[yzzxy]

I largely agree that the mystique has to go, and that conversational Chinese is not nearly as hard to learn as believed, but I disagree that Mandarin is easy as a whole.

Characters are hard. There are thousands of them, with only loose auditory or semantic meaning. Learning to write and read Chinese is almost always going to involve rote memorization, hopefully using spaced repetition.

I've been studying Mandarin in a non-intensive but formal class for 6 years, speak a bit better than mark to Mark here and almost definitely with a larger vocabulary (though this could be 100% biased by the intimidation of a large fluent crowd in his case), and cannot even hope to read a simple Chinese novel or newspaper. I've heard anecdotally that doing so requires working knowledge of about 10,000 characters.

[rockymeza]

According to my newspaper reading professor, only college professors who study characters know up to 10,000 characters--and they are badasses. I think 3-4,000 is enough for normal human beings. Anything above that is just downright nerdy.

[yzzxy]

Well, there you go. Anecdote =/= reality. However, the magnitude of the task remains similar.

[ximeng]

I can write around 4000 characters / 7000 words according to Skritter and am pretty OK reading a newspaper. 10,000 characters is much more than you need.