Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place.
But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists.
A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.
I have always been attracted to languages with a different alphabet, but Chinese always just seemed completely out of my league. I don't know if that is correct, but Japanese seemed easier to speak (like I could repeat words or small sentences and people would understand), whereas it seems very difficult to merely say something that a Chinese native will understand.
According to https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ it's not very difficult, just tedious. They figure mandarin or cantonese takes ~3x the number of classroom hours (2'200) that an easy language like french or spanish (750) would take.
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Long read, but very nice! I like the style, e.g:
I have always been attracted to languages with a different alphabet, but Chinese always just seemed completely out of my league. I don't know if that is correct, but Japanese seemed easier to speak (like I could repeat words or small sentences and people would understand), whereas it seems very difficult to merely say something that a Chinese native will understand.
According to https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/ it's not very difficult, just tedious. They figure mandarin or cantonese takes ~3x the number of classroom hours (2'200) that an easy language like french or spanish (750) would take.