
Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard - barry-cotter
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
======
Jun8
This article is great fun to read and overall very informative. Yet I had a
few gripes about it.

* Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols _directly_ refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term.

The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to
categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they
recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has
something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".

* Writing system not phonetic: Any other European language than English would have formed a much better argument, since English is notorious for its haphazard mapping of mapping phonemes to the alphabet, partly caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch with bare knowledge of English.

One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. Moser
doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent.
Compare with, say, Greek grammar which has baffling complexity or Lithuanian
that still has noun 9 cases! Some exotic native Indian languages have 10-15
noun classes (German has three, which we call gender). In pure writing
complexity, some people rate Japanese to be even more complicated (with its
three sub systems). Or for an older example, consider Mayan hieroglyphs.

~~~
tokenadult
Chinese major who later worked for years as a Chinese-English interpreter and
translator replying here.

 _Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial_

He didn't say that, because Chinese is chock-full of difficult grammar. Take a
look at the page count (847 pages) of the book A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by
late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. His book is thorough, but by no means
exhaustive. Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar
(713 pages) is familiar to many English-speaking students of Chinese. It too
is far from exhaustive. Many of the mistakes made in speaking standard Chinese
by second-language speakers that impair understanding are GRAMMAR mistakes,
and that is true even of native speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese
dialects") who don't know Modern Standard Chinese as a first language. And
almost half the population of Chinese, according to a survey by the Chinese
government, self-rates as unable to converse in Modern Standard Chinese.

[http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...](http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm)

Moreover, despite what that article says, written Chinese characters are
frequently a barrier to understanding among Chinese citizens from different
regions too. There is first of all the problem of high rates of illiteracy in
China, because of the old-fashioned writing system Moser mentions. Many
literate Chinese persons tend to write in the regional vocabulary and grammar
--there is that again--of their native Sinitic language when they write, and I
have seen numerous occasions of Chinese people traveling out of region and not
being able to read hand-written signs at markets or even printed official
signs posted by the local government.

~~~
Jd
I'm also a Chinese major who later worked as a Chinese-English interpreter and
translator.

Compared to German (which I know) / Japanese (which I've studied) /
aforementioned exotic languages Chinese grammar is trivial.

There may be many inconsistencies (and difficulties when you encounter
literary Chinese), but grammar rules are pretty basic.

~~~
tokenadult
A list of languages I have studied before can be found at

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415>

Suffice it to say that Chinese grammar is NOT "trivial" to anyone who digs
into it deeply. No linguist would say so. Chinese grammar, being based in
large part on word order and function words, rather than on inflection, is
friendly to native speakers of English, and that is one of the reasons I
preferred learning Chinese to learning Russian at university while I was
taking courses in both. But there is plenty of grammar in Chinese, and plenty
of misunderstanding of grammar among Chinese persons that impairs
understanding among people who speak differing Sinitic languages.

~~~
Jd
Is not the "grammar" you refer the largely loose particles because of the lack
of formal grammar, rather than the reverse? If so, I standby my original
statement that the grammar (meaning formal grammar) is trivial.

Why not give an example of a grammar point that you think I am missing?

~~~
tokenadult
I've already cited books in this thread, and they list dozens of features of
Modern Standard Chinese grammar that are confusing even to speakers of other
Sinitic languages.

An example I often bring up to English speakers who are learning Chinese is
that they have to learn that the Chinese verbal system is based on aspect

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect>

rather than on tense. Many native English speakers misspeak Chinese as a
second language because they struggle to impose their sense of tense on a
tenseless language, and meanwhile get Chinese aspect marking all wrong. That
can lead to misunderstandings in either direction, as my extensive
acquaintance with persons who speak both languages often shows.

~~~
Jd
Aspect is trivial.

------
Jun8
Some interesting facts about the Chinese writing system:

* The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no anagrams, and no Morse code! To get around the last problem, The Chinese have devised a system where each word was assigned a number, e.g. "Person" was 0086 [ __The Mother Tongue _]

_ Massive statistical tests in the past two decades have repeatedly
demonstrated that 1,000 characters cover approximately 90% of symbols in
typical texts, 2400 cover 99%, 3,800 cover 99.9%. Based on the study of other
logographic systems (Mayan writing, Egyptian hieroglyphs), it seems that
there's an upper limit on the number of unique forms that can be tolerated in
a script. For most people, this value seems to be in the range 2000-2500.

* A Chinese character is generally confused with a word, the assumption being that Sinitic language are exclusively monosyllabic. This is not true. In modern Mandarin the average length of a word is almost exactly two syllables.

* The Chinese writing system is very well suited to writing Classical Chinese but ill-equipped to record the vernaculars (local dialects/languages) of which there are many in China. Consequently, to write Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Shanghainese, it is necessary to invent characters or resort to romanization.

The source is _The World's Writing Systems_ by Oxford University Press. I
recommend this book to everyone who's interested in these matters.

[Edit] In case you're wondering, Chinese has palindromes, but not the letter-
based ones like we're used to. Hofstadter in _Le Ton beau de Marot_ relates an
anecdote with a Chinese professor. Prof. Wu first shows them a famous Chinese
palindrome: Ye luo tian luo ye (At leaves-fall season, fall the leaves). In
turn, H shows him the quintessential Panama palindrome, but Prof. Wu has
difficulty understanding it because he was reading it word by word (p. 143)

~~~
Estragon

      The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large.
    

The probable social consequences are perhaps the most profound. It must
distort an education system to have such a large part of the curriculum
accessible only by rote learning.

------
Vivtek
This is an old article, because he says he's only been studying Chinese for
six years and I remember Doug Hofstadter talking about him, as a Chinese
expert, in the 90's.

In fact, Moser gained some renown as being good enough at Chinese (after
writing this article, obviously - but not too long, as the date that appears
on it is 1991 and I heard about this in about 1996 or so) that he appeared on
a Chinese _game show_ involving language mastery, apparently something along
the lines of a linguistic Jeopardy.

So clearly, Chinese is in fact damned hard, but not impossible for an obsessed
genius.

I wonder if anything has been done about the dictionary situation.

~~~
Figs
We have the internet, Unicode, and powerful computers now, so I suspect the
dictionary situation is _quite_ different from 1991. I don't know much about
Chinese in particular -- my foreign language was Japanese -- but I have
recently looked up kanji using a variety of search engines, including tools
that allow you to draw characters. (For example:
<http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html>) If you have the kanji as text, it's not
much more difficult to look up an unfamiliar word in Japanese than it is in
English, although it may still be difficult to figure out the exact sense if
the writing isn't literal.

For example, suppose you're trying to read something on the Japanese
Wikipedia. I'm horribly out of practice, but I can still go and take something
like "第六回執筆コンテストの入選記事が決定しました。結果発表をご覧下さい。" (found on the front page of
ja.wikipedia.org) and reason that it means something along the lines of "The
best articles of the sixth writing competition have been chosen. Please look
at the results." just by copying the parts I'm unfamiliar with into a kanji
search engine like Jlex (<http://jlex.org/>) a bit at a time until I get
something reasonable back.

~~~
Estragon

      I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991.
    

The firefox extension peraperakun is damn handy.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349/>

------
barry-cotter
1\. Because the writing system is ridiculous.

2\. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.

3\. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

4\. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

5\. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.

6\. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).

7\. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.

8\. Because tonal languages are weird.

9\. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently
met.

An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance
languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes
play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the
Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to
figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an
East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough
task -- never mind reading the book in question.

~~~
zasz
Criticisms 1-5 are basically identical and have no useful alternative for a
linguistically diverse country like China until you finally get everyone
speaking the same dialect.

Criticism 6--uhh, well, there's also Shakespeare for the English equivalent of
incomprehensible classical language. The first time I heard idioms like "one
fell swoop" I was totally all like wtf bro. And you don't need to know
classical Chinese to be reasonably useful in day to day life.

7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally
but that's typically for family names.

8/9--yeah, that's about the only reason Chinese is really that difficult to
learn in my opinion. English speakers belong to one language family, and
Chinese speakers belong to another. Tonal languages are weird _to you._ I
assure you, Chinese people find pluralization, verbal conjugation (past,
present, perfect, subjunctive...), spelling (threw, through, bought, bot),
"r"s, and articles to be pretty fucking weird.

~~~
lanaer
I don't think I'd call these criticisms so much as _reasons_ why Chinese is so
damn hard (for a Western speaker). It’s not like there's anyone around who
designed the language to complain to.

Anyway:

Reasons 1-5 aren't about the many languages used in China (if French & Spanish
are different languages, then I consider Mandarin & Cantonese to be different
languages). These difficulties are due to the lack of a concise phonetic
alphabet (like the roman alphabet used in English, French, Spanish…, or the
hiragana alphabet used in Japanese). If the Chineses languages all used a
common (small!) phonetic alphabet of some sort, many of those difficulties
would dissolve (and there is no particular reason why that could not be done,
technically, except that it throws out a huge part of their culture). Even if
only Mandarin existed, those first 5 difficulties would remain.

Edit: OK, so using a phonetic alphabet would mean that each language would be
written differently... except that this is already true, essentially. You can
actually write in Cantonese in a way that a Mandarin speaker could not
understand (using the same characters), and there are those who do this. I
think he says this in there (I read this a long time ago), that the Mandarin
writing system is just that; Mandarin. The whole country knows how to read it
(without necessarily knowing how to pronounce it), so it's more about the non-
Mandarin-speaking Chinese people having 2 languages that they use: their own
for speaking, and Mandarin for writing. Using a purely phonetic alphabet may
make this bi-lingual usage more difficult... or not. The existing writing
system is already pretty painful, whether you're a native or not (though
natives have more time to get used to it before they're expected to be able to
use it, I suppose).

Reason 6: this isn't like reading Shakespeare (Modern English, though an
earlier version of it), as far as I understand. It seems more like trying to
read The Canterbury Tales (Middle English) or Beowulf (Old English, more like
German than English, really). You're completely correct about it not being
relevant to practical usage of any of the Chinese languages, though.

~~~
billswift
Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) actually isn't that bad, it just looks that way. If
you read it aloud, you can understand it pretty easily. Old English or Anglo-
Saxon actually looks more like Danish than German and is a totally different
language from modern English - modern Spanish has more cognates and other
similarities.

------
pspda5id
At least Mandarin grammar is relatively simple, and it has only 4-5 tones
compared to Cantonese or Minnanese. But don't get me started on the multitude
of Chinese dialects.

The point about classical Chinese isn't fair, the language itself has evolved
little in the past few thousand years. To achieve the same utility in English,
you will have to learn Modern English, Middle English, Norman, Old Saxon,
Latin etc.

~~~
elblanco
Having an interesting conversation with a Korean the other day. She mentioned
that in Korean there are various word and conjugation choices you have to make
based on honorifics. What she didn't realize is that English has something
similar but we don't recognize it for indicating formality -- often as a class
or education signal, or to use differently depending on audience.

I was confused but she explained...

Most English words of German origin are vulgar or informal, while most of
Latin, Greek or French origin are formal. Like "shit" vs. "feces", "fight" vs.
"quarrel", "drink" vs. "imbibe", etc. In general, where we have synonyms, and
those synonyms can be ranked on a scale of informal to formal, German words
are towards the informal end, and romantic origin words are towards the formal
end.

She said it's been one of the hardest things to learn when learning English
(and she's quite fluent), is this concept of "formal" English vs. "informal"
that is separate from "colloquial", mainly because nobody recognizes it and
nobody teaches it.

So apparently this is also something one has to learn in English - word
origin, in order to gauge proper usage.

------
teaspoon
For those curious about the idiom, "It's Chinese to me," here's the directed
graph of prevailing "It's X to me" idioms among world languages:

<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024>

~~~
kqr2
Japanese is missing. Does anyone know their equivalent?

~~~
sliverstorm
Allegedly, "The Japanese use a string of nonsense syllables which imitate the
sounds of unknown languages, especially Chinese"

<http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php>

^ Worth noting that 'chinpunkanpun' is the word; the rest of the phrase is
accurate Japanese.

------
starkfist
It's interesting that almost all of the reasons apply to the written language.
I took Mandarin in college and found the tricks I was taught to learn the
characters were mostly useless. You simply had to memorize everything by brute
force.

The spoken language has a simple grammar and aside from the tones you can
probably get to a passable level within a year if you live in Beijing and
actually interact with people in Chinese.

~~~
tokenadult
Setting aside literacy is costly, and I have seen a lot of learners of Chinese
who go over to Chinese-speaking places do that. But I agree with the statement
that Chinese people will probably be well able to intercommunicate with a
dedicated Westerner who immerses himself in the standard language of China for
a year--but largely because the speakers of the standard language in China are
well used to nonstandard speech from the lips of their own compatriots who
grew up in other regions. I can pass for a native of China over the telephone
--not because my Chinese is so wonderful, but because China is so full of
citizens who speak Mandarin poorly as a second language.

~~~
starkfist
It depends what you consider costly. I switched to Japanese after college and
moved to Japan for a year. Rather than learning anything about the writing
system, I took a 6 week conversation crash course before leaving. When I got
there I just mastered the accent and some of the cultural communication
idosyncrasies like "active listening" rather than spending time reading and
writing anything. I ended up going on far more dates with women than I ever
have in my life prior (or after) and had two really cool girlfriends. In
contrast my friend who was obsessed with mastering Japanese had no friends at
all for about 3 years. Nobody wanted to talk to him because his accent was so
grating. I feel like his approach was far more "costly" if you consider
"social cost" a real factor.

In terms of real economic value I have come to the conclusion that a native
english speaker mastering another language rarely pays off, in a financial
sense. The main benefit is establishing relationships with people you wouldn't
be able to meet, otherwise.

~~~
chipsy
Accent seems to be way more important than vocabulary or grammar for social
situations. It's easier to "fix" an imperfect sentence construction in your
head and infer missing meanings from gestures and pictures than it is to
decipher an extremely thick accent.

------
aristoxenus
It's really hard to get that kind of straight-talk from instructors or native
speakers.

The best rationalization I can think of for someone learning this language, is
that if you enjoyed the meditative focus of learning how to write cursive as a
child, or you miss the wonder of constantly discovering new words as an
adolescent, you can re-live that for the rest of your life with Chinese!

Fortunately for Chinese (Mandarin at least), it _is_ a very beautiful
language, and every dose of that beauty seems to make you want more.

------
0_o
I am from China, my advise for western Chinese learners is:don't learn it
based on Pinyin which seems helpful at the beginning but leads you to nowhere
at all. If you just want to be able to read CHinese books or novels you simply
don't have to know how to speak it. Most of the European Chinese experts in
the last century were like that. And if you just want to speak it fluently,
find a Chinese gf/bf,in two years you can flirt with others in Chinese.

------
andreshb
I read hundreds if not thousands of articles on a daily basis. Most of the
time, I skim them. But this essay/article despite being so long, kept me
interested the whole way, and made me laugh several times. Amazing writer.

~~~
fgf
Me too, it's five in the morning here and I'm afraid I woke up my roommates
when I (repeatedly) laughed out loud.

------
OmniBus
There ain't too much Chinese characters as one perceives. A Chinese character
is like a word in English. They are just using different vehicles to load
meaning. For example, the Chinese character 早 is equivalent to "morning" or
"early" in English. When you learn to write it, it is the combination of 日 and
十. When Chinese learner struggles for the combination of components, English
learner struggles for that of letters(, or stem root). They are pretty the
same. It is much easier to remember that 早 (morning) is associated with 日
(sun). Once you master the skill, it is as easy as spelling. You can complain
too much characters when comparing the number of words in English.

I like classical Chinese. It is the minimalistic form of Chinese languages.
Concise and Poetic.

Modern Chinese is heavily polluted by Western languages, both English and
Russian. Modern Chinese text is crippled by Western grammar. This makes the
text filled with empty words, and long sentences, and odd construction,
mechanical, and confusion.

Writing Chinese never emphases grammar, but the sequence and context. It is
dramatically different approach from Indo-European languages. For example, In
English "When the rain falls, there are fewer and fewer people on the street."
Alternative, you can write, "there are fewer and fewer people on the street
when the rain falls." The order of words and phrases is not so important. In
Chinese, it can be "天雨，街上人漸疏"(sky rain => on street people fewer), or more
concisely, 雨下人疏(rain fall => people fewer), or 天雨人疏(sky rain => people fewer).
You can't reverse the word order in Chinese. You can forget grammar completely
but write the consequence of your thought and scene. It is what the idiomatic
phrase from. For example, if you describe a person fails to break up a
relationship, you can say 欲斷難斷 (want to break => (but) hard to break). This
saves lots of words.

~~~
pradocchia
_You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought
and scene._

Linguists call this a topic-comment language: 雨下, 人疏 -> [as for when it]
rains, [there are] fewer people [out].

It does makes for some nice poetry.

------
totalc
Chinese: the language so hard the Koreans made a new language!

~~~
OmniBus
You are misleading. Koreans have their own languages. Only the written form is
drastically changed. It is not a new language.

It is more than hard and easy. Remember there is politics and culture. The
disuse of Chinese character is pretty recent, post-WWII.

Recently, some Koreans suggest to pick up Chinese character in Korean. In the
past, Korean culture and history are written in these characters. After a few
generation, only very few people can recognise them properly. Also, Characters
differentiate homonym. With characters, it would cause much confusion with
numerous homonyms.

------
skybrian
I wonder if this is true?

From: <http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/chinesewriting.html>

"Since Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other nonstandard varieties differ from
Mandarin not just in sound but also in vocabulary and grammar, the characters
cannot bridge this gap by themselves, even with their relative neutrality
toward sound.7 Much of the core vocabulary of non-Mandarin Chinese has no
counterpart in Mandarin and no recognized character representation.
Conversely, many Mandarin terms for which characters do exist are foreign to
non-Mandarin speakers. The fact that nonstandard speakers can read a text in
the standard language simply means that these speakers are bilingual. They
have learned written Mandarin as a second language. They know enough
vocabulary and grammar to make sense of Mandarin texts, much as I know enough
French words and grammar to read that language (without being able to
pronounce it convincingly, much less to speak it fluently). If Chinese
characters have unified the Chinese languages, then the alphabet has unified
French and English.

"The characters do allow nonstandard speakers to use their own pronunciations
to read Mandarin texts. So instead of acclimating to the national standard,
nonstandard speakers reinforce their own speech habits and add to the vitality
of their "dialect" by introducing new vocabulary from Mandarin, which they
pronounce their own way by analogy. Whether alphabetic scripts should be used
to provide China's non-Mandarin speakers with the means to become literate in
their own language is a political question outside the scope of the present
inquiry. But one thing is certain: since non-Mandarin speakers are forced
anyway to learn a second language, it would make more sense from the viewpoint
of those promoting unity if this bilingualism were achieved through Mandarin
written in the pinyin alphabet.8 The incentive to learn the national standard,
including its pronunciation, would be higher than it is today if one's ability
to read depended on it. As it is now, nonstandard speakers work their way
through standard texts using whatever pronunciation comes naturally, not fully
learning Mandarin and not reading their own languages either."

~~~
tokenadult
"Since Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other nonstandard varieties differ from
Mandarin not just in sound but also in vocabulary and grammar, the characters
cannot bridge this gap by themselves, even with their relative neutrality
toward sound.7 Much of the core vocabulary of non-Mandarin Chinese has no
counterpart in Mandarin and no recognized character representation.
Conversely, many Mandarin terms for which characters do exist are foreign to
non-Mandarin speakers."

Yes, the quoted statement is true. Observing examples of this phenomenon (in
either direction, whether Mandarin speakers not being able to read other
Sinitic languages in Chinese characters, or speakers of those languages not
being able to read quite standard Mandarin in Chinese characters) was what
motivated some of my earlier comments in this thread.

------
brazzy
That's a lot of words to say "because there's too damn many characters".

BTW, the Japanese also believe they speak the most difficult language in the
world. Probably a lot of others too. That means very little.

------
GiraffeNecktie
And then there's Dashan (Mark Roswell) who studied Chinese in Canada for four
years and then went to China. Within a year he was appearing on Chinese
television and now is a huge superstar performing xiansheng, which is an oral
comedic tradition that even native speakers find pretty frickin difficult. I'd
love to know how he managed to learn Chinese so well, so quickly.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashan>.

------
ivankirigin
I studied Japanese for about 2 years in college. I estimated that to learn a
single kanji, it took the time to learn 40 other vocabulary words.

I wished I had focused on speaking instead. Academic japanese seems to treat
starting students like they're going to get a PhD in the language. That is
absurd. Written Japanese beyond hiragana and katakana (the two phonetic
alphabets), should only start in the 3rd or 4th year of undergraduate study.

~~~
chousuke
I don't understand this sentiment. Kanji are an integral part of the japanese
language, and much of it doesn't make sense without them.

You can and should start studying kanji as soon as you have a reasonable
command of hiragana. Every time you learn a new word you should at least check
the characters it's written with instead of pretending that it's okay to use
hiragana for everything.

My experience has been that I sometimes actually understand words I've never
heard before because I can connect the syllables with kanji whose meaning fits
the context.

It's up to you to balance your time between learning the written language and
learning the spoken language, but they are not independent of each other, and
ignoring kanji in the beginning is a mistake.

~~~
ivankirigin
Kanji are important for written language. I see no reason the language should
avoid eliminating kanji, given the available alternatives.

In my experience, there wasn't a single case of being able to infer meaning
from context or radicals or anything.

------
gaiusparx
Chinese is not hard. For example the most complicated object in the world,
human being or people, is written using just 2 strokes 人. Simple.

------
trevelyan
David Moser (author of this article) appeared in the Sinica podcast this week
along with Gady Epstein, Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Kuo. All familiar names
for China watchers.

[http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/maos-legacy-and-
forei...](http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/maos-legacy-and-foreign-self-
censorship)

Quite a good episode. Strongly recommended.

------
jarek
Unsurprisingly the article seems to focus a lot on the non-phonetic script.

I've been thinking about this — considering the difficulties even with the
simplified characters and even for native users of the language if this
article is to be believed, what are HN's thoughts on potential official shift
by China from simplified to pinyin or a derivative of pinyin?

------
yuan
Pardon my cynicism, but, those who haven't learnt Chinese well tend to
exaggerate its difficulty as a pretext to their failure, and those who have do
the same to accentuate their achievement. If you are weighing whether to learn
Chinese and deterred by its supposed difficulty, I hope you'd take that into
account.

------
setori88
I took great pleasure reading aloud many sections of this humorous article to
my Chinese wife. This article resonates closely with my experiences /
frustrations - my dear wife had a good chuckle at my exasperated face.

------
Ujjwol
English is phonetic. What A JOKE ? The author forget the language which is
difficult to what difficult can be BUT it depends on your effort. The language
is so phonetic that even a breath won't be missed out. And a person can write
a book accurately as read by other people if pronounced correctly. And the
language is Sanskrit. Hindi, Nepali, Marathi are it ruined form but they bring
most phonetic features.

~~~
fgf
This is difficult to understand.

