Way off-topic but hey, this IS the off-topic forum...
dennylin93 said:
Sometimes it's just relative. People who speak Chinese think that it's easy, but English is extremely hard because of all the grammar. On the other hand, native speakers of English tend to face difficulties when they learn Chinese characters.
You're right on the money here. The underlying structure of a language (compared to what you're already used to) is key to the learning curve.
For example, Dutch and German are quite similar languages. Most Dutch people with reasonably well-developed linguistic intuition can at least get by in German without much effort and vice versa. Sure, you need a workable grasp of vocabulary (although there is quite a bit of overlap between the two languages) and you may not "get" the finer points of conjugation, but both grammars are based on pretty much the same underlying concepts so sentences are built in more or less the same way. And with some study it's relatively easy for a Dutch person to learn fluent German and vice versa (I do think that Dutch is somewhat more difficult to learn properly than German though).
The same applies to the "class" of roman/latin languages, e.g. Italian, French, Spanish and Portugese. If you know one of those, it's relatively easy to learn another one. And I've been told that this also holds for most Scandinavian languages.
Oriental languages on the other hand are based on completely different concepts and therefore have a totally different underlying structure, making it much more difficult to learn an oriental language if you're from "the west" or to learn a western language if you're Asian.
To illustrate: I once knew a Japanese computer scientist who came to Leiden University in The Netherlands to pursue her Ph.D. degree. She is very intelligent (not to mention breathtakingly beautiful, but that's besides the point
) but she spoke and wrote English like a six-year-old. It can really be that hard if languages are so completely structurally and conceptually different. Plus: while we in the west tend to think: "it should go something like this and if I'm understood that's close enough", the Japanese tend to be much more perfectionistic and be more afraid of making mistakes. That mindset, if present, probably does't help matters either.
However, I do think that the "problem" of different characters is often overstated. When I tried to learn a bit of Japanese I found out that it was actually easier to first learn the Japanese's phonetic alphabet (in this case hiragana, for those of you who know what on earth I'm rambling on about) and then learn the actual language in that script, gradually adding kanji to the mix. Trying to learn the language right away in our western alphabet and then later worry about the Japanese characters proved to make things much more difficult. The characters in most oriental languages are such an integral part of the underlying structure that it's usually better to face them head on than to try avoiding them initially.
Now for the encore of this already way too elaborate post: similar principles apply to programming languages. If you know, say, Java, it's relatively easy to learn languages like C, C++, Pascal, Perl etc. etc. But it is much harder to learn languages like LISP, Prolog or Miranda because such (logic or functional) languages are based on entirely different paradigms and therefore require a totally different way of thinking (or possibly even state of mind). If you're used to imperative programming and trying to learn functional or logic programming, it can take quite a bit of time for the proverbial penny to drop.
Alphons :stud :h