[roenxi]

> It's like claiming Chinese is less understandable than English when you were born and raised in London.

There is a proverbial consensus that written Chinese is very difficult to understand [0, 1]. It is a supremely challenging script. A well educated Chinese person can conceivably encounter words in a written text that they know the meaning of but they cannot understand or verbalise without consulting a reference book.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me

[1] https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Greek-to-...

[ttfkam]

And folks speaking any of the variations of Chinese speech, eg. Cantonese, can still read the ideographs. That's the tradeoff.

Whereas in English, a well-educated American can (and does) conceivably encounter words in written English that they neither know the meaning of, understand, or pronounce correctly without consulting a dictionary.

Hell, English pronounces the exact same written words in wildly different ways as well as multiple words spelled differently but spoken identically to the point that a non-trivial part of the written language is merely memorized rather than learned.

But we learned English when we were young, so I guess it seems "normal" that "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

Or how animal poops can have so many semantic meanings.

https://youtube.com/shorts/z_AGi2diHt8?feature=share