美版贴吧Reddit上有一个中文学习小组，组员十多万人。
随手一翻就能看到不少中文学习的记录，例如下面这个汉字书写练习。
仿佛看到了自己小学时代的作业本。
Hi, I'm quite new to Mandarin and am starting to work on my characters. I suspect they look like a 4-year-old wrote them, so I would appreciate advice/observations in general or specifically about these ones. Thank you!
嗨，我中文是新手水平，刚开始学写汉字。我估计我写得有点像4岁小孩的字迹。有什么汉字书写的建议或者能不能告诉我这些字写得怎么样，感恩。
还有人晒出自己学习中文时抄写的韩愈的古诗《晚春》。
字体方正，笔画稚嫩，笔触里处处用劲儿。
评论区马上就有热心网友指出问题：
Keep the four sentences in line! The top two characters make it seem that the title of the poem is 百杨. And one of them is wrong. It's 杨花榆荚无才思, it's 荚 not 英.
四列字要对齐！上面突出的两个字像是这首诗的标题“百杨”。而且有个字写错了，是杨花榆荚无才思，是荚，不是“英”。
还有不少字帖本上的单字练习，发到网上来就为了求个点赞。
You guys are here with your calligraphy, this is my stuff up on writing 你. I'm getting there slowly though haha.
你们都在晒书法，这是我写的“你”字。慢慢进步中哈哈。
My attempts at writing 高.
我写的“高”。
也有典型的字儿还没写方正就开始尝试连笔了的。
Trying out a semi-calligraphic(?) handwriting, critic needed!
试着写一下半书法体。请指正！
社区氛围十分好，有人晒出好看的书法，底下评论就充满了学习热情。
评论：
My god it should be illegal for something to look this amazing, truly inspiring. This inspires me to continue studying Chinese and its characters. Thank you so much my friend.
天哪，这么美的字是我能看的吗！太鼓舞人了。我又有动力学习中文和汉字了。十分感谢。
从上面稚嫩的书法里可以看出，中文确实不好学。
为外交人员提供培训的美国国务院外事服务局（Foreign Service Institute）在官网上有一个根据70年来的培训数据整理的外语难度榜单。
中文（含普通话与粤语）位列最难的第四级。
排名的依据就是“该语言的水平达到胜任工作（Professional Working Proficiency）所需要的学习时长”。
第一级
约24-30周（600到750课时）
Danish, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish
丹麦语、荷兰语、法语、意大利语、西班牙语
These are languages that are more similar to English.
这些语言跟英语很相似。
第二级
约36周（900课时）
German, Malay and Swahili
德语、马来语、斯瓦西里语
第三级
约44周（1100课时）
Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Russian, Thai and Vietnamese
希腊语、希伯来语、印地语、俄语、泰语、越南语
These are “hard languages” – languages with significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English.
这些就是“难学的语言”——语言上和文化上都与英语有显著不同。
第四级
约88周（2200课时）
Arabic, Chinese (icld: Mandarin, Cantonese), Japanese and Korean
阿拉伯语、中文（含普通话与粤语）、日语、韩语
These are “super-hard languages” – languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.
这些就是“超级难学的语言”了——对于英语母语者来说格外难。
网上也有众多大小榜单把普通话列为最难学的语言。
罗列的理由大致相似：
❶ It has four tones which are not present in non-tonal languages.
普通话有着非声调语言没有的4个声调。
❷ Its grammar is hard to grasp. e.g., it’s hard to distinguish 了 and 过 when you express the meaning of “completed”.
普通话的语法很难掌握，如：想要表达“完成”的意思，很难分辨是用“了”还是“过”。
❸ You have to memorize a lot of radicals to be able to recognize characters composed by them.
你得记忆很多偏旁部首才能辨认由它们组成的汉字。
不过，其中提到的记忆偏旁部首，或许是真的有助于阅读能力的提升。
约翰霍普金斯大学的研究显示，比起看视频学习和打字练习，手写语言符号能更好地帮助学习者学会认字和其他相关的能力。
Hand-writing letters more effectively teaches reading skills compared to typing and watching videos. Participants who received hand-writing training are more able to recognize the Arabic letters, write with them, use them to spell new words, and use them to read unfamiliar words than the other two groups that only practiced letters in typing or watching video clips respectively.
与打字和看视频学习相比，手写字母能更有效地训练阅读技能。接受手写训练的受试者比仅在打字或观看视频片段时练习字母的其他两组受试者更能识别阿拉伯字母、用字母书写、拼写生词，以及阅读不熟悉的单词。
这样看来，比起电子设备充斥的课堂，语文课里从不缺席的认字、抄字、练字环节还是十分有益处的。所以即便很困难，网友们还是兴致高昂地练着汉字书法。
汉学家、语言学家David Moser早就在文章中提醒过学习者们，中文的书写系统不是一般的难。
What does it take for a person to master the Chinese writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. How many such components are there? Don't ask. As with all such questions about Chinese, the answer is very messy. And how are these components combined to form characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other components, to the right of other components, on top of other components, surrounding other components, inside of other components -- almost anything is possible.
要掌握中文书写系统需要什么呢？完全没有和字母对应的东西，虽然汉字里会重复出现一些构件。这些构件有多少个？别问我。就跟所有关于中文的问题一样，这个问题的答案也是繁复而无迹可寻。那么，这些构件如何组成汉字呢？啊，数不胜数，可以从左到右加到别的构件身上，也可以从右至左，或者从上到下，或者包围起别的构件，或者钻进别的构件里……怎样都有可能。
And in the process of making these spatial accommodations, these components get flattened, stretched, squashed, and shortened in order to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are supposed to fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing.
而在这些空间组合过程中，这些构件们或变平，或延伸，或压扁，或缩短，一直到能够符合所有汉字应满足的方块区域为止。换句话说，中文汉字的构件们是在二维上排列，而不是字母系统的一维。
他还调侃过查中文字典的难度，简直难如登天。
Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:
查字典还有一个问题来自中文汉字本身的特性。在中文里呢，汉字之间有空格，但是得需要好多中文知识和真正的侦探本领才能让你找出词汇之间的界限。所以找一个词儿往往是个试错过程。就好象英文写成如下的样子：
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY
还有文言文，连Moser本人说起来都唉声叹气。
Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
然后还有个文言文……
Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure.
放弃吧。太难了。如果你以为三四年学习之后就能轻松翻阅孔孟的文章，就好像水平相当的三年级法文学习者能够阅读狄德罗和伏尔泰那样，那你就大错特错。的确有一些西方人能够顺畅地阅读文言文，不过他们大都头发花白，或至少有教授头衔……
他最后调侃道，英语里表示“难以理解”会说：
“It's Greek to me.”
“这对我来说就像希腊文。”
法语里会说：
“C'est du chinois.”
“这是中文。”
中文里却会说：
“跟天书一样。”
"It's like heavenly script."
你觉得还有什么语言难如天书呢？
这里是中国日报双语新闻夜听双语，我是双语君。
晚安，好梦。
Notes
squash [skwɒʃ] v 把…压扁，压变形；
breeze through sth 轻易通过；轻松完成
radical [ˈrædɪkl] n 偏旁；部首
编辑：左卓
来源：Foreign Service Institute - United States Department of State; Reddit
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