The short answer is that Chinese is one of the hardest languages an English speaker can pick, but it doesn't stand alone at the top. Japanese sits right next to it. And the parts of Chinese that are hard aren't always the ones people expect.

I've learned Chinese, Japanese and French. I'm fluent in French, and I spent three years living between Shanghai and Hong Kong. That's given me plenty of time to think about which parts of Chinese were hard for me, and which parts I'd been warned about that turned out fine.

What the official numbers say

The US Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, groups languages by how long English speakers take to reach professional working proficiency. French is in Category I, the easiest group, at 24 to 30 weeks or 600 to 750 class hours. Mandarin is in Category IV, the hardest group, at about 88 weeks and 2,200 class hours. Japanese is in Category IV as well.

Those are classroom hours for full-time students, people whose job for that stretch is learning the language. If you're studying for 30 minutes after work, the calendar time will be far longer. The ratio is the useful part. By the FSI's numbers, Mandarin takes three to four times as long as French.

That matches what happened to me. French moved quickly. With both Chinese and Japanese, it took a lot longer before I felt any real progress.

Why French felt so much faster

French is easier for English speakers mostly because so much is shared. The two languages have a lot of vocabulary in common, so you recognize words before you've studied them. French also uses the same alphabet, so you can at least read a sign on day one, even if your pronunciation is off.

Chinese gives you neither. Very little vocabulary carries over, and the writing system has to be learned one character at a time. You start from zero on both fronts, which is why the early stages feel so slow.

I once had a 500-day Duolingo streak that never turned into being able to read Chinese. Five hundred days of showing up, and I still couldn't read. That's what starting from zero on the writing system looks like.

Tones were the hardest part for me

If I had to pick one thing, it's tones. I struggled with them significantly, more than with anything else in Chinese.

Mandarin has four tones plus a neutral tone, and the same syllable with a different tone is a different word. The standard illustration is "ma". Said with a high, flat tone, mā means mother. With a rising tone, má means hemp. With a tone that dips and comes back up, mǎ means horse. With a sharp fall, mà means to scold. That's four separate words, and to an untrained English ear they can sound almost the same.

English uses pitch as well, but for emotion and emphasis, like the rise at the end of a question. Pitch never changes which word you've said. So your instincts work against you. You hear a tone as mood rather than meaning, and when you speak, the natural rise and fall of an English sentence pulls the tones of the words out of shape.

If tones are where you're stuck too, start with the basics of Chinese tones. Then use the pinyin chart, where you can hear every syllable in all four tones. Hearing the same syllable four ways, side by side, trains your ear on the differences before you need them in a conversation.

Characters and listening are hard too

Tones aren't the only wall. Characters take years, because each one has to be learned on its own and there are thousands in everyday use. How many you need depends on what you want to read, but the number is large however you count it.

Listening is the other one. Native speakers talk fast, and tones shift and blur in natural speech. Even when you know every word in a sentence, catching them at full speed is a separate skill, and it only comes with a lot of hours.

Where Chinese is easier than you'd think

The grammar is where Chinese turns out to be friendly. It's much simpler than most people expect.

Verbs don't conjugate. "I eat", "you eat" and "she eats" all use the same verb, 吃 (chī), and so do "I ate" and "I will eat". Nouns have no plural endings. There's no grammatical gender, so you never have to memorize whether a table is masculine or feminine. Time is shown with words like 了 (le), or with time expressions such as "yesterday" and "tomorrow", rather than by changing the verb.

Coming from French, the difference is hard to miss. French makes you conjugate every verb for person and tense and learn a gender with every noun. Chinese asks for none of that.

Is Chinese harder than Japanese?

For me, no. Beyond tones, Chinese felt easier than Japanese, and grammar is the main reason.

Japanese verbs and adjectives conjugate. Politeness levels, called keigo, change the verb forms depending on who you're talking to. Particles mark the grammatical role of each word in a sentence. The word order is subject-object-verb, so the verb comes at the end, which is unlike English and takes a while to get used to.

Then there's the writing. Japanese uses three systems at once: hiragana, katakana and kanji. Kanji usually have several readings, so recognizing a character doesn't tell you how to say it in a given word. Most Chinese characters have one reading. Once you've learned it, you know how the character sounds.

So Japanese doesn't have Mandarin's tones to fight, but it has a lot more grammar and a more complicated writing system. The FSI puts both languages in the same group, and both took me a lot longer than French. They're hard in different places.

So is Chinese the hardest language?

It's one of the hardest for English speakers, and the FSI's numbers back that up. But the difficulty is uneven. Characters, tones and listening take a long time. Grammar takes far less than you'd fear.

That unevenness should shape how you study. If you know the grammar won't fight you, you can put that time into tones and characters instead. Characters in particular come down to memory and regular review, which is the part I built Hanzi Express for. If you want to see where you stand first, try the HSK level test.

Tones will probably take you longer than you'd like. They took me a long time too. The grammar won't.

Is Chinese Really the Hardest Language to Learn?