarin-chinese-tones-688244

[leosmith]

Which one did you find more diffucult to learn? And which type of difficulty did you prefer dealing with?

Hi aquarius. Russian vs Chinese: Chinese was more difficult for me, mostly due to the writing system. Russian grammar was extremely difficult for me though, and to be honest I enjoy the difficulties of Chinese more (nice question btw).

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?

The correct answer is that it depends. For example, are you talking to your teacher, to patient native speakers who meet a lot of foreigners, in a low stress environment, are you talking about simple everyday things? You could probably get away with more mistakes in those cases. But I always encourage people to learn correct pronunciation early on, and that includes tones for Chinese. So the correct thing to to is to treat them as if they are essential.

if you don't learn the Hanzi, it won't take as much time to learn Mandarin as Russian

Why would you do that though? Reading really bolsters other language skills; I think it would take me a very long time to achieve a high level in a language I couldn't read in. Or are you planning on converting everything to pinyin maybe?

[Inst]

I'm surprised no one's expressed discussed tone sandhi before. It's not a big deal compared to how difficult Chinese tones seem to be for non-heritage learners / speakers of tonal languages, but the 3rd tone turns into a 2nd tone when preceding the 3rd tone in a word, and often gets half-clipped depending on the tone succeeding it. Moreover, the Chinese language learning community's noted that grammar becomes more difficult as you advance up, with 口语 / 书面语 distinctions (informal, formal) as well as word use and word locations.

Not insurmountable, just takes a lot of time to achieve sufficient proficiency to open up the People's Daily.

[IronMike]

Did someone change the title of this thread or was it always "lerning" instead of "learning"?!

[Querneus]

Did someone change the title of this thread or was it always "lerning" instead of "learning"?!

It always was. Your brain unconsciously corrected the spelling for you before apparently.

[Random Review]

Did someone change the title of this thread or was it always "lerning" instead of "learning"?!

It's a subtle distinction only useful for us more advanced beings. For your purposes you can just read it as "learning" without losing too much.

[reineke]

"Lernen, ohne zu denken, ist eitel; denken, ohne zu lernen, gefährlich."

[FyrsteSumarenINoreg]

I think it's easier for an American to learn Croatian or Macedonian than Chinese.
Chinese pronunciation is difficult, even on a segmental level (that is, without tones).
And the script...
50 % of Croatians (in the North and in the West) don't use the pitch accent, pronouncing luka (the port) and Luka (a name)
the same. In China, unfortunately, the simplified tonal system (used in Shanghai) is on the way out.

[Daniel N.]

50 % of Croatians (in the North and in the West) don't use the pitch accent, pronouncing luka (the port) and Luka (a name)
the same. In China, unfortunately, the simplified tonal system (used in Shanghai) is on the way out.

I hoped someone was going to mention this -- the same holds for Slovene.

However, in many villages in Croatia people use different tones and have different rules how stress moves etc so most people are used to hear all kinds of pronunciation.

The same holds for hard-to distinguish pairs (č vs ć, dž vs đ) -- most natives don't distinguish them either. So they are not important for a foreigner.

[Dragon27]

I hoped someone was going to mention this -- the same holds for Slovene.

Modern Standard Slovene has also lost the distinctive phonemic vowel length.
The two main Baltic languages (related to Slavic, but not the same) - Latvian and Lithuanian - traditionally have a pitch accent system as well, but it's also on its way out (especially among the urban speakers).
Will Swedish and Norwegian follow suit?