[archena]

Much of this article focuses on the writing system, but it's possible to learn to converse in a language without being literate in it. It's a fallacy to say that Chinese is "hard" because it is written with characters (and besides, there's always romanisation via Pinyin).

I'm glad it made sure to state that difficulty is relative in language - the Chinese learn their languages just fine afterall.

I don't think tone is as big of a problem as it's made out to be. As a foreiger who studies Mandarin I've found that with enough listening I began to pick out the tones well (although I still can't reproduce them as acurately!).

Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation surrounding Chinese. A good book mentioned in the bibliography is The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.

[mikeash]

Foreign language learning in general has a strange emphasis on literacy over speaking.

I don't understand why we don't make people learn foreign languages the same way that children learn native languages. Children spend years learning to speak before they start to learn to read and write. It seems to work well. Perhaps older people need to learn differently, but I'm not convinced.

I have to imagine that learning Chinese would be a lot easier if you learned to speak it reasonably well first, and then started learning the writing system only after attaining some mastery of the spoken language. Instead, you're trying to learn new phonetics and tones and grammar and trying to learn stroke order and radicals and a bunch of other stuff all at the same time.

[chen1i]

It's all about environment when you try to speak around. I believe your Chinese teachers encourage you practice speaking in class, but trying to speak Chinese to others after class? If you have Chinese friends, then you are lucky! :)

[mikeash]

The teachers do encourage speaking, but they also spend an inordinate amount of time on reading and writing, even in absolute beginner classes.