Chinese is the most used mother tongue. While the Internet has sealed the place of English as the most used (second) language, Chinese (Mandarin) still holds the top position as the most used mother tongue. In 2010, the number of Chinese native speakers totaled 955 million people. Just think of how many more people you'd be able to talk to after learning some Chinese!
Chinese is considered one of the hardest Languages to Learn . Multiple factors blend together into making Chinese one of the hardest languages to learn for native English speakers. With a different writing system, different grammar, and even different pronunciation style and sound, there are not many things English and Chinese have in common. People who wish to study Chinese must put in years of work to reach fluency and even then it is rare to achieve native-like proficiency. Typically, you must learn 3,000 characters in order to be considered fluent enough to read the morning newspaper. However, the language consists of tens of thousands of characters that make ultimate fluency a daunting task.
Further complicating the issue is the fact that the written forms of Chinese words give no clues on the pronunciation and must be learned separately. With over 67% of the words being made up of two or more characters, you can see how it earns the title as one of the most difficult languages to learn.
Chinese is the only modern Pictographic Language. Reminiscent of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, Chinese is the only extant pictographic language. The Chinese language was developed using images, which means in its simplest form it resembles a game of Pictionary. Many (not all) of the Chinese characters we use today come from ancient drawings of the items they are meant to describe. This can be very helpful for those learning Chinese for the first time. A common example is the word for mountain "shan, 山." The three points of the character are meant to resemble the three peaks of a mountain ridge.
There’s no word to say “yes” in Chinese.
How to say “yes” in Chinese isn’t straightforward like sí in Spanish. Standard Mandarin replies use the verb or adjective in the question for assent:
“Can you help me?” — “Can.”
“Is it clear?” — “Clear.”
However, a nasally “en” is used for a less formal affirmative.
New words are awkward to add to rigid Chinese. The inherent rigidities of Chinese (a set of pictographs instead of an alphabet) makes naming new things a bit difficult. When computers first arrived, they used what was already in their arsenal to create a name: ‘electric brain’. Badminton is affectionately called ‘feather ball’, giraffe a ‘long-necked deer’, and what is a lobster to the Chinese? A ‘dragon shrimp’, of course! You may wonder how people in China type characters on a keyboard, and no, there isn’t a giant one with thousands of keys (though there are keyboards for the 20-or-so strokes). Pinyin, the alphabetization of Mandarin, can be typed on any keyboard and software displays a long list of corresponding characters for each syllable (most commonly used first thankfully!) — a bit like messaging on a number keypad.