Which one is more difficult to learn, English or Chinese?

Of course, they are two of the greatest languages in the world. One exerts the most powerful synchronic influence over the face of the Planet. The other, on the contrary, is the strongest diachronic language. It’s been weaving together the history of a single largest country in population and later its much smaller neighbors since its first emperor froze the writing system of the language for the first time when the country proper came into being in A.D. 221.

Which one is more difficult for a foreign learner to learn to speak and write? I believe it is Chinese. Someone has jokingly commented that one needs three months to learn good English, three years to master French and at least thirty years to be proficient in German. As I see it, he has to double his efforts he has put in tackling German to speak and write good Chinese, and those foreigners who manage to speak and write good Chinese must be geniuses.

Does this sound a little too exaggerated? I believe not.

For one thing, most of native Chinese speakers (e.g. me) find it hard to write things in decent Chinese because they have long been isolated from the traditionally accepted and correct way of writing and do not know what rules to follow in their writing. When it comes to foreigners learning Chinese, they have to first find decently and elegantly worded Chinese texts and use them as models. In everyday life in China, they may find that good Chinese writings are in short supply. It seems to me that the correct, smooth and natural tradition of wording Chinese texts was broken somewhere (during the Great Cultural Revolution?) so that its modern speakers are at a loss to know how to write their language.

For example, earlier dated writings, more often than not, sound too old-fashioned, especially those written before 1949, and even before 1978. You can easily come across badly written news reports, government documents, corporate files, etc. Experts, or rather those of at least writing good Chinese, are hard to come by these days, I have to say.

For another, as far as I know, no complete and generally agreed Chinese grammar system has been established out of the language and the current system, if it is one, is believed to be a poor relation of its Western counterparts.