Originally posted by: LordMorpheus
If you learn to speak, learn to read/write as well.
The modern PRC version of Mandarin (simplified characters) is fairly easy to learn if you're learning to speak anyway.
I took 5 years of chinese and couldn't get my head around the damn tones. The reading and writing was easy, though.
This is just because you're one of the few people who don't think it's that bad.
Chinese characters:
1. They have no building block ie. you don't have an alphabet in which to build words. Each word is its own unique character. Every. Single. Word.
2. They make no logical sense 95% of the time as far as *why* the character is that way. You simply have to memorize that the character looks exactly this way just because.
3. You cannot "sound out" Chinese characters. In English, if you don't know what, say, "mountain" is while reading, you can sound it out and hopefully get its meaning when you hear the word in your head. In Chinese, if you don't know a character, you just end up staring at it blankly. It almost never gives you any clues as to what it sounds like. You *have* to then divert to a dictionary or a Chinese speaker.
4. When you type Chinese, you must use an alphabet anyway, and you must know what the word sounds like. This doesn't seem like it would be that much of a problem, but it is. Say you're doing English homework, and you don't know what a word means. All you have to do is type the English word into any online dictionary, or do a google search for "define: [word]" Now say that you're doing Chinese homework, and you don't know what a character is. Since you must know what the word sounds like to type it out into an online dictionary, and the character gives no clue as to what it sounds like, you're screwed. You again have to divert to a book dictionary or a Chinese speaker.
5. You have to essentially brute force memorize every single character. Not only do you have to brute force memorize what it looks like so that you can recognize it while reading, but also how it sounds (since you can't sound it out), and how to actually write it (because recognizing the character during reading doesn't mean you can remember how to write it yourself).
6. If you know what a Chinese word sounds like, you won't know how to write it without a dictionary.
7. Dictation tests go like this: The teacher says a word in chinese, and you have to write out it's pinyin (pronunciation in an alphabet), it's meaning in English, and its character. You can nail the pinyin and the English meaning, but have absolutely no clue on the character. With English if you know a word's pronunciation you can make a very good guess on how to spell it. In Chinese if you know a word's pronunciation you can make *no* guess as to how to write it.
8. In my mind the purpose of written language is to essentially put spoken language on paper. You tie auditory language with visual language, and logic would suggest there'd best be a link between the two. In English, how a word looks more or less directly relates to how a word sounds. How a word sounds more or less directly relates to how a word looks or is spelled. In Chinese there is essentially no linkage between how a word sounds and how a word is written.
If you're good at brute memorization, Chinese should be simple. If you're not, Chinese will be very very hard and frustrating and annoying.