The following are the difficulties in learning Chinese:
There are many kinds of Chinese characters: writing is considered to be extremely challenging. If there is no obvious semantic hint, the combination of Chinese characters is easy to be forgotten because of frequent practice in the learning process.
Learning “Dumb Chinese”: Similar to “Dumb English” that may appear when China students learn English, it refers to the situation that they can read words but can’t pronounce them. Foreigners may encounter similar problems when learning Chinese alone, and feel that they know the words but can’t understand them in actual communication.
Tone problem: Chinese characters have four basic tones, plus multi-tone words and multi-tone words. Even if a single word knows and knows the pronunciation, when they are combined, it may appear that they are not fully understood.
Fixed collocation is hard to remember: there are many fixed expressions in Chinese, such as fixed collocation in English, but these rules in Chinese are sometimes difficult to understand, for example, why Sunday is not Monday, and why it is “nothing” instead of “nothing”.
Syllables and writing: on syllables, foreigners often make mistakes in the pronunciation of the same Chinese character in different contexts; In writing, it is difficult for them to write skillfully for commonly used Chinese characters with many strokes.
Grammar and Rhetoric: Different Chinese characters may have different meanings in different contexts, so it is necessary to understand and learn grammar and rhetoric deeply to master them better.
To sum up, for foreigners, the main difficulties in learning Chinese include the complexity of Chinese characters, the accuracy of pronunciation, the mastery of tones, the memory of fixed collocations, the understanding of grammar and rhetoric and the adaptation to the overall language environment. These difficulties constitute the main obstacles to learning Chinese.