China Daily USA – Chang Jun
“There are several factors that contribute to the “Chinese-is-difficult-to-learn” mentality, according to Cindy Wei, principal of an after school with a Chinese immersion program in the Bay Area. “Unlike English which contains only 26 letters and is phonetic and inflected, Chinese is a tonal language with many more strokes and characters,” Wei said. A syllable in Chinese pronounced with a rising tone, for example, may have a different meaning from the same syllable without the rising tone. In English, one generally finds a rising tone at the end of a question, said Wei, adding that the sentence structure of Chinese is much more complicated than that of English.”(more)