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Originally Posted by Stensie4JC
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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I think a language should be an essential tool to connect and make things clear to another person.
If a language is so difficult that it takes you all the way to highschool, before you can actually do something with it, then perhaps the chinese should learn roman alphabet and (like the Japanese Kanjii) write their words in roman letters.
At least, I've been able to learn 3 languages before the age of 18, rather than becoming 30 something before I fully mastered one language.
I agree that any language can become so complex as you want it to be,and that one can study poetry and stuff many years after one graduates. But I certainly hope that Chinese kids at the age of 7 can write just about anything they can talk about using a keyboard?
I mean, one could deliberately make a language difficult, which could help in times of war, but that would be a real pain for the average worker...