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