[2021-05-17]QA讨论：为什么我觉得中文很容易学？难道是因为它最合理吗？为什么大多数人觉得很难？

Adrien Grandemange Self-studied Chinese for the past 10 years, Software Engineer

【回答】软件工程师，自学中文10年
我认为你觉得很容易，是因为你对中文有强烈的学习动机。这种动机可能让你把中文理想化了一些。
事实上，中文是一门很难学的语言。是什么让我们感到困难呢？事实上，它与英语和其他印欧语系有很大的不同。我把它看作是一种异域风格。
中文也是一种异常丰富的语言，因为它的书写系统使它承载了许多代代相传的历史。汉字从古至今的无穷无尽，是一种迷人的语言和文化财富。

That makes truely mastering Chinese an impossible task, because its wealth is near infinite. While it is true of every language to some extent, it is particularly true for Chinese. And that's a good thing.
Two things stem from this amazing richness and exoticism. The first thing is that it boosts your motivation to learn this language among others. Learning Chinese will bring you a deep wealth of understanding and insight that Spanish couldn't.The other thing is that it remains a very difficult language.

这使得真正掌握中文成为一项不可能的任务，因为它的财富几乎是无限的。虽然在某种程度上每种语言都是如此，但在中文里尤其如此。这是一件好事。
这种让人惊异的丰富性和异域风格会带来两点。第一，它能激发你学习这门语言的动力。学习中文会给你带来西班牙语所没有的深刻的理解和洞察力。第二，它仍然是一种非常困难的语言。

In short, your strong motivation makes it look very easy to you, while it is actually very hard. How does that happen exactly?
I understand that you are still at a rather early stage in your learning. That means there are still many aspects of the language that are not visible to you yet.
Your mind has a simplified model of how Chinese works. Surely the grammar looks easy. Many people answered that there is no grammar in Chinese, and that makes it really easy. That is not true. Chinese has grammar like any other language.
Probably at that stage Chinese appears to you as legos. Characters are bricks that you can combine in a very flexible way to build sentences.To some extent this is true, there is a certain flexibility in Chinese grammar compared to Indo-European languages.

简而言之，你强烈的学习动机让你感觉很容易，但实际上是很难的。为什么有这情况呢？
我知道你的学习还处于相当初级的阶段。这意味着语言的许多方面对你来说还是未知的。
你的大脑对中文的运作有一个简化的模型。当然，语法看起来很简单。许多人回答说，中文没有语法，这点使它真的很容易。事实并非如此。中文和其他语言一样有语法。
也许在那个阶段，中文对你来说就是乐高玩具。汉字是砖块，你可以用非常灵活的方式组合起来构成句子。从某种程度上来说，中文的语法比印欧语系有一定的灵活性。

In your simplified model of Chinese, there are probably only a few simple rules from which you can build any sentence, your imagination being the only limit. And that makes Chinese look like an easy language to you.
The truth is that like in any language, there are many implicit rules and conventions that form the structure of the language. Without these rules you wouldn't be able to construct complex and understandable sentences.
These rules are numerous, sometimes very complex, convoluted, and there are many exceptions, just like in any language.
You are probably overlooking pronunciation too. Quite a few phonemes (sounds) are specific to Chinese, and many foreign Chinese learners think they have those mastered while their actual pronunciation is a rough approximation of the real sound (that tends to map to the vowels and consonants of their native language).

在你的简化的中文模型中，可能只有一些简单的规则，你可以从中构建任何一个句子，而你的想象力是唯一的限制。这使得中文对你来说看起来像一门简单的语言。
事实上，就像任何语言一样，有许多隐含的规则和惯例构成了语言的结构。如果没有这些规则，你就不能构造出复杂和能理解的句子。
这些规则数量很多，有时非常复杂，让人费解，也有许多例外，就像任何语言一样。
你可能也忽略了发音。相当多的音素(声)是中文特有的，许多外国的中文学习者认为他们已经掌握了这些，但他们的实际发音，是近似真实声音的粗略版(倾向于映射到他们母语的元音和辅音)。

Tones are very difficult too. Pronouncing mā má mǎ mà ma in isolation is one thing. Even pairs of syllables with various tone combinations can be easily mastered with a bit of practice. But consistently using the tones correctly in a conversation with complete sentences, in a fluent way, is a different matter.
For most foreign Chinese learners, they never make it there. They might acquire a large vocabulary, but they still fail after decades of learning Chinese, where a native 4-year old would have absolutely no problem.
I think there's only a handful of westerners who can actually pronounce tones like a native, while most of them think they make a pretty good job of it. Most often they're not aware of their own mistakes.

声调也很难。把mā má mǎ mà只用ma来发音是一回事。只要稍加练习，即使是对不同声调组合的音节也很容易掌握。但是在完整句子的对话中，始终如一地正确使用声调，又是另一回事。
对于大多数外国的中文学习者来说，他们从来没有达到这程度。他们可能掌握了大量的词汇，但是经过几十年的中文学习，他们仍然不行，而一个土生土长的4岁小孩绝对不会有任何问题。
我认为只有少数西方人能够像本地人一样发音，而大多数人认为他们的发音不错。大多数时候，他们并没有意识到自己的发音错误。

I'm not saying this idealization of Chinese is a bad thing. Actually I think it's good in the early stages that you idealize the language a bit. That prevents your motivation from dying off. It allows you to learn a lot in a short time, while not being discouraged by your mistakes.
But remember that, at some point you'll see that you need to update your internal model of what Chinese is, if you want to make further progress. You'll need to leave your comfort zone, and dive into the next layer of complexity, richness and challenge.
You'll need to do this more than once, and it will require a lot of time and motivation. You'll need a continuous and strong thirst of learning more, to consistently jump from one layer of understanding to the next.
To conclude, the only thing I can wish for you is to keep finding Chinese easy, because it will need to remain easy for another few decades before you reach a fluency comparable to a native educated adult!

我并不是说把中文理想化是一件坏事。事实上，我认为在早期阶段，把语言理想化一点是有好处的。这样可以防止你的学习动力消失。它可以让你在短时间内学到很多东西，而不会因为你的错误而灰心丧气。
但请记住，如果你想取得进一步的进步，在某个时候你会发现你需要更新你的内在中文模式。你需要离开你的舒适区，踏入下一层复杂、丰富和挑战的区域。
你需要这样做好几次，而且需要大量的时间和动力。你需要一种持续而强烈的学习欲望，才能不断地从一层理解跳到另一层理解。
总而言之，我唯一希望你能做的就是，继续轻松地学习中文，因为在你达到一个和土生土长的受过教育的成年人一样流利使用的程度之前，还需要几十年的时间！
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fake person
Very well said :D I feel like I need to applaud you. This post deserves way more upvotes for sure.

【回复】说得很好 :D 我要为你鼓掌。这个回答肯定值得更多的赞。

Wei Shi
others are like 2 dimensional symbol, while Chinese more like 3D pictures which better interact emotionly.

【回复】其他语言就像二维符号，而中文更像是三维图片，更好的情感互动。
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Brendan O'Kane non-native but reasonably good speaker of Mandarin.
One of the reasons so many people find Chinese hard is that they expect to find it hard, thanks to the sort of attitude that you can see in other answers in this thread. There's an amazing number of people who are willing to believe that Chinese is somehow a special language, unlearnable by mere mortals and used exclusively for high-level discussions of classical literature.
For some reason, some people can't tell the difference between Mandarin and the entirety of the Chinese literary and linguistic traditions. I guess the confusion probably isn't exclusive to Chinese -- my "English" classes in school covered both the mechanics of the language and the language's literary tradition.
But: Right now, a semester and a half in, you're still laying the foundation for your future study of Chinese. This takes time and effort, and it's important to get as strong a foundation as you can.
As you've found, Chinese is a lot more straightforward than Spanish and English in some ways -- the grammar is an absolute joy to learn compared to -- but there are still plenty of hidden complexities in that area, and they might not be visible to you yet. Chinese textbooks tend to present things a little too simply.

【回答】非母语但普通话说得很好。
许多人觉得中文很难的原因之一是他们希望中文很难，这要归功于你在这个话题的其他回答中看到的那种态度。有相当多的人愿意相信中文是一种特殊的语言，普通人学不会，只能用于高级别的古典文学讨论。
由于某些原因，有些人无法区分普通话和整个中国文学和语言传统的区别。我想这种困惑可能并不只限于中文——我在学校的“英语”课程既涵盖了语言的机制，也涵盖了语言的文学传统。
但是：现在，一个半学期过去了，你仍然在为将来的中文学习打下基础。这需要时间和精力，而且尽可能地打下坚实的基础是很重要的。
正如你发现的那样，在某些方面，中文比西班牙语和英语更加直接了当，相比，语法的学习绝对很快乐，但仍有许多隐藏的复杂性，你可能还没发现。中文的教科书往往倾向于把事情简单化一些。

The dialogues and reading exercises you're encountering in your classes have been specifically developed to be as welcoming and helpful as possible for new learners of Chinese. After a little more study, you'll find yourself moving beyond the materials you encounter in class and reading novels, watching movies, or browsing online forums. What you'll find when you do this is that Mandarin and other Chinese languages, as used in day to day life, are more fun and less predictable than what you've been exposed to in your textbooks -- as would be the case for any other language. You'll come up with all sorts of new questions that hadn't occurred to you before, and your textbooks and dictionaries might not be capable of answering them. If you move beyond the modern language and start delving into China's pre-modern literary tradition, you'll encounter an unbelievable wealth of material written in a language that doesn't bear much resemblance to Mandarin at all. But there'll be time for that later, and there's no reason for you to worry about it just yet.

你们在课堂上遇到的对话和阅读练习都是专门为了尽可能欢迎和帮助新的中文学习者而设计的。经过多一点的学习，你会发现自己超越了你在课堂上学到的内容，然后阅读小说，看电影，或浏览论坛，当你这样做的时候，你会发现，日常生活中使用的普通话和其他中文语言，比你在课本上看到的更有趣，更难以预测，任何其他语言都是如此。你会想到各种各样的新问题，这些问题你以前从未想到过，而你的课本和字典可能无法回答这些问题。如果你走出现代语言，开始深入研究中国的前现代文学传统，你会发现，用一种与普通话没有多少相似之处的语言写成的作品，数量多得让人难以置信。但是以后还有时间做这件事的，所以现在还没有理由担心。

If you ever go to China, you'll find very quickly that "Mandarin" is an extremely broad term, and that the Mandarin spoken even in Beijing will probably not sound very much like the Mandarin in your textbooks. Once you get used to Mandarin as it's actually used, you'll find that Chinese speakers enjoy puns, jokes, and wordplay at least as much as English speakers do -- and you can expect to encounter things that will baffle and delight you in equal measure. But there'll be time for that later.
For the time being, though, it sounds as if you have exactly the right attitude -- which is that Chinese is a mostly learnable language spoken mostly by regular people for mostly ordinary purposes. Keep that in mind, keep working on acquiring the necessary foundation, stay enthusiastic, and you'll be in a good position to start fully enjoying Chinese further down the line. Best of luck to you!

如果你去过中国，你很快会发现“普通话”是一个非常宽泛的术语，即使在北京说的普通话也可能听起来不太像你教科书里的普通话。一旦你习惯了普通话，你会发现说中文的人至少和说英语的人一样喜欢双关语、笑话和文字游戏，而且你可以会遇到同样让你困惑和高兴的事情。但是以后会有时间的。
不过，就目前而言，听起来你的态度似乎完全正确，中文是一门基本上可以学习的语言，大多数普通人只是为了日常用途而使用。记住这一点，继续努力获得必要的基础，保持热情，你就会处于一个很好的位置，开始更快一步充分享受中文。祝你好运！
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Anonymous
I'm thinking this is a contrarian statement made by a positively minded student. Chinese is difficult as successive levels of knowledge. Consider the following:Northerners speak significantly differently from Southerners.Idiomatic sayings are seemingly without end. There are idioms to explain Westerner concepts and then 2x more.Words and phrases are being created at a pace -arguably faster than any other major language.

【回复】我认为这是一个积极的学生提出的逆反说法。中文是一门难学的学问。考虑以下几点：北方人和南方人说话明显不同。成语似乎没有尽头。解释西方概念的习语，还有两倍以上。词汇和短语的创造速度，可以说比任何其他主要语言都要快。

Brendan O'Kane
Sure, any learner of Chinese is going to run into difficulties, and the age and number of Chinese languages is going to contribute to that -- but I don't see any reason for people to pretend that Mandarin is somehow unfathomable for non-native speakers. It's just a language and anybody who's willing to put in the time and effort can learn it.

【作者回复】当然，任何一个学习中文的人都会遇到困难，而中文的年龄和数量都造成了这种困难——但我认为没有任何理由假装普通话对于非母语人士来说是很难的。它只是一种语言，任何愿意花时间和精力的人都可以学会它。

Sam Kaplan
I understand that billions of people can speak Chinese. :)

【回复】我知道有数十亿人会说中文 :)

R. Shreevatsa
By the way: Sanskrit grammar _is_ an absolute joy to learn! :-)

【回复】顺便说一句：梵语的语法绝对是学习的乐趣！ :-)

Rui
Bravo!rebuild my way of understanding my own language as well as English .every time u think u get to know it,there always comes more.

【回复】精彩! 重建我理解自己的语言和英语的方式。每次你认为你了解它了，总是会有更多疑问。

Rishen Huang
Agree with you! Chinese is not a difficult language that you can understand just a few sentences ,then you will find you can talk with chinese!But the classical chineses…hhhhh…As a chinese, I think it's extremely hard to understand correctly

【回复】同意你的观点！中文并不是一门难学的语言，你只要能听懂几句话，你就会发现你可以用中文交流了！但是文言文... 呃... 作为一个中国人，我认为要正确理解是非常困难的。
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Kang Jing lives in Singapore
it is true that people find it easy when they just begin to study chinese. It does not have tenses, verb form and chinese grammar is quite simple as compared to English. Language is a tool, when it comes to the writing part, you must know how to let native chinese speaker understand what are you trying to convey and convince him or her.
The first thing first, you should know that there is difference between the way that the westerns think and the way that orientals think. one of the examples is essay. in english, people always start a paragraph with topic sentence. however, when you read an esssy which is written in chinese, the topic sentence is always at the end of a paragraph.

【回答】在新加坡居住
当人们刚开始学习中文的时候，确实很容易。它没有时态和动词形式，中文的语法也比英语简单。语言是一种工具，当涉及到写的部分，你必须知道如何让母语为中文的人理解你想要表达的东西，并让他/她明白。
首先，你应该知道西方人的思维方式和东方人的思维方式是有区别的。其中一个例子就是散文。在英语中，人们总是以主题句开始段落。然而，当你阅读一篇中文的散文时，主题句总是在段落的结尾。

in the main body paragraph of an essay, to convince the reader, english speaker use 'state - explain - elaborate - conclude', but chinese will give examples and specific details. people call the western thinking patter as "chunk-up" and orientals thinking pattern as "chunk-down".
What i am trying to say here is that you should know how to think in the way that orientals think when the readers of your essay are chinese. that is the difficult part for those who learn chinese as a second language. a lot of my singaporean friends struggle with writing chinese composition, and when i read their compos, despite many grammar errors, i find out that the way they write is "chunk-up". to write a good essay in chinese, you have to construct you sentence and arrange your paragraphs carefully in "chunk-down". it is still understandable if you write in "chunk-up" pattern, but native chinses speakers will find it a bit weird as they subconsciously are not convinced.
By the way, i am a native chinese speaker and learning english now.

在一篇文章的正文段落中，为了让读者明白，母语英语的人使用“状态-解释-阐述-总结”，但中文会给出例子和具体的细节。有人说西方的思维方式是“上堆式”，而东方的思维方式为“下切式”。
我在这里想说的是，当你的文章的读者是中国人时，你应该要知道如何以东方人的思维方式来思考。对于那些把中文作为第二语言的人来说，这是最困难的部分。我很多新加坡的朋友都在努力写中文作文，当我读他们的作文时，尽管有很多语法错误，我发现他们写作的方式是“上堆式”。要想用中文写出一篇好文章，你必须用“下切式”组织你的句子，并仔细排列你的段落。如果你用“上堆”的方式写，虽然也可以理解，但是母语中文的人会觉得有点奇怪，因为他们潜意识里并没有确信。
顺便说一下，我的母语是中文，现在正在学习英语。
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Benjamin Azada
Very insightful. This is why when you translate a Chinese essay into English it sounds very 啰嗦。

【回复】很有见地。这就是为什么当你把一篇中文文章翻译成英文时，它读起来非常啰嗦。

Ian Lau
I think CHINESE has tense，its subtle and with some symbol characters like 了，过，I must say，its too changful to master even for native speaker.

【回复】我认为中文是有时态的，它很微妙，有一些象征性的字符，比如“了”，“过”，我必须说，它太多变了，即使是母语的人也很难掌握。
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Yuè Zhāng
Julien Gaudfroy, a French man who is extremely gifted in learning foreign languages, speaks flawless American English and German. He spent 5 years learning Chinese everyday for about 8 hours, and then he came to china. Having lived here for about 10 years, now he can be labelled as a perfect Mandarin Chinese speaker.
I'm very glad that you find Chinese is easy, but what you are seeing is that grammatically Mandarin Chinese is, indeed, easy, even easier than English( no offence )
However, did it occurr to you that with more grammar rules there are more logic explanations to interpret certain sentences and paragraphs, but with less rules, simply there is no reason for a lot of things, and there is no way to memorise all of them by learning through your textbooks. Only through years of practice, massive reading and conversation can you really master part of it.

【回答】
朱利安·高德弗洛伊，一个在学习外语方面极具天赋的法国人，能说一口非常流利的美式英语和德语。他花了5年时间，每天学习中文大约8个小时，然后他来到中国。在这里生活了大约10年，现在他可以说是一个流利的普通话使用者。
我很高兴你发现中文很容易，但你看到的是，从语法上来说，普通话确实比英语更容易(无意冒犯)
然而，你有没有发现，语法规则越多，解释某些句子和段落的逻辑解释就越多，但规则越少，很多事情就没有理由了，也没有办法通过你的课本来记住所有的东西。只有通过多年的实践，大量的阅读和对话，你才能真正掌握其中的一部分。

Besides, ancient terms and dialects (almost all the dialects are grammatically much more difficult and unpredictable than Mandarin Chinese) have huge impact on our daily communication, you can't have a proper conversation without it. And different from western languages, all chinese languages don't see accuracy and logic as important, they tend to be far more imaginative (by using imagery) than any other mainstream languages in the world.
I don't mean to scare you, but nothing's really easy in this world, especially when it comes to languages.
People tend to rank languages by its difficulty, the truth is languages simply cannot be regarded this way. I consider language not knowledge, it's more of a habit within human nature, and speaking another language is more of a skill unless you are a linguistic. But it's true that languages comes with different challenges to different people, say, French, Spanish and Italian speakers could learn any other Romance languages with less effort than most of people, but may be not that easy to learn chinese.
Chinese comes from a totally different cultural background to all westerners. What I am trying to say is, yes, Chinese is more time consuming than most of the mainstream languages (this is a statistically-based fact). I'm not saying it is hard, because language is no knowledge.

除此之外，古老的术语和方言（几乎所有的方言在语法上都比普通话更难预料）对我们的日常交流有着巨大的影响，没有它你就不能进行正常的对话。与西方语言不同的是，所有的中国语言都不认为准确性和逻辑性很重要，它们往往比世界上任何其他主流语言更富有想象力(通过使用意象)。
我不是想吓唬你，但在这个世界上没有什么是真正容易的，尤其是涉及到语言。
人们往往根据语言的难易程度来给它排名，事实是语言根本不能被这样看待。我认为语言不是知识，它更多的是人性中的一种习惯，说另一种语言更多的是一种技能，除非你是一个语言学家。但是，语言对于不同的人来说确实有不同的挑战，比如，说法语、西班牙语和意大利语的人可以比大多数人更轻松地学习任何其他的罗曼斯语系，但是学习中文可能没那么容易。
中国人的文化背景与所有西方人完全不同。我想说的是，是的，学习中文比学习大多数主流语言要花费更多的时间(这是基于统计数据的事实)。我不是说这很难，因为语言不是知识。

Xun Wang Data Scientist
A language is just a set of semantics to describe and logic around things. As people pointed out, the more languages you learn, the more commonality you can find among their semantics, and the easier it is to pick up a new one. Or maybe your brain is grown in such a way.That's great.
Chinese does not have tenses, which is a recurring source of mistake for my English after 15+ years of learning. Chinese rarely use clauses, which keeps the stream of logic straight as a laser beam. Chinese is combinatoric, which creates new words from old words. Chinese characters are all single-syllable, which is more phonetically consistent... There are plenty of features in Chinese which make it an easy language.

【回答】数据科学家
语言只是一套描述事物的语义和逻辑。正如人们所说的那样，你学习的语言越多，你就能在它们的语义中找到越多的共性，也就越容易学会一门新的语言。也许你的大脑是以这样的方式成长的。这很好。
中文没有时态，而这是我学了15年+的英语后经常犯的错误。中国人很少使用从句，这就保持了逻辑的顺畅，就像激光一样笔直。中文是组合式的，从旧词中创造出新词。汉字都是单音节的，发音比较一致... 中文有许多特点，使它成为一门简单易学的语言。

However, the Chinese language is highly contextual in the sense that the exact meaning and sentiment of sentences are usually inferred, not clearly defined. You might have not been exposed to that kind of ambiguity yet under a controlled learning environment. This could be a challenge in real-world scenarios.
I do hope you've found a generalizable shortcut to learning Chinese. If you can share your experience with every one else, maybe the world will start learning Chinese and many Chinese can save the trouble of learning English in the future!

然而，中文是高度语境化的语言，句子的确切意义和情感通常是推断出来的，而不是明确的定义。在有限的学习环境中，你可能还没有接触到这种模糊性。在现实世界的场景中，这可能是一个挑战。
我真希望你已经找到了一条学习中文的通用捷径。如果你能与其他人分享你的经验，也许世界将开始学习中文，许多中国人可以省去在未来学习英语的麻烦！

David Abrahamson China & Myanmar, Environmental Work
This is great that you're having such a positive experience with Mandarin and doing well in it. Without knowing too much about your experience, I'm betting you're finding it easy for the following reasons (in no particular order of importance).
1. You have a good memory and are able to quickly transfer short term memory to long term. I studied Mandarin for years and, as with my study in other subjects (languages in particular) I would spend hours memorizing certain words, and then wake up the next day with them forgotten. My brain requires a sort of repetition before the words stick, but I know other talented Mandarin speakers that do not need as much repetition.
2. Mandarin is your second foreign language. Since you've already worked through years of studying Spanish (with success I presume?), you have exercised the parts of your brain that are related to reading and listening (one part) and speaking and writing (a distinct separate part) in addition to other areas such as concentration and memory. In studying psychology I learned that the brain, like a muscle, gets stronger the more you use it and you've been exercising the language parts, so in a way it is natural in some respects that Chinese is easier than Spanish.

【回答】在中国和缅甸，从事环境工作
你对普通话有这样积极的体验，而且学得很好，这很棒。在不太了解你经历的情况下，我打赌你是因为以下原因（没有特别排序）而发现它很容易。
1、你有很好的记忆力，能够很快地将短期记忆转化为长期记忆。我学了好几年的普通话，就像我学习其他科目(特别是语言)一样，我会花好几个小时去记忆某些单词，然后第二天醒来的时候就忘了。我的大脑需要一定程度的重复才能记住单词，但我知道其他有能力的普通话使用者不需要这么多次的重复。
2、普通话是你的第二外语。既然你已经学了多年的西班牙语（我猜是成功的吧？）除了专注力和记忆力之外，你还锻炼了大脑中与阅读和听力(一部分)、说话和写作(独立的部分)相关的能力。在学习心理学的过程中，我发现大脑就像肌肉一样，使用得越多就越健壮，而且你一直在锻炼语言的部分，所以在某种程度上中文比西班牙语简单是很自然的。

3. You have discipline and do what the teacher tells you. Sounds silly, but I'm not being facetious. Going to class, doing the homework, listening to tapes, practicing the characters etc, are all important aspects of comprehensive language learning and are things that many people studying Mandarin do not do. Instead they cram tests, don't listen to tapes and skip the grammar explanations, but this is a mistake. I did not do this my first four months of studying Mandarin and did a piecemeal approach. This was not effective. After talking to friends who had success with the language I paid for a good teacher, did everything she told me to, and listened to my tapes over and over, spending many hours studying and practicing characters. I got much better.

3、你很有纪律，能按照老师说的去做。虽然这听起来很傻，但我不是在开玩笑。上课、做作业、听录音、练习汉字等，这些都是综合语言学习的重要方面，也是许多学习中文的人不会去做的事情。相反，他们死记硬背考试，不听录音，跳过语法解释，这是错的。在学习普通话的前四个月，我并没有这样做，而是采取了零敲碎打的方式。这种做法不管用。在和那些在语言方面取得成功的朋友交谈之后，我花钱请了一位好老师，做她要求我做的所有事情，一遍又一遍地听录音，花了很多时间学习和练习汉字。我变得好多了。

4. You may have a good aptitude for learning languages (Talent). After spending ten years in China, going through the Mandarin learning process myself and meeting learners with varying degrees of success, I think there are three determinants of success with Mandarin: memory ability (#1 here in this list), time expended (related to #3) and that language talent. Time is the most important one in my opinion, and the assiduous learner can overcome deficits in memory or talent. But some people have the talent, can identify how words are used after hearing them in a conversation once, and can put something they learned spoken into written or listening quickly, and fluidly use words they just learned. I'm learning my third language now, Burmese, and I have trouble putting the words I have memorized to use, but some people are naturally good at this.

4、你可能有学习语言的天赋(才能)。在中国呆了10年，我自己也经历了学习中文的过程，并且遇到了不同程度的成功学习者，我认为学习中文成功的决定因素有三个：记忆力（最重要的），花费的时间（与第三点有关）和语言天赋。对我来说，时间是最重要的，努力刻苦的学习者可以克服记忆或天赋的不足。而有些人有这样的天赋，能够在一次谈话中听到单词后，识别这些单词是如何使用的，并且能够把他们所学到的东西迅速地转化为书写或听力，能够流利地使用他们刚刚学到的单词。我现在正在学习我的第三种语言，缅甸语，我很难把我记住的单词拼出来，但有些人天生就擅长这个。

5. You enjoy studying languages, or maybe just enjoy studying Mandarin. If you can find something you enjoy and make a living, then you never have to "work" another day again in your life. Mandarin may seem so easy because you dig it.
As mentioned in other answers you are in the early stages of learning Mandarin but those can be tough for many. If you do not feel challenged, don't worry, Chinese has some exciting complications related to its use of literary metaphors, historical references and poetic allusions that can keep a learner challenged for a lifetime. This doesn't mean it takes a lifetime to learn, and with a solid base you should progress smoothly to the advanced stages. As mentioned there are also a myriad of dialects. But hey, it's a satisfying path and, especially if it's something you enjoy, then you should pursue it to the advanced levels.

5、你喜欢学习语言，或者只是喜欢学习普通话。如果你能找到自己喜欢的事情并以此为生，那么你的生活中就再也不用“工作”了。普通话看起来很简单，是因为你喜欢它。
正如在其他回答中提到的，你还处于学习普通话的早期阶段，但是这些对很多人来说也是很困难的。如果你不觉得有挑战，也不用担心，中文在使用文学隐喻、历史参考和诗歌典故方面有一些让人激动的复杂之处，而这些可以让一个学习者一辈子都有挑战。这并不意味着要花一辈子的时间去学习，有了坚实的基础，你就能顺利地进入高级阶段。正如前面提到的，方言也有很多种。但是，嘿，这是一段让人满足的旅程，特别是，如果它是你喜欢的事情，那么你就应该追求到更高的水平。

Tim Lamb American Living Abroad
Some native speakers like to believe their language is far more complex to learn than Western languages - and that this matters.
You should understand that you only have, at best, an intermediate grasp of the language; it may be because that certain components of Spanish and English that both languages have in common (for example grammatical structures) were more of a challenge for you than they were in Chinese. As a result, Chinese appears more rational to you than either English and Spanish. However, keep in mind that learners of a 3rd language generally have an advantage over 2nd language learners as they better understand the commitment needed to learn a new language and have a method for comprehending new languages that has already succeeded once before. So it may be simply that your proficiency in Spanish is the reason why you find Chinese easier to pick up.

【回答】在海外生活的美国人
一些以英语为母语的人，认为他们的语言(中文)比西方语言复杂得多，而这一点很重要。
你应该明白，你最多只能掌握到这门语言的中级水平；(你觉得容易)这可能是因为西班牙语和英语的某些共同成分(例如语法结构)对你来说比中文更具挑战性。所以，对你来说，中文似乎比英语和西班牙语更合理。然而，请记住，第三语言的学习者通常比第二语言的学习者有优势，因为他们能更好地理解学习一门新语言所需的投入，并且有一种理解新语言的方法，这种方法已经取得了一次成功。所以，简单地说，可能你精通西班牙语就是你觉得中文更容易学的原因。

Yuanbin Phillip Tang Chinese who spent 10+ years in North America
Honestly, I'm happy to hear someone thinking Chinese is easy to learn. I wish our language is easiest to learn in the entire world so that we don't have to be forced to learn English in high schools and pass CET-4s to graduate universities, so let's not discourage whoever is asking the question and hopefully he will become the driving force in promoting Chinese to be the world's language of choice one day =)
To answer the question:Chinese is easy in the beginning as there are literally no grammar rules and people will generally understand you regardless of word order. Speaking Chinese on a native level is another thing though, as I can easily tell friends who immigrated 5 years ago apart from friends who immigrated 15 years ago by hearing them speak Chinese, despite the fact both speak close to perfect mandarin.

【回答】在北美生活了十多年的中国人
说实话，我很高兴听到有人说中文很容易学。我希望我们的语言在全世界是最容易学习的，这样我们就不必被迫在高中学习英语，和通过CET-4考试进入研究生院，所以不要打击提出这个问题的人，希望有一天他能成为推动中文成为世界首选语言的驱动力 =)
回答这个问题：中文一开始很容易，因为它没有语法规则，不管语序如何，人们通常都能理解你的意思。不过，达到母语水平的中文是另一回事，就像我可以很容易地分辨出5年前移民的朋友和15年前移民的朋友，听他们说中文就可以，尽管事实上，他们都能说近乎完美的普通话。

Darren Jansen An eternal student of Chinese
That could depend on who you are.
If your native language is Japanese, then Chinese might be easier for you to learn because you are already familiar with the characters. Or if your native language is Vietnamese, then Chinese tones might be easier for you to learn than for other people.
But if you are native English speaker and you’ve studied other languages, then you might find the grammar of Chinese to be easier than German or Russian grammar for example. Or there may be other elements that seem more logical to you than other languages you’ve studied.

【回答】终生的中文学习者
这可能取决于你是谁了。
如果你的母语是日语，那么中文对你来说可能更容易学习，因为你已经熟悉了汉字。或者如果你的母语是越南语，那么汉语的声调对你来说可能比其他人更容易学习。
但是如果你的母语是英语，而且你学过其他语言，那么你可能会发现中文的语法比德语或俄语的语法要简单。或者，可能还有其他因素让你觉得比学过的其他语言更符合逻辑。

Edward Logan Fluent Mandarin speaker, MA in China Studies (Johns Hopkins SAIS)
I agree with a lot of the other responses that much of the difficulty of Chinese comes from the perceived difficulty of the language.
But I think for you it came easily more because you already knew how to learn a language. I found French much much harder to learn than Chinese, but then again I learned French as a third language, the first language I had learned formally, and Chinese as my fourth. Although Chinese grammar is arguably harder (students years into studying it still make simple errors because of how unintuitive it is), with French and Spanish basically the only parts you need to learn are conjugation and what tenses mean. Few books put Chinese grammar into words well, but if you already have an intuitive understanding of what grammar there is to know, it can make learning Chinese pretty doable.

【回答】普通话流利，中国学研究 硕士(约翰霍普金斯大学)
我同意许多其他的回答，中文的困难很大程度上来自于感知到的语言的困难。
但是我认为对于你来说，这更容易，因为你已经知道如何学习一门语言。我发现法语比中文难学得多，但我又把法语作为第三语言来学习，这是我正式学习的第一门语言，中文是我的第四语言。尽管可以说中文语法更难(学习中文多年，仍然会犯一些简单的错误，因为太不直观了)，对于法语和西班牙语，基本上只需要学习词汇的变化和时态的含义就可以了。很少有书能把中文的语法写得很好，但是如果你已经对中文语法有一个直观的理解，那么学习中文就相当可行了。

Eren Bay studied at Fudan University
Why learning Chinese is easy:
* Lack of grammar, there are so few of them
* 500 characters will be sufficient to communicate with Chinese.
* 2000 characters will make it possible to "understand" any contemporary novel or essay. You can't say that about English.
* There are only 338 combinations of PinYin (phonetic possibility of a character) and four pitches, You can manage to speak as good as a native speaker if you try practicing them.Chinese is my second language and no one can tell that.
Why learning Chinese is hard:
* The abundance of idioms in daily speech. And most of them rooted from classic literature. The literal meaning would make no sense to you . Like 刻舟求剑 （Carve marks on a boat to look for sword: Disregarding the changing circumstances in a foolish way）,or my favorite one 二桃杀三士（Kill three officials with two peaches: Outwit someone.)

【回答】就读于复旦大学
为什么学中文很容易：
* 语法很少
* 掌握500个汉字就可以用中文沟通了。
* 掌握2000个汉字会让我们可能“理解”任何当代小说或散文。你不能说英语也一样。
* 只有338种拼音组合和4种声调，如果你试着练习，你就可以说得和母语的人一样好。没有人知道中文是我的第二语言。
为什么学中文很难：
* 日常用语中丰富的成语。它们大多来源于古典文学。字面上的意思对你来说是没有意义的。比如：“刻舟求剑”（在船上刻痕以寻找剑：用一种愚蠢的方式无视环境的变化），或者是我最喜欢的一个“二桃杀三士”（用两个桃子杀三个官员：用计谋杀人）

* Read between the line. Chinese are too subtle, you have to know how they think to understand their real intentions. This is hardest, even for the native speakers.
* The language(Yes,language) used in classic literature has nothing to do with the verbal language. It would be hard for you to understand poems or anything written before 1900.

* 读懂言外之意。中国人太微妙了，你必须知道他们是怎么想的，才能理解他们的真实想法。这是最难的，即使是对于母语人士来说。
* 古典文学中使用的语言(没错，语言)与口头语言没有任何联系。你很难理解1900年以前写的诗或任何东西。

Michael Thigpen Teacher, Writer
You're probably realizing that Chinese does not have transformational morphology. Chinese does not mark tense, gender, or plurals and has a very consistent grammatical structure at the outset. These challenges to learners of other languages are absent from Chinese.
The challenge in learning Chinese at the early stages is not grammar, but mastering the sounds and tones. It may be that you are naturally talented in that regard and so what is extremely trying for some you find easy.
What you are calling "rational" is that it is transparent how Chinese morphemes are combined together. Germanic languages like English and Romance languages like Spanish also have logical reasons for the roots of many of their words, but due to shifts in sounds and spelling conventions over the years they are not as easy to see.

【回答】教师，作家
你可能已经意识到中文没有转型的形态。中文不标记时态、性别或复数，一开始就有一个非常一致的语法结构。对于其他语言的学习者来说，这些挑战在中文里是不存在的。
在早期阶段学习中文的挑战不是语法，而是掌握发音和声调。也许是因为你在这方面天赋异禀，所以对于一些人来说，极其困难的事情你会觉得很容易。
你所说的“合理性”是指中文语素的组合方式是透明的。日耳曼语（如英语）和罗曼斯语（如西班牙语）的许多单词的词根也有逻辑上的原因，但是由于多年来发音和拼写习惯的变化，这些不那么容易看到了。

Paul Jim
Chinese is easy to learn and you possibly are a great visual-learner!
In daily use, the grammar is tolerent. On getting the basics of Chinese grammar, One doesn't have to pay so much annoying attention to the grammar as it's flexible enough for one use 'imperviously'. And I believe that it is easy for you to snap out of the Latin alphabet system when you're learning Chinese characters. But for one thing, a good penmanship of Chinese takes some place in Chinese learning. The pronunciation is never a problem. Many Chinese people have strange dialects and strong accents, sometimes even unintelligible to native Madarin users. Practice makes perfect.
Now you find Chinese is easy to learn. It may be that you're not entering the high context of Chinese language. Always remember that the beauty of Chinese lies between the lines, sometimes beyond.
Then good luck. 长路何漫漫，望与君共勉。

【回答】
说中文很容易学，很可能你是一个优秀的视觉学习者！
在日常使用中，语法很宽容。要掌握基本的中文语法，你不必把注意力放太多在语法上，因为它足够灵活，让人“不知不觉”就用出来了。我相信，当你学习汉字的时候，会你很容易脱离拉丁字母系统。但是一方面，良好的汉字书法在中文学习中也挺重要。发音从来不是问题。许多中国人也有着奇怪的方言和浓重的口音，有时候当地的中国人甚至都会听不懂。只是熟能生巧。
现在，你发现中文很容易学。这可能是因为你还没有进入中文的高语境。永远记住，中文的美在字里行间，有时甚至超越了字里行间。
最后，祝你好运。长路何漫漫，望与君共勉。