Comment by materiallie
3 days ago
I know it's a common pop science factoid, but there's actually no evidence that language difficulty has much to do with becoming a lingua franca.
Russian is commonly viewed as a difficult language, but it become a regional lingua franca in their sphere of influence. The only reason we aren't speaking Russian is because they lost the cold war.
I do agree that Mandarin speakers might become more open to Pinyin if more foreigners started learning the language. I'd also point out that English and Romance speakers find Mandarin difficult. For Mandarin speakers, is their own spoken language actually difficult for them? They might find English to be a difficult language.
English is one of the most difficult languages to learn, because there's so many irregular sentence/word constructions + irregular pronunciations due to vowel shift + foreign loan words like French/Latin that must be pronounced differently.
Mandarin eliminates all of these problems. The tones and characters are difficult, sure, but questions and answers being grammatically identical along with consistent pinyin is a lifesaver.
Most of that is due to weird spelling, not inherent to the spoken language.
The hardest part about Chinese is "weird spelling" because the written language is a separate language than the spoken one.
If you're using pinyin it's already easier than English.
> English is one of the most difficult languages to learn
I'm curious if this is just an opinion, or if there is data on this. As a native English speaker, I would have thought this to be true. But I have literally never heard this from people who learned English as a second language, and I was always surprised when these folks said they thought English was pretty easy to learn. My guess was that the "loosey goosey" rules of English are a double edged sword. Yes, there are tons of irregular sentence constructions and exceptions to the rules, but at the same time, most native English speakers (at least in the US) don't actually care all that much if you get all the exceptions right, so if you follow the general rules, people will understand you and respond. I mean, tons of native speakers mix up lay/laid/lie/lied (or sometimes throw in a layed for good measure) all the time, and people don't really care.
This is in contrast to other languages where people will give you blank stares (or worse, take offense) if you get one verb conjugation wrong.
English is the best language for this because it easily incorporates quirks/foreign loan words. It will always win over more perfect languages because it just absorbs new concepts. It's purpose/existence from the start was to absorb cultures/concepts. It IS the embodiment of joining cultures + move fast/break things over entrenching/codifying.