[palata]

Long read, but very nice! I like the style, e.g:

> Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place.

> But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists.

> A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.

I have always been attracted to languages with a different alphabet, but Chinese always just seemed completely out of my league. I don't know if that is correct, but Japanese seemed easier to speak (like I could repeat words or small sentences and people would understand), whereas it seems very difficult to merely say something that a Chinese native will understand.

[082349872349872]

According to https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ it's not very difficult, just tedious. They figure mandarin or cantonese takes ~3x the number of classroom hours (2'200) that an easy language like french or spanish (750) would take.