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-ben[A]rticles like this [...] trivialize the difficulty of learning two extremely different languages. - Fox
Fox blogged about yet another holier-than-thou article in the Straits Times written by an English-speaking Singaporean, Lee Seng Giap (currently on the NTU faculty), who wrote about how he grew up speaking only (mostly) Hokkien, but strove really hard to learn Chinese and English in school and is now an experienced bilingual translator of both.
It’s a really touching story, to be honest, but it’s one containing a good admixture of “I can do it, therefore it’s not hard, and hence so can you”, and even perhaps a touch of hagiography. Fox has already written on why this article annoys him, and much of Fox’s post is relevant to this discussion. I’ll just point out the logical fallacies not pointed out so far.
First, the ”I can do it, can you” argument is a fallacy of overgeneralization, and is most clearly expressed in this paragraph:
Based on the misconception that Chinese is a difficult language for those from an English-speaking background - and that English too is difficult for those from a dialect-speaking environment - I should not have done so well in these two languages.
It’s clearly a non sequitur, and if anything is a testament to just how hard the writer had to work in order to learn Chinese and English when they weren’t spoken in his family at home. It’s great to hear that someone was so successful in learning a language when starting out from nothing, but that doesn’t mean that therefore learning Chinese is easy.
Second, the faint-hearted appeal to authority by quoting a theoretical linguist is hinted on by this quote:
Vili Maunula, a theoretical linguist, writes: ‘All languages are, to the best of our current understanding of human languages, equally suitable for conversation. No language is more expressive or less expressive than the other, neither is one language easier or more difficult.’
However, the appeal is lackluster and weakened by the fact the source appears to be a comment left in this blog post. If Maunula wasn’t quoting himself from another source, then clearly this is a statement that isn’t really meant to be authoritative anyway. Even so, the quote is taken completely out of context - the original quote quite clearly referred to the utility of languages in expressing concepts, whereas the letter-writer simply shoehorned it into his exposition of why learning Chinese for English speakers shouldn’t be difficult.
Third, the analysis on the average rate of language acquisition is completely absurd. Lee uses character counts as a proxy for learning chinese, and long-windedly writes:
The Ministry of Education (MOE) announced last year a list of 1,600 to 1,700 Chinese characters for CL (Chinese language) pupils, and 1,800 to 1,900 characters for HCL (higher Chinese language) pupils in primary school.
There are 52 weeks in a year and 312 weeks in six years. If one divided 1,700 and 1,900 respectively by 312 multiplied by seven days, CL students would have to learn 0.78 character a day, while HCL students would have to learn 0.87 character.
This accounting is faulty on at least two counts. First, this accounting ironically does not account for school holidays nor for the blatantly obvious fact that schoolchildren don’t spend every hour of the day learning Chinese. A more realistic accounting taking these two factors into account yields instead approximately 6 yrs x 36 weeks/yr ((The primary school year has 40 weeks, but I’m taking out a few weeks per year for things like exams and falling sick and lessons wasted scolding children and making them behave and things like that.)) x 3 hours/wk = 648 hours of Chinese instruction, in which to learn 1,700 or 1,900 characters. That works out to 2.6 - 2.9 characters per hour in class, or 8 - 9 characters per week on average.
Second, learning Chinese is hardly the neat and linear process that this calculation suggests. Chinese is far more than memorizing an arbitrary set of characters. That’s what students have to do on top of mastering the basics of reading, writing, grammar1 and vocabulary. That’s just the extra baggage on top of learning the language due to its singular orthography2 that in theory wouldn’t exist if Chinese switched to an alphabetic orthography. Consider that of the major languages that had at one point or another made use of Chinese characters - Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese come to mind - all but one have given up entirely on Chinese characters.3 Even in the one exception, Japanese, there has been significant pressure to reform the language to limit the number of kanji to be used in that language. That, more than anything else, says a lot about how hard it is to learn the Chinese writing system.
Yet somehow this is all to cognizant of how Chinese is taught in many schools in Singapore - as lists of characters and words to memorize. Often students are trained on rote learning, and to be able to distinguish 辨 from 辫, and mostly useless vocabulary like 珊瑚 or 打喷嚏. And even when there is some faint attempt at some discussion of Chinese culture, it’s hardly ever presented as an exposition of how things like Confucian philosophy 儒家思想 permeates contemporary Chinese societies, but rather on factual matters of traditions like “for the Duanwu festival 端午节 people eat zongzi 粽子”, or just simply thinly-veiled morality lessons. Why, then, is it not surprising that few students express an interest in the language when in school?
The result is nothing short of tragic - many Chinese speaking Singaporeans don’t have true monolingual proficiency in Chinese. I mean this in the sense that the vast and overwhelming majority of Chinese-speaking Singaporeans that I know, even those from “Cina” backgrounds, are not entirely comfortable forming a single sentence in pure Chinese for anything other than the most trivial of statements. For example, even something as simple as “I want to shop at Takashimaya” is most often rendered as “我要去 taka shopping”. Saying the correct “我要去高岛屋逛街” would sound strange and overly pendantic to them.
All this masks a simple, unavoidable fact that Lee attempts to refute: for English speakers, Chinese is really, really difficult to learn compared to many other languages. The differences between English and Chinese are considerable, such as:
- the different orthographies (ways to write the language),
- the conjugation of nouns and verbs in English but not Chinese,
- the tones 阴阳上去 in Chinese that don’t exist in English,
- the different word order for prepositions (especially 的 and “of”),
- the use of “measurement words” 量词 in Chinese,
- the use of mood particles 呢、啦、咯、etc. in Chinese,
and many others. And that’s just the technical aspects, excluding things like cognates, the more prevalent use of ellipsis in Chinese, idioms and implicit cultural norms. English and Chinese simply have much less in common than (say) English and French.
In reality, each difference represents yet another obstacle to gaining proficiency, and it’s only made harder by the lack of common ground for the speaker of one to grasp the other. A truly bilingual speaker of both must be cognizant (if at a subconscious, if not fully conscious level) of the similarities and differences.
Perhaps by being Singaporeans, we naturally underestimate how hard it is to attain bilingual aptitude in both English and Chinese. Consider how rare it is to find examples of such bilingualism anywhere else. Both English and Chinese are notoriously difficult to master for anyone who’s not a native speaker. English speakers trip over tones and get exasperated with writing “let’s eat breakfast” 吃早餐吧; Chinese speakers famously stumble over the many pronunciations of English vowels4 and forgetting to conjugate verbs.
That there are true bilingual speakers is a great thing, but anyone who pretends that there isn’t any difficulty is learning both is just either ignoring the facts, or could even be deluded as to his or her true proficiency in either. One just needs to get some experience in teaching Chinese or English as a second language to discover how hard it is to teach one to a speaker of the other.
References
- Lee Seng Giap, Straits Times, Who says it’s hard to learn Chinese?, 2008-06-04.
- Fox, Next Stop Wonderland, ST: Who says it’s hard to learn Chinese?, 2006-06-03.
- Vili Maunula, comment dated 2007-09-18 in Lingformant, Number of languages in the world to be cut in half in a century, 2005-10-11.
- Thankfully, Chinese does not have verb conjugations, which are the bane of learners of Romance languages.↩
- The arcane nature of the Chinese “alphabet” is probably goes a long way toward explaining why spelling bees in Chinese are nonexistent. Intriguingly, China apparently holds contests for kids to look up words in dictionaries, although neither of the PRC students in my lab have ever heard of such a thing.↩
- The one remaining exception in Korean is in names.↩
- The most egregious example from PRC students that I’ve encountered is “usually”, which they often pronounce YOO-ral-e.↩
In my opinion, learning Chinese (or any subject) in Singapore is purely learned through memorizing. Some how, Singaporeans were taught to know the answers, but not how or where the answers were derived. For example, Singapore students were taught the Chinese character for good is written this way,好。No one question why it was written that way and we just learned it as it is.
Had my Mandarin teacher in Singapore told me that 好 is made up of two other characters, 女（Girl) + 子 （Boy), because the Chinese believe that having a Daughter and Son is a GOOD thing, I would have shown more interest in the language and maybe would have gotten a better understanding of my own culture.
After learning more about the Chinese language (ironically in the US), I felt that schools in Singapore should have taught the Chinese language with the understanding of its culture and significance cohesively.
Maybe this method of teaching the language is not possible when using Simplified Chinese in current curriculum. And it may be some time before MOE figure out a better solution. But it definitely beats memorizing though the text book.
You need to know, what, 10,000 Chinese characters to read a simple novel? The fact that it’s an ideographical language is one of the major elements contributing to its difficulty. Hell, even for hieroglyphics you can figure out pronunciation just by looking at the word (which you can’t in Chinese).
And there’s a good counter-example to most people not being able to master 2 languages - India. Many people are good at both English and one Indian language. Or so I’m told. I’ve only had contact with select members of the diaspora, so I don’t know the English standard of the majority (or know their proficiency of their Indian tongue).
That was me.
1. In Hongkong, students are taught both English and Chinese. However, few HK students can be effectively bilingual. That alone suggests that being bilingual in both languages is not as easy as Lee makes it out to be.
2. I’m sure that someone is going to bring up the ‘counter-example’ of PRC scholars who enrolled in Singapore schools and scored A’s in English. That someone is going to expect all Chinese-Singaporeans kids to be like that. Needless to say, he/she conveniently will leave out the fact that the PRC scholar also got 10 O-level A1’s and 4 A-level A’s.
One other huge bane of the English language is tenses. I think there is no concept of tense in Mandarin. When referring to something in the present, past, future or future in the past, the time reference is usually stated. Proper use of tenses is something that is very difficult to master.
You raised good points about the fallacies in Lee’s arguments, but when you say “[Lee ignores that] for English speakers, Chinese is really, really difficult to learn compared to many other languages”, you are also missing the point of Lee’s article. His article is a response to the many (Chinese) Singaporean parents who complain about the teaching of Chinese in local schools.
In any case, shouldn’t “the conjugation of nouns and verbs in English but not Chinese” make Chinese easier to learn?
A last quibble: I don’t think “我要去高岛屋逛街” is necessarily -the- correct rendering in Chinese. “Gaodaowu” (高岛屋) is the reading of the Chinese characters that the Japanese use to write Takashimaya, but it is not Takashimaya. I would say calling it “Gaodaowu” is just as correct as calling it “Taka” - they are just different adaptations of the same term by people who don’t speak Japanese.
Besides, “我要去高岛屋逛街” is not the only way to say “I want to shop in Takashimaya” in Chinese. It is just as grammatical to say the simpler “我要去高岛屋/Taka/Takashimaya买东西”.
I think the biggest problem with English is all the exceptions.
There’s also the parallel vocabulary (German line and French line)
Lee also contradicts himself. He claims that learning Chinese and English is not difficult but yet he gives a detailed account of how much extra-curricular time and effort he spent. The last time I checked, when we say a task is difficult, we mean that it requires a great deal of labour, skill and planning to perform it successfully.
Nelson:
1. The sexism inherent in Chinese orthography qua the ‘女’ radical is something I’ve asked around about: PRC students, Taiwanese postdocs, and even a professor in East Asian linguistics here on campus. Apart from ‘good (好)’, virtually all other characters have malign connotations (贬义) like 奸 and 娇. The only other characters containing the ‘女’ radical that have a benign connotation (褒义) refer to prettiness like 娇 or 姿. Nobody I know has been able to find a benign character that doesn’t refer to female beauty!
2. In Taiwan, students are now taught simplified characters alongside the traditional ones. They find it immensely easy to learn them after learning the traditional forms, once they figure out the rules like 話 –> 话 that govern the vast majority of “simplifications”.
Interestingly it now seems that there’s a growing current of support in China for reverting to traditional characters, especially among younger intellectuals. Just search for “化简归繁” and you’ll find lots of posts on this topic. One of the arguments supporting this is that many find the simplified characters to be less logically constructed.
Fox:
1. Hong Kong is an interesting counterexample. According to the Honkies that I know, neither English and Chinese are used regularly outside the classroom and are therefore sterile subjects that don’t garner much interest.
There’s much to be said for the bilingual approach in Canada, where all government publications are available in both French and English, all schools teach both languages, and you can take the driving exam in any of 11 languages, including Chinese and Vietnamese. We certainly could do more in Singapore to promote the use of multiple languages in more contexts.
2. As you surely know, there’s a wide disparity between oral proficiency and written proficiency. Many of us know at least one PRC who has perfect SAT or GRE verbal scores but cannot string together a coherent sentence, especially when they first arrive in an English-speaking country.
Aaron:
1. I did list tenses as a disparity: in #2, I mentioned conjugation and concord.
Interestingly, the Chinese textbook that my labmate states that there _are_ tenses in Chinese, but they’re trivial to conjugate: for example, present continuous (我在吃饭。) and past tenses (我吃了饭。). Definitely nothing on the level of irregular verbs in English, or the irregular verbs in Spanish - Están me haciendo loco!
ahkow:
1. I’m not sure that I see what you claim I’m missing. The first two paragraphs of Lee’s article are:
To me, this very clearly indicates that the article is meant to be a rebuttal of the point that Chinese is hard to learn for children growing up in English-speaking households. Yes, the article is specifically targeting children where my discussion doesn’t, and nobody will deny the fact that it’s easier for young children to learn new languages than adults. However I believe these same arguments to be valid.
2. The facility of conjugation in Chinese would make it easier to learn for an English speaker, but one has to first set aside the notions of concord and conjugation; it’s not clear to me a priori that children picking up on this idea that easily.
3. Maybe it was a little disingenuous to pick a place like Taka in an example like that. However, it serves a minor point too: whether or not you would choose to translate the name ‘Takashimaya’ depends partly on how much of a purist you are, and partly on your audience.
To all other non-Singaporean Chinese speakers that I know, a sentence like ““我要去 Takashimaya 逛街” is considered awkward and less standard to than “我要去高岛屋逛街” simply because there are Chinese characters in the name. It is taken for granted in Taiwan (and I believe mainland China too) that Honda is 成田 and Hyundai is 现代 and are pronounced as they would be in Chinese. Obviously transliterated names like Mercedes-Benz would be pronounced phonetically, but with some cleverness can sometimes be rendered in a form that is even semantically sensible (In Taiwan, it’s 奔驰).
It is a minor thing, clearly, but it highlights too the disparity between what is considered correct nomenclature in purely Chinese-speaking societies and a more multilingual one like in Singapore. The obviously conclusion to draw is that people will say it however it will be most easily understood to the appropriate audience and context.
4. No doubt your proposed alternate translation is grammatically correct, but I would argue that it’s not semantically equivalent to the original sentence. “逛街” and “买东西” are not semantically equivalent translations of ’shopping’. The former is ’shopping’ in the sense of going out or hanging out, not necessarily buying anything; the other clearly has a connotation of purchasing _something_ and is a better match for the English sentence “I want to get something at Taka”.
Clearly it’s largely contexual, and the differences are often subtle, perhaps even subjective, but it depends on how accurate a translation you want. In this case I believe it’s possible to argue “逛街” is a tighter concept than “买东西” for the verb “to shop”; whether or not you would consider it splitting hairs to insist on the difference is another issue.
Also, not all concepts map neatly and exactly between languages. Consider how a literal translation would fail on the sentence “我好心痛喔！”, or the subtleties of the meanings of words like “隐逸” or “set”. The imperfect matching of concepts is an issue that surely must complicate the development of bilingual proficiency.
Elia,
By Chinese in Hongkong, I meant Cantonese Chinese. Students in HK are taught Chinese and English but few in HK feel comfortable in English. Cantonese Chinese is overwhelmingly the lingua franca. Also, everyday conversational Cantonese in HK does incorporate many English words. So, I would imagine that “我要去 Takashimaya 逛街” is not entirely peculiar to SG. Any society in which there is linguistic interference between English and Chinese could possibly find that construction to be acceptable. I would also imagine that Malaysian Chinese speakers (Mandarin and Cantonese) would also use that phrase. Malay and English words are regularly used in their daily conversational speech.
Interestingly, the Chinese have difficulty learning Mandarin as well. And don’t get me started with the Taiwanese, who need zhuyinfuhao ruby text in their outdoors posters and advertising so the average reader can figure out just how to pronounce the words.
Fox:
My sample size of N = 3 Honkies says otherwise - all 3 are firmly in the “somewhat strange but understandable” category, but clearly this is too small to be definitive.
Wow! Your point about ‘女‘ radical is fascinating. I’m definitely supporting the reversion of the traditional writing system.
Incidentally, I chance upon a book titled “The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language”, by C.H. Kang and Ethel R. Nelson. The authors theorized that you can find biblical stories through the interpretation of some traditional characters.
Nelson: I would be very sceptical of such claims, because it’s difficult to tell whether such rationalizations are causal or merely ex post facto.
Take your example: Woman 女 + Boy 子 = Good 好 “because” the Chinese believe that women bearing sons is a good thing.
Is the character for good constructed this way because
1. of the inherent cultural context that existed when 4000 years ago a character was needed to express the concept of goodness, and THEREFORE the cultural mores suggested this as a way of writing the concept,
OR
2. because it’s an easy way to remember how to write the character, and the true reason has long since been lost in history, but THEREFORE the orthography could have subtly influenced the pervading cultural notions.
#2 may sound silly initially, but consider how the logic of #1 fails to apply to the vast majority of chinese characters. For example ‘终’ ＝ 丝 ＋ 冬 can’t be interpreted as “the end = silk + winter”. It’s just nonsensical, mostly because 冬 is used here to help the reader guess the sound. The situation is only worse with multiple-character words like ‘蒲公英’.
Establishing causality is one of the most difficult things to do, and therefore it makes good sense to be skeptical of such claims.
pinyin.info (as Akikonomu recommends) is a great source of information on this topic. I particularly like Moser’s opinion piece on Why Chinese is so damn hard.
hmmm… off the top of my head, 妙
a couple more things:
1. (splitting hairs here) honda is 本田 and not 成田; the latter is narita, as in narita airport;
2. yes, japanese kanji and korean hanja are pronounced the chinese way in mainland china too; thus “三星” is not pronounced “samsung” in chinese, even though it is in , but “san xing” in putonghua, and so on.
(though i’m myself not entirely comfortable with the fact that the chinese language does not attempt to mimic japanese/korean pronunciations of kanji/hanja, instead falling back on the “chinese” pronunciations, but that is another topic of discussion. lol.)
Yeah sorry, mistyped. :p
About 妙, yay! but I wonder if that’s the exception that proves the point. Few + woman = wonderful?
hisashiburi…
Just had to comment because this is an issue close to my heart. I really think the problem lies in our attitude towards a language. I hate it every time our national daily writes about how it’s important to learn Chinese because of the ascendancy of China. Or about all the financial advantages of being able to speak it. Parents are satisfied only when their child attains good grades in school. It becomes so dollars-and-cents that it’s no wonder our children hate it so much. I still remember my Chinese teacher telling me that she was only there to ensure we all passed Chinese so we could go on to university.
I think if we shift our focus to a deeper appreciation of the culture and language, we will see better results than simply shoveling Chinese characters down our children’s throats. Ironically I developed a greater interest and appreciation for languages ever since I arrived in the US, because the approach here is so different. You learn a language to better understand a culture, and the big bucks that come along are just an added bonus. I have seen Americans become better at Chinese than a lot of Singaporeans, simply because they had a deeper appreciation and interest that was fostered by the teaching methods here.
What do you think of singaporedissident.blogspot.com?
a benign character that doesn’t refer to female beauty
What about 嫁 = adding a female to the home? Wonder how matrilineal ethnic groups in Yunnan would translate this word from Mandarin into their own language. Don’t know if there is an equivalent in their language since in their societies men ‘marry into’ their wives’ families…
Also seems strange that woman + horse = mother
A whole list of characters with this radical to analyse: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?cdqrad=38
Im: I wouldn’t consider 嫁 to be ‘benign’, but a ‘neutral’ character.
some things:
1. The result is nothing short of tragic - many Chinese speaking Singaporeans don’t have true monolingual proficiency in Chinese. I mean this in the sense that the vast and overwhelming majority of Chinese-speaking Singaporeans that I know, even those from “Cina” backgrounds, are not entirely comfortable forming a single sentence in pure Chinese for anything other than the most trivial of statements. For example, even something as simple as “I want to shop at Takashimaya” is most often rendered as “我要去 taka shopping”. Saying the correct “我要去高岛屋逛街” would sound strange and overly pendantic to them.
you are wrong. as a linguistic student, i count “我要去 taka shopping” as a case of code-switching, just like most of the other sentences not formed in purely chinese, as you mentioned. very few cases of codeswitching are due to low proficiency (as you think). most are, indeed, due to various social factors. as coulmas (2006) says, the social environments in which code-switching occurs are varied, and accordingly, many social variables which potentially influence speakers’ choice of language in coversation need to be considered… [these include] community norms and values, ethnicity, level of education, etc.
2. to consider ‘that for English speakers, Chinese is really, really difficult to learn compared to many other languages’ a fact is really an overgeneralization. i don’t have any specific studies on hand at the moment, but i do know that learning languages is a complex matter - some english speakers can pick up mandarin easily, some cannot; some mandarin speakers can pick up english easily, some cannot - have seen a couple of studies in psycholinguistics and otherwise, which have not yet proven a viable explanation for these discrepancies. again, it is likely that there are multiple factors involved.
3. what is true bilingualism to you?
4. why do you dismiss 珊瑚 or 打喷嚏 as mostly useless vocab? what then is not useless?
jun:
1. Maybe I didn’t make my point clearly enough.
I do not deny that code switching occurs natually in multilingual societies, nor am I saying that code switching is necessarily indicative of low proficiency in all cases
What I am saying is that even if pressed to form complete sentences in pure Chinese or English, many Singaporeans are unable to do so, or can only do so with considerable effort. I don’t think you can explain that away with code-switching.
2. Yes, it’s an overgeneralization, if you like taking my statements out of context. Obviously talent for learning languages is variable; clearly some people have better ears for languages than others. However, surely you don’t deny that it is easier to learn a new language that has more similar to languages that you already know. That was the main point.
3. To me, true bilingualism means lots of things, but in particular I think a truly multilingual person should be perfectly comfortable using any of the languages he/she knows, be it in combination (e.g. in code switching) or purely in one language. I don’t see many Singaporeans doing well on the latter end.
4. When was the last time you had occasion to say or write 珊瑚 or 打喷嚏?
1. how would you define ‘pure’ mandarin or english (or even any other language)? is it fully in either?
2. it may be very, very much easier to learn a new language that is similar to languages that you already know, or it may not.
eg, chinese may or may not be easier to learn for english speakers, as compared to other languages. this depends on multiple factors, aside from how ‘talented’ one may be in learning an additional language in the first place. eg, are we talking of a monolingual english speaker? which ‘other languages’ are we talking about?
3. there is no such person - nobody is ‘perfectly’ comfortable in any language, much less in a variety of languages that s/he knows in any and all contexts. language itself is not a complete tool in expressing ourselves. have you heard expressions such as ‘oh, words fail me!’ (in english), or ‘i don’t know what to say’ or ‘i’m speechless’ (in any other language).
4. why should frequency of use (or the lack thereof) make such conceptual terms useless? (when was the last time you had the occasion to use ‘coral’?) again - what then is not useless?
NB thanks awfully to auntie unewolke.
More monstrous sentences you hear:
今天的weather很好
来，我们玩game
Chinese is hard to pick up for those who only speak languages where meaning does not depend on tone. The tones seem to be what get most adult learners of Chinese that I know/know of.
Illiteracy and language difficulty
In discussing the question whether it is hard to learn Chinese, someone has suggested that there is a co-relation between illiteracy in China and the difficulty in learning the Chinese language. This is saying the right thing for the wrong reason.
Illiteracy is a worldwide phenomenon. It has less, if at all, to do with linguistic difficulties. UNESCO statistics show that for 2005, the selected estimates of illiteracy for people aged 15 & above are: the world-18.3%, Africa-35.2%, America-6.0%, Europe-1.4%, East Asia/the Pacific-10.8%, South & West Asia-40.9%.
These figures show that illiteracy has more to do with non-linguistic factors than linguistic difficulties. These non-linguistic factors include the level of development, poverty, lack of opportunities and facilities amongst others.
Europe, America and East Asia/the Pacific are amongst regions with the lowest levels of illiteracy below the world’s percentage (18.3%). This is because they are more developed than regions such as Africa (35.2) and South/West Asia (40.9%). Lee Seng Giap
Hi there,
Thanks for stopping by!
I agree that based on these statistics, non-linguistic factors appear to explain more of the data on illiteracy than linguistic factors. However, the data cannot show us how it is intrinsically more difficult to learn one language relative to others in order to attain the same level of literacy.
Also do you have a causal analysis to show that illiteracy is caused _by_ lack of economic development? I’m cautious to go from correlation to causation here.
I don’t think Chinese is too difficult to learn. When I was in School we has a lot of people from HK, China and Japan and I ended up picking up a bit. I guess the fact that I liked some of the Chinese girls helped
Given that you need to know 10,000 (?) characters to read a simple novel, and the word doesn’t tell you how to pronounce it, it’s quite certain it’s hard to learn compared to other languages.
“King Sejong explained that he created the new script because the Korean language was different from Chinese; using Chinese characters (known as hanja) to write was so difficult for the common people that only privileged aristocrats (yangban), usually male, could read and write fluently. The majority of Koreans were effectively illiterate before the invention of Hangul.
Hangul was designed so that even a commoner could learn to read and write; the Haerye says “A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.”"