Is Chinese one of the hardest languages to learn?

[Photo: from VCG]

"Is Chinese a hard language for foreigners to learn?" That's the question posed on Zhihu, the Chinese version of Quora.

To this question, a French user of Zhihu, PetitFancy, answered,"I think Chinese is difficult but not that difficult to learn." This answer was agreed by 7,275 users, perhaps many of whom are foreign learners.

Though admitting that Chinese is "not that difficult" to learn, PetitFancy, whose Zhihu profile indicates that he is a wine industry insider from France, said his handwriting is terrible even now.

The biggest challenge for him is that Chinese belongs to a totally different language system, and the language and thinking habits of Chinese speakers differ from that of Europeans.

He also said, pronunciation is hard for foreigners, recalling how a class of 30 shrunk to only one student (himself) in one semester, even though the teacher was a sinologist and sometimes used English, German, and French to teach them. 

[The audio clip is from Studio+, produced by CRI.]