Why do some people think Chinese is a scary and unlearnable language?

Because there are so few easy wins.

When I started to learn Russian, I was amazed. Two days in, and I could read. Sure, I didn’t understand anything, and probably sounded like a slow-witted 8-year old (if that!), but I was reading!

Better yet, there were tons of words that instinctively made sense. Between Russian and French/English, I could find tons of similarities in vocabulary. Cat is pronounced koht, tiger is teegr, day is dyen.

Little wins are what keep you going and motivated. You feel yourself making progress.

With Chinese, it’s the exact opposite. The easy wins come when you’re already at an advanced-intermediate level - before that it’s just complete and painful slogging.

Everything is just so… alien. First, tones. Try as you might, it’ll take you a few months to be able to do tones on command, and full disclaimer, you’re probably still going to fail to get 100% accuracy there.

Then the characters. Forget about reading, for a very long time. If ever. Even today, when I know and recognise ~3,000 characters, reading the newspaper is an incredible effort. I might know most of the characters, but I won’t know the combinations, and hence the words they form.

And just when you think you’re getting comfortable, you hit the chengyu wall. Essentially, China has a multitude of 4 character idioms that make no sense unless you know the story behind them. For example: 愚公移山 － Mr. Yu Move Mountain. It’s based on the story of Mr. Yu, who grew frustrated that travellers needed to go all the way around the mountain he lived on to get to the village. He therefore started to dig a passage through the mountain. His wife and neighbours tell him he’s crazy, and he’ll never achieve it in his lifetime. He answers that if he doesn’t succeed, his sons will. If they don’t, their sons will.

Generations later, a passage is dug through the mountain (or, in the official version, a god takes pity on Mr. Yu and moves the mountain). Mr. Yu Move Mountain: When there’s a will, there’s a way.

Now imagine hearing your client tell you that Mr. Yu Move Mountain without knowing the story. You look bewildered and ask: “Who’s Mr. Yu?”

That being said, once you break through the first few walls, Chinese gets much MUCH easier. Grammar is incredibly simple (no conjugation!) and words begin to make a ton of sense once you know the characters (e.g. Butter = 黄油 ＝ yellow oil).

No idea how you’d call this though.

But when you start? Oh God. It does look scary.

Edit: Max V Lee kindly pointed out that Mr. Yu is actually incorrect, and that the Yu in this case means more a “Foolish Old Man”. Just goes to show the last point about Chinese: the more you learn, the more you realize there’s so much more out there that you still don’t know ^^