I also think, as I explained in the first comments above, that the logic of Chinese vocabulary (while I agree it is beautiful) is not useful in most cases except as a reminder when you already know the word. A word like 贴吧, for example, is very logical, but you would never come up with it if you haven’t heard it before, it could have been just as well: 谈站，聊天页，or a dozen other possibilities. Loans are infinitely easier because you only have to remember a code to “japanize” their pronunciation, whereas for Chinese you have to store raw data.

I think the main point you are forgetting here is that I don’t state plainly “Chinese is more difficult than Japanese”. What I state is: the learning curve of Chinese never reaches a plateau due to the independent DATA system, and therefore AFTER a certain point of proficiency N, it can be said that Chinese is harder than any other language. But this N point is not the same for all, in Japanese it would be a very very high N, corresponding to a level where you are past all the honorific problems.

Admittedly, if this N is so high that we are entering into native proficiency level, then the whole formulation becomes difficult to apply in practice.

In any case, as I said in the previous post of the series, the Chinese vs Japanese competition was just a gimmick to attract readers. I don’t take any such competition seriously, if we go to the end of it, we would have to start quantifying things more scientifically.

The objective of this series was not that, but just to analyze the aspects of Chinese that make it so hard, and in particular that aspect that I find fascinating, the parallel vocabulary system. See the post 3 in the series for what I think is the most interesting conclusions in this respect.

So, I close this discussion for the moment with a draw: I accept to call Japanese the most difficult language, at the same level as Chinese, for different reasons.

I am into something else right now, and my next language Thursday is already taken with this. But if you are interested we can do a Guest post afterwards, where we debate this, you write for Japanese, I write for Chinese. Then we can put a poll in the end of the post, and see who is the champion of the World by popular election, this way we can break the draw, what do you say?

One thing however we must not

However, Japanese honorific speech continues to pose difficulties even for advanced learners. The reason is that it is different from grammar (i.e. not strict CODE). In fact, you can learn Japanese grammar perfectly without knowing any honorific speech! Even educated Japanese frequently make mistakes when using honorific speech. So, to become skilled at honorific speech is an additional study task that advanced learners of Japanese — Japanese people and foreigners alike — have to grapple with way beyond the point when they have internalized basic grammar.

However, let’s concentrate on you main argument why Chinese is the world’s most difficult language. As I understand it, your claim that Chinese is harder than Japanese is partly based on two misconceptions.

Firstly, you overestimate the difficulty of vocabulary acquisition for advanced learners of Chinese.

Secondly, you underestimate the difficulty of vocabulary acquisition for advanced learners of Japanese.

In my opinion, that the Chinese vocabulary is unrelated to the international system of vocabulary (=Anglicized Greek and Latin) does not consequently make the language more difficult to learn. I’d go so far as to argue that the uniqueness of Chinese vocabulary on the contrary benefits the learning process for advanced students! This is because the structure of Chinese vocabulary is extremely logical. In other words, the more characters you learn the easier it becomes to learn new characters and compound words. For example, the Chinese word for server 服务器 (serve-machine) is a piece of cake to learn if you already know the meaning of 服务 (serve) and 器 (machine). In my own experience, after I mastered about 2000 Chinese characters it became significantly easier to learn new characters and words. Of course, I still stumble across the occasional 离子, but then again, Japanese is not dissimilar in this regard. Contrary to some people’s beliefs, the main bulk of Japanese vocabulary is made up of Japanese stem and Chinese stem words written in hanzi. True, as your friends who study Japanese have pointed out, Japanese uses English loan words for *many* technological and *some* modern words. But this still amounts to only a fairly limited percentage of the total vocabulary. An early learner of Japanese might get away with throwing in a lot of Japanicized English words in his daily conversation. Maybe his Japanese interlocutors will even do the same out of courtesy for his scarce language skills. But the expectations from the environment increases as he encounters more ‘real life’ situations and the over-reliance on English loan words eventually has to go. Not to talk about most of the more demanding sort of written material (novels, scholarly literature, etc.), which compared to spoken langauge tend to employ even less English loan words.

Moreover, in contrast with Chinese vocabulary, Japanese vocabulary is decidedly less logical. As I wrote in my earlier post, the mix of native words and loan words derived from Chinese and European languages makes learning new vocabulary a thorny task for students of Japanese. In addition, Japanese word stems tend to be fuzzier than Chinese ones. The problems connected with Japanese vocabulary structure do by no means fade away when you reach an advanced level.

Make no mistake; I think Chinese is a daunting language to learn indeed. It‘s no doubt the second most difficult language out there

2) I know this problem, but I maintain that having 2 very distinct set of pronunciations is not necessarily harder than having very similar ones. In Chinese there are many characters with a slight difference, often only a tone difference, depending on their meaning. At first this is easy, but when you know 20 characters pronounced yi, and some of them can be said in different tones, it can be very tricky to retain. What is terrible of the tones in Chinese is that in fast speech we don’t usually decode them, we tend to understand more from the context than from the tones. Because of this, since you are not decoding it every time you hear it, it is very difficult to retain the tones of the least common words. In my definition of fluency, perfect pronunciation is irrelevant (it is an absurd notion anyway), what is important is perfect Listening Comprehension. This comprehension is harder when so many characters sound almost the same. Therefore, in this aspect I don’t believe Japanese is harder at a higher level.

3) This is IMO the most powerful of your points. If you tell me that all Japanese words at all levels are doubled (for example, that for most words there is an “elektron” and a “dianzi” version, and both are commonly used), in this case I will admit Japanese is harder. But the information I have from students of Japanese is that, in fact, there is a strong tendency to use English roots for most modern and technical words, except for older things like “dianzi” that were invented before the war.

Finally, to summarize my theory, the main obstacle in Chinese is not the “somewhat tricky pronunciation and the larger number of hanzi”.

All that is hard enough, but the main difficulty is: A complete parallel set of words unrelated to the international system of vocabulary, compounded with a great difficulty to read fluently and therefore memorize words that are almost never used in spoken contexts (see my latest post about this). In other words, the DATA part of Chinese is larger than any other language, and also more difficult to retain.

You might be able to convince me that Japanese is harder (I am not 100% sure of my own theory anyway), but to do that you need to address mainly this point 3, and read carefully the post above why I think this Data, as opposed to the Code, is a more important obstacle at advanced level.

1) Japanese grammar is way harder.
2) Japanese hanzi have both Chinese stem and Japanese stem pronunciations. One therefore has to learn completely divergent pronunciations for each character.
3) Japanese mix native words with loan words derived from Chinese and European languages. Thus, the vocabulary is much more complex than the refreshingly logical structure of Chinese etymology.
4) Japanese has a complicated honorific speech.

All of these reasons put together surely outweighs the somewhat tricky pronunciation and the larger number of hanzi used in Chinese.

Chinese is actually an easy language up to intermediate level, I would say almost as easy as Spanish (for an English speaker).

But the point of this post is that Chinese is the most difficult language to learn *at an advanced level*. This is because the learning curve of Chinese turns up at later stages much more steeply than other languages. And when I say “advanced level” here, I mean very high, I am speaking of the point where you already speak and write fluently about many general subjects.

LOL, 你写英语还不错都会骂娘！ 但是我得告诉你，我那个句子 ”regardless of the origin of the student” 原来不包括中国人在里面！！