I didn't mean to imply that English is freakishly difficult for Chinese speakers, but this one aspect is difficult. I'll expand on my comment a bit. First of

I didn't mean to imply that English is freakishly difficult for Chinese speakers, but this one aspect is difficult. I'll expand on my comment a bit. First of all, I've spent nearly my entire adult life living in Taiwan, after growing up in the US. I'm a reasonably comfortable reader of Chinese and work as a co-owner/academic director of an English cram school here. Consequently, I have a pretty keen interest in the challenges facing Chinese students of English. In some senses, English is the easiest language in the world to learn. Hollywood movies are readily accessible nearly everywhere, as are English newspapers, textbooks, magazines and music. The wealth of learning materials available for English far outstrip those for learning Spanish or French, or especially Chinese. English is also necessary for speaking with most native English speakers. The vast majority of Americans, Brits, Australians or especially Canadians I've met here in Taiwan speak very little Chinese. It's neither expected nor required of them to learn it. As a result, it's possible for more and more young people here to pick up a fair amount of English before ever going abroad. And when they do go abroad, they'll likely be using English all the time. English is a bit difficult phonetically, with its relatively large number of vowel sounds and rhotic R. Spelling is also less phonetic than most romance languages. That said, Chinese is tonal, which presents a serious challenge to most speakers of non-tonal languages. And any orthographic challenge of learning to handle "eigh", "tion", "ture" or other spelling patterns absolutely pales in comparison with the challenge of learning about 5000 characters, many of which are semi-phonetic at best. So, no. English isn't "freakishly difficult" for Chinese speakers in the same sense that Chinese is for English speakers. It is much more work than learning Thai, which shares more cultural stories and religion, or Vietnamese, which has a large number of cognates with all widely used Chinese topolects, or Korean or Japanese, each of which have the above advantages plus the use of familiar Chinese characters. In my experience, a lot of high-intermediate students do struggle with phrases that derive from biblical or historical sources that native speakers routinely use without even realizing it. It is at just the point at which European languages start getting easier that these idioms start popping up all over the place. Phrases such as preaching to the choir, beauty is more than skin deep, actions speak louder than words, a gray area, out of the blue, call someone's bluff, rock the boat, bread and butter, have your cake and eat it, don't count your chickens, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and the blind leading the blind are common in dozens of languages, but Mandarin isn't one of them. This is slowly changing with exposure to western culture, though.