I’m from China, and I’m going to talk about one cultural aspect of my home country that people outside of my country misunderstand: Chinese is really hard to learn.
The idea that Chinese is hard might be originated from the impression of various complex characters. However, Chinese is easier than everyone thinks. I want to analyze it theoretically because I’m a native speaker, and my experiences of whether Chinese is hard or not do not apply to people learning Chinese as a foreign language. I admit that writing in Chinese is technically more challenging than in English because we need to learn and practice a lot to remember how to write different characters in complex structure. However, there are lots of connections between characters that conceptually help us to memorize.
For example, a common way to structure a character is to use a component to represent the pronunciation with another component representing the meaning. For example, characters with the component of “月” (Yue), usually mean a part of the body, such as “臂,” “肌,” “肢,” meaning “arm,” “muscle,” “limb.” The other components are namely “辟”, “几”, “支”, these components are pronounced as “pi”, “ji”, “zhi” when they are considered an independent character. The pronunciation of these characters are “bi”, “ji”, “zhi”, which is almost the same as the component representing the pronunciation.
Besides the characters, the words (made up of more than one character) and phrases are also created in a pretty “reasonable” way. As I’ve experienced learning English, I spend a long time remembering new words. However, in Chinese, after learning a certain number of characters, we don’t need to memorize many new words deliberately, but understand these words directly through the characters. Here’s an example. “数” and “学”, meaning “number” and “study”. Combing them we can get the study of numbers, which is Math(数学). “物” and “理”, meaning “mater” and “rule”. For these two characters combined, we can get material rules, which is Physics(物理).
From my perspective, Western countries consider Chinese a hard language to learn because they are frightened by the complex characters and try to compare the difficulty of characters to letters. While learning Chinese will be much easier at the stage when they manage some basic characters.
[Chinese]
我来自中国，我要谈论一个外国人常有的对于中国的一点误解——中文非常难学
认为中文难学这一观点可能来自于对各种复杂汉字的第一印象。然而，中文比西方人们想象的要简单。我会从理论上分析它为什么没有这么难，而不是讲自己的经历。因为我作为母语学习者，我认为的难度并不具有可参考性。诚然，在中文书写方面，是比英文更困难的，因为我们需要长时间的学习，加以大量的练习很多才学会写结构复杂的汉字。然而，汉字之间有很多联系，这些关系在概念上有助于我们记忆。
例如，构造汉字的常见方法是使用一个偏旁来代表发音，另一个代表意义。例如，带有“月”偏旁的汉字通常表示身体的某个部位，例如“臂”、“肌”、“肢”，分别表示“手臂”、“肌肉”、“手和腿的统称”。组成这些字的另一个偏旁分别是“辟”、“几”、“支”，这些偏旁在被视为独立字符时发音为“pi”、“ji”、“zhi”。这些字的发音几乎与发音偏旁的部件相同。
除了汉字，词和短语也是以非常合理的方式创造的。就我学习英语的经验来看，我花了很长时间记忆新单词。然而，在中文中，学习了一定数量的汉字之后，我们不需要刻意记忆许多新词汇，而是直接通过这些汉字理解这些词汇。以下是一个例子。 “数”和“学”，分别表示“数字”和“学习”。将它们组合起来，我们可以得到“对于数字的学习”，也就是数学。“物”和“理”分别表示“物质”和“规则”。将这两个字符结合起来，我们可以得到物质的规则，也就是物理学。
从我的角度来看，西方人认为中文难学是因为他们被复杂的汉字吓到，试图将汉字的难度与字母进行比较。然而，在他们掌握了一些基本汉字后，学习中文会没有他们所想的这么苦难。