Oooh, you're a dragon! That's the best one. Maybe all your luck is being stored up for something big!
Yes, Chinese is an incredibly hard language. There's so much memorization involved: how to make the strokes and what order they go in for each character (very important!), how to pronounce it, the tone, and the meaning, of course.
Actually my husband tells me, at least among the people he knows, an interesting phenomenon is occurring. They study until high school and even into college to memorize how to write characters. But since he's graduated high school, he rarely writes things out by hand. With texting and computers there's not that many things done on paper anymore, and he has to think about how to write less-used characters. I think this is an interesting phenomenon of the digital age, and I have wondered if, in the next 50 years China will cease teaching the writing of characters, and it will become an art more than an essential skill.
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