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I studied Mandarin for a year in university and lived in Japan for one year (yes, took the wrong language series). If anything spoken Mandarin is easier than En

I studied Mandarin for a year in university and lived in Japan for one year (yes, took the wrong language series). If anything spoken Mandarin is easier than English and Japanese. The hard part is the tones, but that's not hard if you actually apply yourself. The grammar itself is relatively simple and doesn't have the multiple layers of etiquette like Japanese or the 50%+ irregular "special cases" of English. The writing systems of Japan and China are another story...

GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
Yeah I've been studying Mandarin for the past year and the thing I love about it is that the grammar is really really simple. Compared to French or English it's an absolute dream. There are no irregular verbs because there's NO freaking conjugation whatsoever. No masculine and feminine nouns. Not even singular and plural! The sentence structure is similar to English - but more rigid (i.e. predictable) - in that you generally have to express things in the order that they exist in the real world. "I can tomorrow at the library meet you" but I can't "meet you at the library tomorrow" (since the library is where we're meeting, we have to be there before the meeting can take place). Of course the tones are challenging in the beginning since we just don't have the ears for it, but it's not that hard. Reading and writing Chinese, however, can be difficult even for many Chinese people who were born and raised in China. Just try looking something up in a Chinese dictionary. If you haven't grown up with it, it's pretty much impossible.