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. > > > Made even worse by the fact that most people lose the ability to hear differences between vowel tones they are accustomed to & foreign ones by the time they are 12. That's why few adults learn to speak another language with the correct accent or at least, accent-free, and why it is much much easier to learn languages when you are a young kid. Snarkhunter