It’s a piece of cake. In fact, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi says Chinese is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.

“Otherwise,” Yang reasoned at today’s National People’s Congress, “it’s hard to explain why 1.3 billion have chosen it as their mother tongue.” (Thanks to Danwei for the Xinhua link.)

Right, said the foreigner who took his first Chinese lesson 16 years ago and is still learning.

Maybe Yang meant Chinese was easy to learn for kids growing up immersed in the language (although he did encourage reporters and others to take up the language). Maybe he meant it was easy for Japanese people to learn because some things are written the same way in both languages, with characters. Perhaps Yang knew that prospective Korean and Vietnamese students of Chinese, too, would benefit from the many words in those two tongues that came from China and still sound vaguely similar.

Or maybe Yang, who happens to speak excellent English and enjoys a cup of tea, was just joking. (Was his statement even logical? And people don’t choose their mother tongue, do they?)

According to the U.S. National Virtual Translation Center Mandarin is a Catrgory III language, which is deemed exceptionally difficult for native English speakers. Others in the category are Cantonese (another Chinese dialect), Arabic, Japanese and Korean. That’s two of the top five.

Some aspects of Chinese are vexing — the tones, the writing system and the syntax, to name a few. To be fair, though, other aspects of Chinese support Yang’s case, like the fact that there are no conjugations, no declensions, no inflections and there are a relatively limited number of phonemes in use (if you subtract the tones).

I suppose whether or not a language is “easy to learn” is relative. Which reminds me… Have you heard the one about the job applicant who put on his resume that he knew every language but Greek? The sceptical interviewer tested him on Arabic and he failed. Then Chinese, and he failed again. Then tossed him a softball question in French, and the applicant failed again to demonstrate that he could speak French. When the interviewer asked him what gives, he replied: “It’s all Greek to me.”
 Photos by Jason Lee and Nir Elias

Living in the most populous country on earth one sees some pretty large crowds. On a normal night, some Chinese shopping districts can feel like a mall in the United States or Britain the week before Christmas.

Public transport frequently plays host to large numbers of people. Once I was in a subway station so jam-packed that my travel companion, who weighed less than 100 pounds (that’s about 45 kilos), was literally lifted off the ground and transported several feet by the other passengers.

The biggest crowd I have ever seen in several years in China, though, was the mass of humanity that is now gathered outside the Guangzhou train station.

Freakish, unseasonable weather has hobbled China’s train system at exactly the wrong time - days before the Lunar Near Year - and tens of thousands of stranded peasants-turned-proletariat who planned to go home to celebrate China’s biggest holiday are stranded.

The road in front of the station has been closed and is occupied by a sea of people - sitting on baggage, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, peeling oranges, nibbling on nuts, stomping their feet to stay warm, drinking white lightning, anything and everything to pass the time.

When I saw them on Monday, many had been there 24 hours already. On Tuesday, a Reuters photographer reported that the crowd had abated a bit, but was still huge. The weather, meanwhile, remained cold and wet. Food vendors had come. Mobile cell phone antenna trucks had rolled in to support the extra load. Many travellers were prepared to stay as long as it takes. (I did not see any portable loos, though.)

Faced with bad weather that won’t quit and such a huge crowd, the authorities are trying to manage expectations.

By the time I got there on Monday, the Guangdong rail bureau had stopped selling tickets and loudspeakers urged passengers to return the tickets they were holding, offering a full refund. Wang Yang, the Guangdong Communist Party chief, visited on Sunday and told a migrant worker he hoped the man would be able to make it home for the holiday, but to prepare to stick around if need be.

Then, on Tuesday, the state news agency Xinhua ran this story:

Many migrants have already returned their tickets and trudged back to factory dorms, resigned to ringing in the ”Year of the Rat” away from family. But most were still hopeful, waiting in the cold rain.

Is the next step to force the migrant workers to give up family reunion plans in order to disperse the crowd? What would the consequences of that be?

If I were a Chinese leader, I’d be praying for warmer weather - and brainstorming for ways to convince those waiting for trains to voluntarily give up one of the most cherished traditions in China.

Pictures by Jason Lee/Reuters 

But when I was in the southern city of Guangzhou last week renewing my visa and attending the annual session of Guangdong’s provincial parliament, I found myself wondering about the importance of one meal in particular: lunch.

The Chinese are credited with inventing many things, including gunpowder, the compass, paper and noodles. To that list, I would venture that one widespread practice could be added: the siesta, or “wu xiu” as it’s called in Mandarin.

Virtually every government office across the country, from Shanghai in the east to Kashgar out west near the border with Kyrgyzstan, shuts down for lunch from noon (or sometimes earlier) to 2 p.m. (or often later). Few even bother keeping a receptionist on hand to field calls. Many businesses - save restaurants - close down during the lunch hours, too.

In Guangzhou, I visited the local public security bureau’s entry-exit office, which issues visas and residence permits, five times in three days. On two days, I twiddled my thumbs during the midday break, impatiently waiting for 2 o’clock to roll around so I could deliver documents or pick up my passport.

One day, in a taxi en route to pick up my press badge for the provincial parliament session, I called the officer in charge to tell him I was on my way. It was 11:25 a.m. and I told him I was five minutes away. “You won’t make it,” he told me. His office closed at 11:30 a.m. “I’ll be back in the afternoon.” Fine, but were there any events to cover later in the day, I asked. “Yes. A press conference,” he said. Could I attend? “No,” he said. “Not without a badge.”

Left to twiddle my thumbs yet again, I started considering the mathematics of lunch in China.

Let’s assume that every office in China is open five days a week, 50 weeks a year - that’s 52 weeks minus a government mandated “golden week” holiday for Lunar New Year and one for National Day. That’s 250 work days a year. Subtract another five for other holidays and good measure, and we’re at 245 days.

Multiply that number by two, which is probably the average noon snooze, and you get 490 hours.

Divide 490 by eight, which we’ll assume (generously, perhaps) equals roughly the average number of hours in a day at the office in China.

Figured that way, the long, ubiquitous lunch break that Chinese enjoy consumes 61.25 work days a year.

I wonder if businesses and government departments around the country will be taking long breaks during the Olympics.

If they do, over the course of the 17-day event, 4.25 work days would be lost. All in the name of lunch. Have you eaten yet?
 

John Ruwitch is Reuters South China Correspondent. Picture of pork buns in a Beijing restaurant by David Gray.