Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
That's a good point, Marcus. Perhaps the tones of spoken Chinese really aren't more difficult to learn than the consonant and vowel distinctions of English -- I'm not sure, because I've never tried to learn Chinese!

I still think that the complexity of written Chinese presents a barrier, but if China decided to promote international learning of spoken Mandarin written in some form of pinyin romanization, then I imagine it would be possible for Chinese to replace English as a global lingua franca.
That's not a good point. For a Russian there isn't much difficulty to speak English. Most English sounds are close to Russian and that diversity doesn't hamper much. In the word "live" all sounds are similar to Russian so I don't know what's the problem for Marcus to say that. For Asians English is more difficult than for Europeans but still for a Chinese to learn English is easier than for an English to learn Chinese.