Mandarin Chinese vs. Arabic

Humans are considered to be the most social animals on the planet. They live together, enjoy and share their feasts and reside together for obvious reasons. Social conventions among them are held through spoken communication. Development of language is an important block in this regard.

Different languages are spoken all over the world. Some of them are very easy to understand in terms of grammar, vocabulary and some are pretty hard to understand.

If you do a simple search on Google about the hardest language on the earth, the result would be “Mandarin Chinese” and the second one would be “Arabic”. Both of these languages have a vast and deep origin and history.

Languages have been divided into 5 categories. These languages have been divided on the basis of understanding by the English learners. According to these categories, Chinese and Arabic have been classified in the category V. These languages are accompanied by Korean, Japanese and Cantonese. These languages are categorized to take 88 weeks or 2200 class hours to master them.

Chinese language is said to be the part of Sino-Tibetan family with at least 6000 years of history. This language has its roots from Shang Dynasty which lasted from 1766–1123 BC.

In China, different dialects are spoken but Putonghua or Mandarin which means “the common speech” is the main dialect everyone speaks. Mandarin Chinese is spoken by over 1.3 billion people around the globe.

Arabic language is part of Semitic family with its roots originating from Arabic peninsula. The oldest version of Arabic dates back to 10th century which makes it one of the oldest languages on the planet.

Arabic is said to have an ancient history of 2500 years. The language is spoken by 371.4 million people all over.

After this brief intro to both the languages, lets draw the focal point to the fact that why Chinese is the most difficult language in the world and its comparison with the second hardest language Arabic.

The fact is that the search result on the Google shows the difficulty of language considering English as a native language. But the truth is that difficulty of a language depends upon your mother tongue. For instance,

If your mother tongue is Japanese or Korean, you will find Chinese easier to learn because you will already be familiar with many Hanzi characters.

If you want to learn Arabic or Urdu and your native language is Farsi, both languages will be easier for you since you will be familiar with many phonetics and alphabets.

Here, I am going to list some factors on the basis of which we can classify the hard areas of each language (Arabic and Chinese).

I. PRONUNCIATION:

Pronunciation is the foundation of any language. In Chinese, meanings of words originally depend on the tone of a word. Remember! Tone is not same as pronunciation. In Chinese accent, tone literally changes the meaning of the word. Mandarin is a tonal language so the rising or falling of a pitch or tone is changing its meaning too. For example,

tāng with a high tone it means ‘soup’, but táng with a rising tone means ‘sugar’.

Have an another example:

In general, Chinese pronunciation is very difficult and can create confusion within a word.

For the sake of convenience to foreign learners of this language, Pinyin writing system is developed which uses Latin alphabets and diacritics to differentiate between the tones and pronunciation.

On the other hand, Arabic is phonetically spelled and pronunciation highly depends on intonations. Arabic pronunciation changes with the position of alphabet in a word. Word pronunciation also changes whether the word is definite or indefinite.

So, winding up, pronunciation of both the languages is equally difficult and requires a great deal of practice to sound like a native speaker.

SPEAKING:

Fluency in Chinese is a result of a lot of practice. The more you practice, the more fluent you are. Because the tones in Chinese are a foundation of speaking and also they are a reason to mean each word, so a great deal of practice is required.

In China, different dialects are spoken. There are 10 dialects of Chinese but 7 of them are most commonly spoken and understood by a majority.

Standard dialect that is spoken and understood by a majority is Standard Chinese that is a modern form of Mandarin or Putonghua. Putonghua is used in official and formal meetings and writings.

The speaking of language also depends upon the geography. Since, Arabic is spoken over a vast geographical area, so the particular form of language that is peculiar to specific area or the dialects of Arabic spoken in Arab world differ from region to region. For example, Syrian dialect is different than Moroccan dialect and so the others.

So a standard dialect called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Fusha dialect (meaning eloquence) is adopted as standard dialect and is used for official and educational uses.

WRITING:

Chinese writing spotlights much focus on strokes during writing. These strokes are so important that they change the meaning of the word. Consider the following example:

These symbols are complicated to use and even native speakers may do a mistake in them. Average Chinese learners know up to 4000 Hanzi characters while experts may know up to 8000 characters.

However, Arabic lacks the use of characters and instead uses the alphabets. There are 28 Arabic alphabets that have consonant sounds.

These re written from right-to-left and are not very difficult to remember. It may take a week for people with a high mental aptitude and for average cognitive minds.

The shape of these alphabets changes depending upon the location of alphabet in a word but they are not very difficult to remember.

READING:

Chinese is a visual writing. Meaning you can identify the characters easily than writing them yourself.

In this example, you can notice that the symbol for water is found in all the water related items.

Chinese characters are complex and hard to memorize. So, reading codes are developed to break the words in radicals for an easy understanding of them. There are up to 200 radicals developed for this purpose.

Reading Arabic is a bit not easy since Arabic morphology is rich and complex. It relies upon the addition of the words. Sound of alphabets changes depending upon the location of them within a word.

Diacritics used in Arabic language also change the grammar, meaning and sense of a word and to interpret them, derivation and inflection rules are required.

GRAMMAR:

East Asian languages are said to have relatively simple grammar, but Chinese language has a complex and cognitive grammatical system. One of the main reasons of hardness and complicacy of this language is its complicated grammar.

Every sentence is judged by word order, sentence structure and function words. These function words determine the subject we refer to. One plus point of this language is that Chinese is not a gendered language i.e. designated pronouns are not required for males and females.

Arabic has its own unique and logical grammatical system. Arabic grammar is known as “sea of grammar” due to its vastness. But Arabic grammar is highly logical and word conjugated. Once understood, there is no chance of missing the target while speaking.

Arabic is a gendered language. It has plural forms of speech. Arabic grammar comprises of verb conjugation, word order, gender, dual, plural forms and each of them has its own rules and regulation. Even past, present and future tenses require specific verb conjugation. Word conjugation changes on the use of the word and determines whether it is a subject of a sentence, object of a preposition, object of verb and more.

Plural formation in Arabic is also a hard nut to crack. Plurals in Arabic have same consonants but vowels around them are rearranged and every noun has unique plurals.

This was a glimpse of how vast is the Arabic grammar? I think it’s fair to put them in category V.