3 ms·

One of the main reasons that Chinese/Japanese are so difficult is kanji (漢字). Having to learn thousands of unique symbols really cranks up the difficultly quick

• rekado 9y ago
  (In Chinese they are called Hanzi.) It wasn't very hard for me to learn to read and to type with a Pinyin input method by simply writing office email. It's much easier to recognize characters (e.g. by picking them from a Pinyin conversion, or by reading them), when the context is known. You don't need to know how to use a pen to learn how to speak Mandarin.
  • Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    For what it's worth, Japanese kanji are much more difficult than Chinese hanzi. Kanji each have at least 2 and often up to 4 or 5 different readings in different situations, and can be combined in different ways (with hiragana to make 訓読み and with other kanji to make 熟語).