This American professor of Chinese has penned a monumental (and rather entertaining) rant as to why foreigners find learning Mandarin so difficult. I can relate to a lot of his points, esp. the difficulties arising from the tonal nature of Chinese, but thankfully as a Ribenren I’m spared the ordeal of acquainting myself with the writing system from square one. The writer whines about how Mandarin isn’t as phonetic as English and how learning the characters is a total bummer:
(…) Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you’re just sunk. And you’re sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.
Read it here.
