What do you find most difficult in learning Chinese?

<<The number of Chinese characters is not infinite.
Compared with the number of words in English, the number of Chinese characters is just a glass of small beer compared with a full pond of water. >>

Even if you know all 3000 characters, that doesn't mean you know every word, because there are all the combinations of characters and the like.

lob Sat Jan 17, 2009 8:32 am GMT
<<Even if you know all 3000 characters, that doesn't mean you know every word, because there are all the combinations of characters and the like.>>

Unless he is an outright dumbo, compund words are just a piece of cake to any learner!
The exceptional conciseness and expressiveness of the Chinese language precisely lies in its ability to express new ideas through the infinite combinations of characters!

<< Normally most of us would just pronounce the word by taking apart the character in halves and choosing to pronounce the easier half of the character (or I'd like to call it sub-character) whose pronounciation we know. >>

That's really interesting - could you give me an example of a character which might be unknown like this?

<<<<Caspian Sat Jan 17, 2009 3:59 pm GMT
<< Normally most of us would just pronounce the word by taking apart the character in halves and choosing to pronounce the easier half of the character (or I'd like to call it sub-character) whose pronounciation we know. >>

That's really interesting - could you give me an example of a character which might be unknown like this?>>>>

It may sound a bit complicated, but I indeed would like to try to explain that to you with an example.

Suppose someone reading a passage of texts meets the phrase 瞠目结舌 (which can be literally translated as "be wide-eyed and tongue-tied", meaning "someone is struck dumb by surprise or unexpected things") and doesn't know the pronounciation of the first character 瞠 in it. What would he or she do?

Let's take a closer look of what the character 瞠 is like.

It is obvious that 瞠 is made up of two parts, the left part 目 and the right part 堂. Specifically, the left part 目 being a most comonly-used character itself, semanticaly means "eye", hinting that the word 瞠 has something to do with "eye"; in contrast, the right part 堂 also being an existing commonly-used character which means "hall", is pronounced as "táng" (second tone), a pronounciation that even primary school kids should know. So, when 目 and 堂 combine to form a new character 瞠, people who do not know its pronounciation will be most likely to choose to pronounce it as "táng" by taking the left part 堂 to represent its pronounciation, as is phonetically the case with most xingshengzi characeters, where the right part is usually used to give clue to the pronounciation of the whole characeter. Normally, people do this, myself included, when they encounter new characeters they don't know how to pronounce, and that works fairly well in most cases. But in this case 瞠, that method fails. The correct pronounciation of 瞠 is "chēng" (first tone), you see, totally different from "táng". This kind of mispronounciation is not uncommon among native Chinese speakers. Hope I've made msyself understood on this issue! Having that said, I also hope you may have easier feelings next time when learning Chinese characters' pronounciations. LOL(*^__^*)

Oh I am sorry there is a critical mistake in the above reply.
Read this one plz!

Suppose someone reading a passage of texts meets the phrase 瞠目结舌 (which can be literally translated as "be wide-eyed and tongue-tied", meaning "someone is struck dumb by surprise or unexpected things") and doesn't know the pronounciation of the first character 瞠 in it. What would he or she do?

Let's take a closer look of what the character 瞠 is like.

It is obvious that 瞠 is made up of two parts, the left part 目 and the right part 堂. Specifically, the left part 目 being a most comonly-used character itself, semanticaly means "eye", hinting that the word 瞠 has something to do with "eye"; in contrast, the right part 堂 also being an existing commonly-used character which means "hall", is pronounced as "táng" (second tone), a pronounciation that even primary school kids should know. So, when 目 and 堂 combine to form a new character 瞠, people who do not know its pronounciation will be most likely to choose to pronounce it as "táng" by taking the RIGHT part 堂 to represent its pronounciation, as is phonetically the case with most xingshengzi characeters, where the right part is usually used to give clue to the pronounciation of the whole characeter. Normally, people do this, myself included, when they encounter new characeters they don't know how to pronounce, and that works fairly well in most cases. But in this case 瞠, that method fails. The correct pronounciation of 瞠 is "chēng" (first tone), you see, totally different from "táng". This kind of mispronounciation is not uncommon among native Chinese speakers. Hope I've made msyself understood on this issue! Having that said, I also hope you may have easier feelings next time when learning Chinese characters' pronounciations. LOL(*^__^*)

Some books about the learning of Mandarin by the Western authors.

The guide to Kuan Hua (1906)
Author: Goh; Hopkins, L. C. (Lionel Charles), 1854-1952
Publisher: Shanghai, Kelly
http://www.archive.org/details/guidetokuanhua00gohhuoft

A Mandarin-Romanized dictionary of Chinese (1907)
Author: MacGillivray, D. (Donald), b. 1862
Publisher: Shanghai, Printed at the Presbyterian mission press
http://www.archive.org/details/mandarinromanize00macgrich

A dictionary of colloquial idioms in the Mandarin dialect (1873)
Author: Giles, Herbert Allen, 1845-1935
Publisher: Shanghai, A.H. De Carvalho
http://www.archive.org/details/dictionaryofcoll00gilerich

Western Mandarin, or The spoken language of western China; (1900)
Author: Grainger, Adam
Publisher: Shanghai, American Presbyterian mission press
http://www.archive.org/details/westernmandarino00grairich

The books listed above are just too old!
Learn to speak modern Chinese speak!

Shuimo I will never learn Chinese. It's an awful language

its complicated grammar. Chinese verbs and declensions are a nightmare
:-)

<<Baum Sun Jan 18, 2009 2:59 pm GMT
Shuimo I will never learn Chinese. It's an awful language>>

Tell me a language that is not an awful language to you?!