If you lay apart the expletives, the poster said that Chinese realize their language is hard to pick up for foreigners. So their strategy seems to be learning English instead of holding their breath for rest of the world learning Mandarin. Do you disagree with this assessment?
If you do, where exactly? Do you suggest that all languages and writing systems are equally easy to learn as a second language? If not, do you consider Mandarin to be easier or as easy to learn as English?
I, for one, find Mandarin damn hard to learn (doing it my first year), and the script is indeed the toughest part. While I find it visually elegant, it is fairly irregular, prompting for massive amount of drill and memorization in learning. (I knew two other foreign languages and two natively before approaching Mandarin, so I have some perspective here). Many people seem to share such experience, i.e. people reliably find Chinese hard.
If you lay apart the expletives, the poster said that Chinese realize their language is hard to pick up for foreigners. So their strategy seems to be learning English instead of holding their breath for rest of the world learning Mandarin. Do you disagree with this assessment?
If you do, where exactly? Do you suggest that all languages and writing systems are equally easy to learn as a second language? If not, do you consider Mandarin to be easier or as easy to learn as English?
I, for one, find Mandarin damn hard to learn (doing it my first year), and the script is indeed the toughest part. While I find it visually elegant, it is fairly irregular, prompting for massive amount of drill and memorization in learning. (I knew two other foreign languages and two natively before approaching Mandarin, so I have some perspective here). Many people seem to share such experience, i.e. people reliably find Chinese hard.
Oh, and I found where from that reference to the heavenly script stuck in my head: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html