Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

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einzelne
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby einzelne » Wed Apr 28, 2021 6:57 pm

thevagrant88 wrote:
einzelne wrote:
thevagrant88 wrote: I wouldn’t say “zero evidence”. He’s released videos in the past speaking Chinese, both prepared speeches and interviews.


You mean his scripted videos and, so called, 'interviews' where they discuss for the n-th time the same old "how I learned X language" topic and nothing else? Yes, faking language competence on YouTube is easy.

I don't know all these polyglots, since I stopped following them years ago ( I remember that Steve discussed how he literally devoted thousands of hours to his Chinese while also living among natives). At any rate, I prefer to rely on some objective, independent data, not self-assessment of YouTube stars.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby einzelne » Wed Apr 28, 2021 6:58 pm

RyanSmallwood wrote:Has Luca ever talked about his level of Mandarin, or had it evaluated anywhere?


I began learning Mandarin Chinese in 2008, and my love for it burned like fire. Though I started slowly, I eventually ramped my daily learning up to more than two or three hours per day. I got a lot of exposure and practice to the language during a two-year timespan.
Since then, however, I haven’t had too much contact with Mandarin Chinese. I try to use it at Chinese restaurants, or with other language lovers, but don’t get anywhere near as much practice as I would like.
My level has decreased quite a lot from what it once was. Once, I hosted a Chinese couchsurfer in my apartment, and was dismayed to find that I was regularly forgetting even basic words.


Yeah, I also find languages easy when I don't use them...

Notice that in spite of that he kept listing Chinese as a language he can speak/fluent all these years.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby thevagrant88 » Wed Apr 28, 2021 7:49 pm

einzelne wrote:
thevagrant88 wrote:
einzelne wrote:
thevagrant88 wrote: I wouldn’t say “zero evidence”. He’s released videos in the past speaking Chinese, both prepared speeches and interviews.


You mean his scripted videos and, so called, 'interviews' where they discuss for the n-th time the same old "how I learned X language" topic and nothing else? Yes, faking language competence on YouTube is easy.

I don't know all these polyglots, since I stopped following them years ago ( I remember that Steve discussed how he literally devoted thousands of hours to his Chinese while also living among natives). At any rate, I prefer to rely on some objective, independent data, not self-assessment of YouTube stars.


Steve never lived with native mandarin speakers to the best of my knowledge. He learned Mandarin in Hong Kong where Cantonese dominates, far more so back in the 60’s.

And while I always appreciate some healthy skepticism, I wouldn’t go about making such claims. Having said that, Luca has definitely filmed himself speaking Japanese, misrepresenting his abilities by quite a lot so who knows.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby Sayonaroo » Wed Apr 28, 2021 8:01 pm

I quite liked Vlad's video. he brought up good points and most of them were points that I had in my head too. I thought his points and point of view were made clear in his video. Chinese was the language that was the most distant from the languages he know. But regardless of the "difficulty", chinese is so much easier to learn nowadays with pop-up dictionaries like zhongzhong on chrome, pleco, kindle, lingq, vocabtracker.com, etc. i can't imagine learning chinese in the 60s like Steve did since i'm so spoiled. zhongzhong/inkah/etc on chrome parses the sentence for you and there's even an anki plugin that parses the sentences and looks up all the words. the anki addon is called pinyin on top of hanzi https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/417709332 of course they're not 100% accurate in parsing but they're still accurate and pretty damn useful nonetheless.

as far as i know japanese and chinese are the only languages with good quality hover dictionaries on chrome/firefox that parse etc
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby RyanSmallwood » Wed Apr 28, 2021 8:09 pm

thevagrant88 wrote:Steve never lived with native mandarin speakers to the best of my knowledge. He learned Mandarin in Hong Kong where Cantonese dominates, far more so back in the 60’s.

And while I always appreciate some healthy skepticism, I wouldn’t go about making such claims. Having said that, Luca has definitely filmed himself speaking Japanese, misrepresenting his abilities by quite a lot so who knows.


Iirc Steve said he was paid to learn the language full time, so he was able to spend all day making flashcards and listening to Mandarin audiobooks. I don't know all the details of his work, but I assume if he was paid to learn it he was also required to use it too.

I've also heard criticisms, of Xiaoma's Mandarin, that he spent a lot of time practicing basic sentences and pronunciation so he sounds accurate in simple conversations but otherwise he still makes mistakes and his level isn't super high.

A lot of people mean different things when they say a language is "hard", usually its more do with if their learning materials are appropriately teaching things, and if they feel overwhelmed and stressed or making good progress. As I mentioned before I think its as simple as the fact that Mandarin grammar is less complicated that people commonly report it as being not as hard as they expect, but they mean "I was able to say stuff without feeling stressed" not "I learned it to a high level as quickly as other more closely related languages".

Its pretty common sense that any language without a lot of shared vocabulary is going to take a long time to absorb, and all the hard numbers seem to show this, and tones and characters are obviously going to be extra challenges. Some anecdotes from people who haven't demonstrated a high level aren't a strong reason to disbelieve this, unless people can consistently learn it as quickly as other related languages, its not easy.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby einzelne » Wed Apr 28, 2021 9:06 pm

thevagrant88 wrote: Steve never lived with native mandarin speakers to the best of my knowledge. He learned Mandarin in Hong Kong where Cantonese dominates, far more so back in the 60’s.


Well, may be I confused his story about Mandarin with the one about Japanese. I don't remember, it was years ago.
At any rate, there are some objective factors which make Mandarin a particularly difficult language for Western learners. So I wouldn't trust those "Chinese is a piece of cake" claims.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Wed Apr 28, 2021 9:15 pm

I imagine it has a lot to do with the characters. I have a very strong visual memory, and I find the chapters to be fun and not incredibly hard to remember. But it’s easy to imagine it being a real barrier for a some people. (The tones are probably hard for everyone...)
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby alaart » Wed Apr 28, 2021 9:30 pm

I don't think I qualify to give an oppinion, as I still have a long way to go, but here is my take on comparing Japanese and Chinese:

MyTake on Japanese Chinese.png
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby 白田龍 » Thu Apr 29, 2021 12:50 am

All languages are easy when you have good resources and a solid learning strategy.

But everybody starts cluelessly trying random stuff.
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Re: Why do people have such drastically different opinions on the difficulty of Mandarin Chinese?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Apr 29, 2021 2:45 pm

As I just mentioned in the thread about not learning Russian grammar, I think there is a not-insignificant subset of people who are terrified of grammar. For this subset of people, an analytic language like Mandarin will be much easier than the other FSI Category IV languages that have highly synthetic grammar (namely, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic), and it may even seem even easier than a synthetic Category III language such as Russian or Hungarian.

So I think we can assume that people who hate grammar will probably say that Mandarin is easier to learn than most synthetic languages (and to those with a good ear and a talent for visual patterns, the challenges of Mandarin may seem even smaller than for the average person). But at the end of the day, it takes FSI twice as long to get the average student fluent in Mandarin as in Russian or Hungarian.
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