Category: Learning

My Chinese Learning Story, Part 2

Read Part one

Previously, I anecdotally recalled my earliest encounters with Chinese (outside the context of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and covering the critical first year in China. I did forget to mention a few critical aspects of my learning program.

In the year between my first visit and ultimately moving to China, I did buy some Chinese learning PC software from a discount book store. Though I spent quite some time doing the vocabulary drills, the whole experience slipped my mind because of how ultimately stupid the endeavor was. The software didn’t teach “blue,” it taught “deep blue” and “light blue;” the food section focused entirely on Western foods like toast and pizza.

Furthermore, I should give credit where credit was due. I got a significant boost from a PC-based dictionary which both included animated stroke order of characters and had a hand drawn look up function. This is what helped me figure out writing on my own. (Mind you, these were pre-smart phone and Pleco days). The creator of the dictionary, Pablo, also made a useful character learning game called Pingrid.

You can find them both here. The latest version is fairly different from what I played 10 years ago, but the basic idea of having to find a target character given its pinyin and/or English definition (drawn from CEDICT) from a set of characters really helps one build sight recognition. Spaced repetition was involved and there was an incentive to find the character quickly. One could change the fonts and even select random fonts to really train visual recognition. The best part was probably the ability to upload your own vocabulary list and the system could handle up to 2-character long words. I highly recommend Pingrid for anyone looking to improve their reading speed.

Recognizing characters became a game I played in my daily life. From menus to bus stops, shop signs to the subtitles on televisions, I was in a constant quest to see what I recognized and was encouraged by the fact from one week to the next, I would find new characters and words had lodged themselves into my brain.

In China, it wasn’t just a matter a self studying some textbooks, listening to tons of podcasts, and interacting in my daily life, I also invested a lot of time in building vocabulary lists. For every textbook chapter and podcast, I took notes of the vocabulary words used, collecting everything in a master Excel file. There were three main purposes to this. First, to see if I had already “learned” the word from a different source (or even a previous chapter). Secondly, to index the words by the characters contained within them. This allowed me to notice that a particular character was being used in multiple words and build up an internal semantic representation of the characters. For example, in an early lesson of Short Term Spoken Chinese, the vocabulary list included 书包 (shu1bao1, “book bag”) and 包子 (bao1zi “steamed stuffed bun”), it was obvious that 包 was contributing to the meaning of both words and as I came across more words with 包, my understanding of the character slowly shifted. [I would be uploading the Excel files and/or screen shots, but those are on an external hard drive in a suitcase in Beijing.] Finally, and possibly most importantly, writing characters out helps one remember them. I only occasionally put any effort into hand writing, but typing pinyin into an IME which brings up a list of homophone is a process that forces on to really focus on the character as written in a textbook and match it to the screen. I took the typing task even further by transcribing the dialogues (textbook only) into a Word document.

Anyways, eventually I ran out of Short Term Spoken Chinese textbooks that could be purchased at Book City, and being a cheapskate I didn’t want to invest a lot of money in other textbooks. So, I got a library card. That allowed me to access lots of 对外汉语 books (Chinese as a Foreign Language), including both other series of textbooks and various graded readers. I became voracious, and was willing to put in a little time skimming over books that were too easy for me. I found that quite helpful because it was a review/consolidation of the language in novel forms, and yet one occasionally came across new words to jot down.

At some point, I bought a used iPhone from a friend and discovered Pleco and a bunch of new podcasts. Though the phone was stolen a month later, I was hooked to the even more efficient studying tool and picked up an iPod Touch in Hong Kong.

As my listening and reading comprehension grew, I did dive into Chinese media, watching several television series, including 《家有儿女》、《男人帮》、《喜羊羊与灰太狼》、《北京青年》、《北京爱情故事》、《康熙微服私访记》以及《还珠格格》。I gave up on 《蜗居》 for being too melodramatic (not that the other serials weren’t soapy), and only watched about half of the episodes of 《我爱我家》, which for some reason didn’t have subtitles. I’m not sure how well the links will work outside of China, and its crazy to see how the internet companies are not so diligent about protecting IP. They were all free to watch back in the day, now most of the streaming sites want you to pay for a membership in order to watch a 20 year old TV show.

And things continued mostly like that for the 4 years I lived in Shenzhen. Though I became more busy with work, I would always spend at least one morning or afternoon a week in a coffee shop self studying because it was a past time I enjoyed.

Read Next Part

Duolingo

I’ve been wanting to talk about Duolingo for a while because I have a lot of feelings regarding its teaching methodology. I tried it first a few years ago, but quickly burned out for three reasons: a) the sentences were weird, b) the grading was tough on spelling/formatting, and c) there was no instruction. So, one had to start a lesson and make mistakes to at least get a sentence level translation, but the 3-strikes-and-you-are-out system made learning a real chore. When I started up again over a year ago, it was clear they had worked out a lot of the flaws, and the “relaunch” last spring shows the company is continually trying to optimize the system. Nevertheless, there are some major flaws with Duolingo:

  1. Over reliance on full sentence translations. Sometimes the question bank pulls up a word-word pair or a word-image pair, but it seems the vast majority of Duolingo’s question bank involves full sentences. While the context allows greater flexibility in learning expressions (when context is needed for disambiguation) and this allows for testing of grammar (S-V agreements, conjugation, etc), sometimes it can be useful just to drill the smaller elements of a language. For a mobile first learning platform, full sentences involve a lot of typing on a phone keyboard. Maybe I’m just old, but that’s a pain in the neck. On the other hand, when selecting from the word bank, there is usually only one grammatically sentence that can be formed (I’m thinking translating from target language to source language), so one could essentially ignore the target language.
  2. Limited question bank. Not only are most vocabulary items stuck within the context of a sentence, they only exist in one or two sentences. The main exceptions of which are the earlier levels where you drill “he sits, she sits, the dog sits, the duck sits, … ad nauseum.” One needs to see words in a variety of contexts to really master it. However, after a few times through the set of questions in a particular lesson, one has memorized the meanings of all the possible sentences and can hack it.
  3. Rigid lesson structures. Duolingo segregates its question bank into discrete lesson units. So topic A has 2-6 lessons, and each lesson draws from its own question bank. Because the current crown system requires repeating all the lessons in the topic up to 11 times, one can quickly over learn. For example, I know from memory that Japanese Hiragana 1 Lesson 1 has dog, cat, and bird. If I do a random review, and come across bird, then I automatically know the next questions are going to be about dogs and cats.
  4. Weak on Asian languages*. Having thoroughly explored Duolingo’s Korean and Japanese units as well as briefly playing around with Chinese, I can attest that Duolingo doesn’t understand the need for a stronger drilling of the language basics. I started with Japanese because I wanted to improve my recognition of hirigana and kitakana, but because of the rigid lesson structures and poor overall design, I can learn groups of 4-5 characters in discrete chunks, only needing to distinguish among those 4 characters (instead of against ones that are visually similar and easily confused). When testing character to romanization, Duolingo says the character out loud, undercutting the point of training sight recognition (and complains if you try muting your phone). Finally, there are a bunch of characters that aren’t even taught in the early sections or on their own at all, only being mixed into to full sentences further down the lesson tree.
  5. No sense of learner’s vocabulary level. Though Duolingo offers the option to “test out” of chunks of lessons and touts the use of spaced repetition, the system really doesn’t have a clue what words I know and what words I don’t, meaning I sometimes repeatedly am answering questions that are way too easy which is both boring and a waste of time. As far as testing out goes, it merely unlocks chunks of levels, so one could theoretical start learning midway through the tree. But the gamified design still incentivizes one to max out the earlier lessons.

Despite all this, I’ve been sticking with Duolingo for over a year. Firstly, because I do find it quite useful with Spanish and German. Secondly, despite its flaws, one does get exposed to the target language and learning does occur. Thirdly, most of these flaws are common to every language learning app/software I’ve seen.

*I have seen Lingodeer presented as an alternative to Duolingo with a better treatment of Asian languages. I’ve only used it a little so far, but other than substituting a deer for an owl, it seems to be similarly structured.

Is Korean hard?

I’ve got this crazy notion that Korean is an easy language to learn. It’s probably just hubris, but I’d like to explore the idea. Mind you, I consider Chinese an easy language, so I may be peculiar to begin with.

At this point, I’ve finished reviewing the first half of the Korean textbook, almost finished review Talk To Me in Korean Level 1, and have 82 crowns in Duolingo. (For more on these, see here). Also, when it occurred to me to download a Korean dictionary on my phone, I also went ahead and picked up a couple other language learning apps to check out.

Why Korean should be hard

  • Politeness levels. Korean has several levels of speaking/writing ranging from very informal to very formal. Not only does one have to learn entire sets of grammar for each level, but it is also necessary to use them appropriately depending on who you are speaking to.
  • Grammar. Like Chinese, Korean does tend to be “telegraphic,” i.e. leaving a lot of information (especially about the subject of the sentence) to context. However, Korean is highly inflected with the particles attached to the ends of nouns to indicate whether they are the subject, theme, object, location, etc. and endings to verbs reflecting not only politeness level but also tense and aspect.
  • Pronunciation. Korean phonology is quite different from English, with more explicit use of unaspirated consonants and a ton of vowels that are rather difficult to distinguish between. Like Japanese, Korean has a fuzzy boundary between “l” and “r” as represented by the letter “ㄹ”. (btw, I’m not familiar with any part of China where there is confusion between “l” and “r”, so if you are going to make racist jokes, at least get the stereotype correct).
  • Numbers. Korean uses two sets of numbers: Native Korean numbers and Sino-Korean numbers which were borrowed from China back when “Chinese” sounded more like Cantonese. The native Korean numbers are crazy like English where there is only a murky connection between “two”, “twelve”, and “twenty.” (Unlike Chinese which is uber-logical with the “two”, “ten-two”, and “two-ten”). Some of the numbers also change when paired with measure words. (I believe Japanese also does this, and Chinese only does it for the number 2). Also, measure words!
  • Phonological Rules and Coarticulation. So, unlike Chinese where a syllable is a syllable, Korean–despite being written in blocks of syllables–has complicated rules where phonemes shift to the next syllable or change depending on if it is being followed by another syllable or what the next syllable starts with. These rules are even reflected in the grammar where the particles used depend on the sound structure of the word or there are direct spelling changes in the conjugation to make it easier to pronounce. Most European languages do this to, but when it’s your native language you don’t think about it.

Why it is “easy”

Despite all that, I still feel that Korean will be easy to learn. This is primarily do to the fact that Korean not only has an alphabet, but it is a beautifully designed alphabet that seriously only takes a day to learn. (Compare that to the half a semester in college dedicated to learning the Arabic alphabet). Once you have an alphabet you can wander the streets looking at signs and playing your own personal version of “Hooked on Phonics” and this is where the “Korean is easy” notion really kicks in. I’m honestly astounded by how many loan words are floating around, both from English and Chinese. Maybe I’ve been in China too long, where loan words are highly “sinified”, but I really didn’t expect to see so much English. Consider the following vending machine:

How about a cuppa?

A quick little Korean lesson first: 커피 (keo pi) is coffee (“p” usually substitutes for “f”). The top row says 밀크커피 (mil keu coffee) , 살탕 커피 (sal tang coffee),트림 커피 (keu rim coffee), and 블랙 커피 (beul laek coffee). So saltang is the Korean word for sugar, but the other three just sound out milk, cream, and black. I know for a fact that Korean has its own words for milk and black. In fact, milk is available on the bottom row, where it is properly written as 우유 (woo yoo).

I think a lot of the English loan words are just market-level stuff, but the Chinese goes deeper. Riding on the subway, every stop is written in Hangeul (Korean script), hanzi (Chinese characters, though sometimes I feel they are pulling double duty as kanji also), and English. With the hanzi and Korean syllables aligned, one quickly notices that more than 90% of the subway stop names sound a lot like the Chinese, e.g. yongsan instead of longshan, dongdaemun instead of dongdamen. I’m just guessing here, but I think there was an analog of the Norman invasion (which infused English with French vocabulary) between China and Korea.

So, to answer the question is Korean easy? If you already speak English and Chinese, maybe. Being “literate” allows one to engage with much more of the language much quicker, not only can one shortcut a lot of vocabulary by recognizing loan words, the higher volume of linguistic input powers incidental learning.

I have also heard that speaking Korean makes it much easier to learn Japanese.

How many characters do you need to know?

This really depends on what you mean by “know” and what you intend to do with your knowledge of Chinese characters.

Reading the Newspaper

There is a common factoid bandied about in the Chinese education world, that of the tens of thousands of characters out there, one only really needs to know about 2,000 (or 2,500 or 3,000) in order to read a newspaper. This is 废话 (fei4hua4 “garbage talk”). Firstly, what on earth do you want to read a Chinese newspaper for? Secondly, newspapers are hard. They are full of proper nouns, e.g. names of countries, world leaders, and companies, and either overly rely on abbreviations or get cute with wordplay. So, frankly unless “knowing” a character implies a deep knowledge of the morphemes it represents (i.e. a broad knowledge of the words it appears in and/or the ability to interpret it in new contexts), then any of the cited numbers of characters is going to be insufficient to read a Chinese newspaper with full comprehension.

Though one often encounters the cited factoid when someone is trying to sell you some newfangled way to learn a bunch of essential hanzi and master Chinese literacy, there is at least a logical basis to the myth.

Frequency Analysis

Firstly, frequency analysis of hanzi pretty consistently finds that a “smallish” set of hanzi cover a significant proportion of a given text or corpus. Chinese scholar Zhou Youguang compiled several character frequency studies to find that the first 1,000 most common characters have a 90% coverage, the first 2,400 most common characters have a 99% coverage, etc. (see table below)

# Characters10002400380052006600
% Coverage90%99%99.9%99.99%99.999%

So, let’s say you know those 2,400 characters and are reading some text. Well, on average 1 in 100 characters is going to be unfamiliar. That really does not sound so bad, but again, recognizing a character doesn’t do much good if you don’t know the word it is part of. By way of personal anecdote, though I have a pretty extensive vocabulary (both in terms of raw characters and words), I’m constantly running into things that have me want to check the dictionary.

So which exactly are the most frequent characters? It depends on the corpus of texts you look at. I’d recommend the frequency list put together by Jun Da, since the scope far exceeds any reasonable expectations of vocabulary, covering 9933 hanzi (there are a handful of characters that appear in their traditional form as well as some which aren’t currently part of modern Chinese).

Lists of Common Characters

Xing Hongbing lists 15 “Common Character Lists” ranging from 1928 to 1985 and 5 “General Purpose Character Lists” created between 1965 and 1987, the most recent of which make up a system of 2,500 + 1,000 + 3,500 characters that pretty much encompass everything you are likely to run into unless you have a penchant for archaeology. Though construction of the common character lists took frequency into consideration, much like Special English, there is an attempt to balance raw frequency against utility. For example, among the first 1,000 most frequent characters on Jun Da’s list, there are 7 characters not among the “《现代汉语常用字表》常用字（2500）” [Modern Chinese Commonly Used Characters]. Those seven hanzi (e.g. 尔、伊、谓、诺、伦、俄、洛) are not particularly obscure, but they aren’t exactly high priority characters (unless you are from Russia, in which case you need 俄 on the first day), reserved for the upper levels of HSK test preparation (if at all). Nevertheless, all seven of those characters are in the second list: “《现代汉语常用字表》次常用字（1000）” [Modern Chinese Secondary Commonly Used Characters].

The two sets of commonly used characters are completely contained within the “《现代汉语通用字表》（7000）” [Modern Chinese Characters for General Purposes]. This list is actually part of the centralized push to standardize characters in the People’s Republic of China. If you come across the booklet, there are about 10 pages dedicated to listing out common variants of characters that are no longer “permitted” in printing official documents.

Educational Lists

The old HSK came with a fairly comprehensive list of characters and words divided into four levels. The test prep materials listed out approximately 800, 800, 700, and 600 characters to master (2900 total). Unfortunately, the new HSK not only cut the vocabulary range down significantly, it completely scrapped the idea of a character list separate from the recommended vocabulary words.

Ministry of Education standards for compulsory education (e.g. primary and junior high school) specify that students should recognize 1,600 characters by 2nd grade, 2500 characters by 4th grade, 3,000 characters by 6th grade, and about 3,500 characters by 9th grade (requirements for writing from memory are lower). As for what those characters are, the MOE published its own list of 3,500 “Common Characters for Chinese Language Courses” also following a 2500/1000 character split. This list mainly overlaps with the Common Chinese Character list described above, but there are differences. Interestingly enough, the list highlights 300 characters out of the 2500 set which should be taught first, but otherwise there are no suggestions as to the order in which the characters should be taught.

Conclusion

I don’t know how many characters you should know, but there is always more to know. If you are curious about the overlaps between the various character lists, I have a handy excel sheet here.

See more resources

Sources:

周有光 （1992） 《中国语文纵横谈》，人民教育出版社。
[Zhou Youguang, 1992. Discussing the Length and Breadth of Chinese. Peoples Education Press.]
referenced via —
邢红兵（2007）《现代汉字特征分析与计算研究》，商务印书馆。
[Xing Hongbing, 2007, Characteristic Analysis and Computational Research of Chinese Characters. The Commercial Press.]

Korean Learning Plans

I’ve dabbled with Korean on and off for the past 2+ years, and have recently gotten it into my head to finally commit myself to obtaining (conversational) fluency. The plan is to basically live there for two months (starting next week), and spend a couple hours a day on self-study, specifically Duolingo, a textbook written in Chinese, and the wonderful podcast TTMIK. While working on this self-improvement project, I hope to also direct this blog towards random musings on the learning process.

For the record, I have been to Korea twice so far, totaling almost three weeks in the country. I didn’t know any Korean prior to my first trip to Seoul in 2016, but after a few days, I had picked up the alphabet and was wandering the streets and subways sounding out all written signs to see if I could recognize any words through their similarity to Chinese or English.

About half a year later, a friend of mine announced her intention to take a semester of Korean lessons at my university, and in a show of solidarity I picked my own copy of the required textbooks and self-studied for a month or two. I only managed to finish the first of the two textbook set.

Second half of Elementary Korean textbook

Planning to visit Korea a second time that summer and wanting to be better able to communicate, I must have watched about a dozen instructional videos on YouTube before I found the “Talk to Me in Korean” podcast, which I started listening to. Korea was to be the last stop on a roughly eight-week tour taking me through Singapore, Thailand, and Japan, so, though I was most motivated to learn Korean, I was also a little distracted by the other languages. By the time I made it to Busan, I “knew” maybe enough to fit on a notebook card.

Cheat Sheet

After the trip, I rapidly forgot all the Korean I had studied, only briefly touching it for a couple weeks last Spring when I found it on Duolingo after finishing Spanish. However, I hadn’t reviewed or studied Korean until about two weeks ago, when I shifted the focus of my daily foreign language study over from German.

In these two weeks, I’ve been hacking away at Duolingo (57 crowns so far!) and spending a bit of time every day reviewing the Chinese textbook, and I have surprised myself not only by how much was still kicking around the old memory banks, but also how quickly I’ve incorporated new vocabulary. I am feeling very optimistic about how much progress I can make once I land at Incheon.

My Chinese Learning Story

Part One

Before China, I had absolutely no interest in learning Chinese. Long ago, I was looking to learn a non-European foreign language and my university offered two: Chinese and Arabic. I chose Arabic. Ironically, I am fluent in Chinese today while Arabic remains inscrutable.

Prior to visiting China the first time, my mom asked me if I intended to learn any. My answer was an emphatic no. I was going to be backpacking with a friend, who ostensibly was already fluent, and I figured there should be enough English-speakers in the touristy parts of Xi’an, Beijing, and Shanghai.

Nevertheless, it is hard not to pick up at least a few words when surrounded by the language, and it certainly helps to have a non-native speaker modeling the essentials of basic communication. I seem to recall learning “ma3 ma3 hu1 hu1” (horse horse tiger tiger, i.e. so-so) as my first word in Chinese, then getting the pronouns “ni3” (you), “wo3” (I), “ta1” (he/she/it) on the second day. Afterwards, there wasn’t much conscious effort to get a handle on: good, bad, have, don’t have, want, don’t want, this, that, etc. Considering my traveling companion went around telling every street peddler and beggar that I was a rich man forced me to scramble to spit out a “mei2you3” or “bu2yao4.” I did get my hands on a pair of phrase books during the travels, which exposed me to a fair amount vocabulary and sentence structure. (The Lonely Planet phrase book used such a weird romanization system.) Nevertheless, during the solo portions of my travels, it was extremely difficult to get around. I recall getting a taste for Chinese characters, learning “大” (da4 “big”) from the highway mileage signs between Kunming and Dali and getting North, South, East, and West figured out from the street signs on the grid-like Xi’an.

I had caught the China bug, so even back in the U.S., I put a little effort into Chinese language podcasts (i.e. ChinesePod), but I recall even the Newbie level was too hard for me and I didn’t make any progress on Chinese.

When I moved to China, I would assess my Chinese level as pretty close to zero. I could count to ten and say hello, but had no clue what anyone was saying to me. Since I didn’t have any actual job to occupy my days, I spent quite a few hours a day studying Chinese, typically from a borrowed introductory textbook (Short-term Spoken Chinese) and podcasts (which I began to systematically and obsessively listen to).

My first month in Shenzhen, I went to a particular Lanzhou Pulled Noodle restaurant, which had both the picture menu on the wall and the one page laminated text-only menu. I worked my way down the text-only menu blindly and trusting in the fact that a Muslim restaurant wouldn’t serve me any pig brains. I copied the name of the dish I ordered into a notebook and used my best judgement of what came out to try to decipher the Chinese characters. Though I was quickly able to distinguish 大 (da4 “big”) from 小 (xiao3 “small”) and 牛 (niu2 “cow”) from 羊 (yang2 “sheep”), I recall being utterly flummoxed by 面 (mian2) which had so, so many entries in the dictionary, e.g.: “face, side, surface, aspect, top, classified for …”

I spent a lot of time finding places to hang out in, and having the same basic conversations over and over again. Even understanding only 50% of what was said to me, it was pretty easy to guess that people were asking “what country am I from”, “am I married”, and other questions of that ilk. I’m certain I gave some funny answers when I completely missed the mark.

Alcohol also served a major role in the early learning process, both in trying to flirt with the waitresses at a bar owned by a friend of mine and in drunkenly conversing with clients from Hong Kong in a combination of broken English and broken Mandarin.

As I found odd jobs which required a lot of commuting around the city, podcasts (mostly ChinesePod and ChineseLearnOnline, though I eventually added PopupChinese) became an essential part of the learning experience. I invested the time on my computer to edit the 10+ minute long lessons down to the approx. 30 sec. long content cores and built playlists to shuffle through them. I could “review” 50 lessons in a half hour long bus ride.

Time passed and I kept plugging away on the Chinese, moving on to the next textbook in the series. Within about 6 months, I was confident enough to do a short solo travel (3 days). Within about 9 months, I took a longer solo travel into the backwoods (2 weeks). The following year, I took and passed the Intermediate level HSK (old edition). I don’t recall how much, if any, writing was required for that.

Read Next Part


Is Chinese hard (to learn)?

Read in Chinese

The short answer is no, or at least, it shouldn’t be. Sure, the presence of tones in the phonetic system can be confusing and the tens of thousands of characters (hanzi) in existence is certainly daunting, but it is a mistake to overly fixate on these pain points.

In truth, tones and hanzi are not really problems for learning Chinese. Firstly, tones do not actually do as much work as the textbook examples suggest they do. Certainly, it would be embarrassing to create confusion between “horse” and “mother” (ma3 and ma1, respectively), but a surprising number of Chinese syllable segments have a restricted number of tones to choose from. For example, “te” has to be “te4”, so even if your pronunciation is off, the listener will apply their implicit knowledge of Chinese phonological system and automatically correct. Once context is introduced, the inclination to listen over “mispronunciations” is even stronger. Finally, the majority of native Chinese speakers were not brought up in perfect standard Mandarin, meaning that their version of Chinese is likely to have some variations in tonal pronunciation. There is even a common saying to this point: “天不怕，地不怕，只怕广东人讲普通话:” (Tian1 bu4 pa4, di4 bu4 pa4, zhi3 pa4 guang3dong1ren2 jiang3 pu3tong1hua4). “There is nothing to fear in heaven or earth except a Cantonese speaking Mandarin.”

Regarding hanzi, though they are many and have complex internal structures, the threshold for competency has been vastly lowered in the technological age. We don’t need to overly concern ourselves with stroke order and proper calligraphy techniques when writing hanzi is a matter of hitting a few keys and selecting one from the IME provided list. Of course, one still needs to put in the effort to recognize hanzi, but to a certain degree, learning hanzi is the critical element of learning Chinese. One’s vocabulary is directly proportional to the number of hanzi in one’s tool bag. Furthermore, given the fact that Chinese does not have the inflections, tenses, and cases of other languages and that the main grammatical points can be boiled down to special cases of a number of hanzi, it is not overly reductive to equate the task of learning Chinese to learning hanzi.

So, all told, as Chinese is “simpler” than some languages and the so-called most difficult part is the essence of learning, it really isn’t a hard language to learn.

Note: Obviously the thesis “learn characters –> learn Chinese” has some logical fallacies. To get going, one needs to learn the basic patterns of sentence construction, clearly differentiate vocabulary from characters (and build up a sense of morphology), and practice speaking and listening as a separate set of skills. Nonetheless, the main effort of progressing from beginner to intermediate and to advanced is in building up a large knowledge base of characters.