This article comes up every so often, and I'm sure that every learner of Chinese has run across it at least once.
It's a mix of common frustrations for Chinese learners and a lot of self-aggrandizement (on the part of both native speakers and successful learners.) It does correctly illustrate differences between (learning) Chinese and Romance languages, though some of the points are out of date.
Thankfully, speaking Chinese is slowly becoming "boring." By itself it's no longer enough to make you interesting, and non-"heritage" speakers demonstrating conversational fluency in Chinese has become somewhat normalised. Hopefully within my lifetime, a non-heritage learner will get the same reaction from speaking Chinese as they'll get from speaking Spanish in Texas. Frankly, I find unbearably tedious the folks who still try to parade basic conversational fluency as though it were something magical.
(I currently live in NYC. If I happen by Canal St, I'll run into waiters who can effectively converse in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, English, and some additional family dialect. No one seems very impressed by their skills at language-acquisition, despite being the result of much less formal schooling than we might enjoy...)
Learning Chinese from English is obviously harder than learning Spanish from Italian, but it's easily within what one can accomplish with a little focus and effort.
I did a bachelor's degree in Chinese at a state school with a good programme and good professors but at a school that just isn't particularly well-known for East Asian studies. My classmates were mixed between "heritage students" and students who had no background in any East Asian culture or language. Over the course of four years, many of them were able to achieve very high degrees of professional fluency. It just wasn't a big deal.
> waiters who can effectively converse in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, English, and some additional family dialect
Chinese who can speak any one of those languages (Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkein) or some others (like Hunanese, Gan) can easily pick up one of the others by living in one of the places where they're spoken.
It's a mix of common frustrations for Chinese learners and a lot of self-aggrandizement (on the part of both native speakers and successful learners.) It does correctly illustrate differences between (learning) Chinese and Romance languages, though some of the points are out of date.
e.g., I believe that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin has become the only romanisation scheme for teaching Chinese in English
Thankfully, speaking Chinese is slowly becoming "boring." By itself it's no longer enough to make you interesting, and non-"heritage" speakers demonstrating conversational fluency in Chinese has become somewhat normalised. Hopefully within my lifetime, a non-heritage learner will get the same reaction from speaking Chinese as they'll get from speaking Spanish in Texas. Frankly, I find unbearably tedious the folks who still try to parade basic conversational fluency as though it were something magical.
(I currently live in NYC. If I happen by Canal St, I'll run into waiters who can effectively converse in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, English, and some additional family dialect. No one seems very impressed by their skills at language-acquisition, despite being the result of much less formal schooling than we might enjoy...)
Learning Chinese from English is obviously harder than learning Spanish from Italian, but it's easily within what one can accomplish with a little focus and effort.
I did a bachelor's degree in Chinese at a state school with a good programme and good professors but at a school that just isn't particularly well-known for East Asian studies. My classmates were mixed between "heritage students" and students who had no background in any East Asian culture or language. Over the course of four years, many of them were able to achieve very high degrees of professional fluency. It just wasn't a big deal.