Don’t feel intimidated if you have any curiosity about learning the language. From an outside perspective, all languages are immensely complicated. In fairness, even native Chinese speakers wouldn’t be able to comprehend the poem above when spoken aloud. It’s designed specifically to mess with people and make them think about language. I love poems like this but there’s an argument that they are disingenuous and exaggerate the difficulty of learning a language.
You clearly know English, so as a counterexample to show what you are capable of, take a minute to check out The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
It’s only 4 tones. If you think of it like music, it’s not too hard. The hardest part is converting characters into English into pinyin back into the characters.
… what!? Guess that’s a language I will definitely never learn.
Don’t feel intimidated if you have any curiosity about learning the language. From an outside perspective, all languages are immensely complicated. In fairness, even native Chinese speakers wouldn’t be able to comprehend the poem above when spoken aloud. It’s designed specifically to mess with people and make them think about language. I love poems like this but there’s an argument that they are disingenuous and exaggerate the difficulty of learning a language.
You clearly know English, so as a counterexample to show what you are capable of, take a minute to check out The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
It’s only 4 tones. If you think of it like music, it’s not too hard. The hardest part is converting characters into English into pinyin back into the characters.