| > Learn to read first before worrying about tact and perspective. You said "you're full of shit", which I thought lacked tactfulness. You're right, I didn't read the earlier comment carefully enough. I guess it needed to be quite forcefully pointed out that Chinese people don't realize how hard their language is to learn. > Talking about the lack of perspective, why don't you tell us what is your native language? It won't be news to us if a speaker of a Indo-European language finds another Indo-European language easier to learn than a Sino-Tibetan language. Well, let's go through what I said again: Not having tones and no huge obstacle to becoming literate makes English a hell of a lot easier to learn. I still think that's true. You seem to be saying that people find it easier to learn languages that are more related to their native language than some others, but how is that related to my point about Chinese being quite an undertaking to learn? You quote some literacy statistics, but that's not really relevant to what I said either, is it? An intentional distraction, perhaps. Chinese has got a huge alphabet, and most other languages don't. This means that it's much more difficult to attain literacy in Chinese. Whatever amount of characters you want to draw the line at, it'll still be much more than 26. > I would not stand by idly seeing people slandering the language I love Oh please. No one has slandered your beloved language. The fact remains though, that the tones and characters are a big burden on someone who wants to learn it. |