I read the article the last time it was discussed here on Hacker News. The author correctly leads off with the main reason Chinese is hard to learn as a second

I read the article the last time it was discussed here on Hacker News. The author correctly leads off with the main reason Chinese is hard to learn as a second language, and not easy to learn to full literacy even for a native speaker. My HN user profile discloses that I am a second-language learner of Chinese. I began study of the language in 1975. There are all kinds of interesting challenges in learning Chinese. One that is underestimated is how much the various Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") are not cognate even for vocabulary that would be cognate for French and Spanish, or for English and German. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？ 他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？ 佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. On the whole, I find Chinese grammar fits my preferences (I like languages in which word order is the main element of grammar, and dislike languages like most Indo-European languages with a lot of inflection shown by changes in word endings), I can deal with Chinese pronunciation (but my children find it much more "natural" than I do to use phonological tone to distinguish differing words, a common feature of many languages but not my native language, English), and I just have to suck it up and exert a lot of effort to be literate in Chinese, even with today's computer aids. The Chinese writing system is HARD even for native speakers of Modern Standard Chinese.