# Forum Other Languages All other languages Chinese  which one?

## американский13

hey guys which language is harder to learn russian? or chinese?

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## Pravit

Why don't you learn one and decide later for yourself?

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## Sean

In my humble opinion Russian is harder. But other people might find Chinese harder. It depends on the person to some extent.

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## американский13

thats what i am planning on doing pravit   ::  
i did some research and found out some good facts
like the grammar is easy and very flexible, But the writting
is alot more complicated and speaking is sometimes hard
(trying to speak the correct tones mostly) i think this will
be a good project considering the amount of people who speak
it. Since i read in one of your posts that you know a bit about
the language have any advice on learning the characters?

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## Pravit

Chinese grammar has less rules than Russian, but one could even say it's more rigid in the sense of word order and idiomatic expressions. Unfortunately I do not really know that much about Chinese grammar.  
The writing is certainly harder, that I can say. About learning the characters, there are some good books that help teach you how the characters developed - for example, a picture of the sun behind a tree is the character "east." Usually they go over some basic ones and then some basic components so you'll recognize others(or at least have some idea what they mean). But most of them will simply require rote memorization. Here's a good site for learning characters: http://www.zhongwen.com/ 
I noticed more stuff on the net for learning Chinese than Russian, but you shouldn't be using the net as your primary learning tool anyway. In fact, I would really recommend a class for Chinese, because getting the tones right(and recognizing them) is really important. As for books, the ones for learning Russian are usually much easier to find than the ones for learning Chinese. 
But again, I wouldn't say any language is "harder", it just depends on your learning style. So, pick one and then learn it  ::  Maybe if you pick the "harder" one, you may end up liking it more anyway.

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## Zhenya

Perhaps you're right Pravit, but im convinced that Chinese is by far much harder to master well, than Russian, for any Europeean...

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## Pravit

> Perhaps you're right Pravit, but im convinced that Chinese is by far much harder to master well, than Russian, for any Europeean...

 Perhaps. Say this particular European only learned pinyin and has no interest in reading and writing, and he's very good at pronouncing foreign languages. I'd say he'd be able to become functionally conversational in Chinese much quicker than in Russian. He might even master it quicker than Russian.  ::  I'll use the same expression I did in the other thread - Chinese has a much greater "margin for error" than Russian does.

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## Zhenya

Yes perhaps that's true...

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## американский13

actually i'll just study  both it shouldn't be that hard considering most users here know up to 4 languages (or atleast the basics anyway)
and i dont have to pick between the 2, its a win win situation

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## Pravit

Always a good choice, but a word of caution - even our best foreign language learners have a hard time learning two or more languages by themselves. The people you mentioned usually learned these languages in succession, not at the same time. Well, I should clarify. If you're taking a class in one language, it should be no problem to learn one by yourself, and even take another class in another language. Or, for example, if you already know one language fairly well, it should be no problem to read a book in that language while you learn the basics of the other one. However, if you're learning the basics of two languages at the same time, you may run into some difficulties. But of course, everyone is different, and perhaps you may have no trouble at all with them both  ::  Good luck.

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## американский13

yeah, a math teacher at my school is a native russian.And in january hes going to start  an after school program dedicated to the russian language and culture. so im going to join that, but in the mean time i'll purchase that penguin series russian book and look at that.So i will be ahead of everyone else when it starts 
and in my spare time i will study chinese

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## американский13

also i will have you guys here to help me out so its all good

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I do believe that Russian is harder than Chinese especially for beginner. You can speak in Chinese pretty well after a few months learning on basic pronouncing rulls. But Russian is hard to pronounce and have a lot of rules on grammer. 
Russian is really hard. That's what I feel after a tring to learn it.

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i guess its rather subjective...in Singapore, Chinese is the bane of many young Chinese Singaporean students because English is taught as the first language, and mother tongue, the second. Since almost everything here is in English, some find chinese pointless, difficult and boring. 
I think the main difficulty in learning chinese lies in the memorisation of chinese characters...if i'm not wrong, 5000 to get by very decently. I don't seem to know the nature of Chinese grammar very well though...they never really tried to teach us anything called "chinese grammar".

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