daveg at frost.he.net wrote: >> On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Scott Schultz wrote: >> >>> >>>> It's widely reported to be among the hardest of the >>>> alphabetic languages (let's not get into the difficulty of >>>> becoming literate in chinese!), actually. > > Even learning to speak Chinese is hard for many westerners. It's > that whole tonal thing - many western adults just can't grok it. And many Chinese can't let it go when they speak western languages.