Imagethief was dismayed to learn from Chinese state news service Xinhua that Chinese is not, after all, such a tough language to learn. After four years of banging my head against this language like some kind of intellectual brick wall, it is clear that my problems in no way stem from the intrinsic difficulties of Chinese or its utterly alien nature in comparison to my native English. Rather, they must be attributable to some as-yet undiagnosed learning difficulty from which I obviously suffer.

This would come as no surprise to the legions of teachers who banged their own heads over young Imagethief for so many years, and who wrote so many fruitless notes to his parents, most of which said something along the lines of, "Well, he's a bright young man, but..." insert the career-limiting academic shortcoming of your choice here "...so why don't you come down for a little chat?"

Here is what Xinhua had to say:
Frequently used Chinese characters decreasing

BEIJING, May 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese is not difficult to learn, for people could understand 90 percent of the content in Chinese publications, so long as they learn only about 900 Chinese characters and 11,000 phrases, a new survey shows.

Though 1.65 million words are found in use in the files, only 110,000, or seven percent, are frequently used. The rest are mainly names of people, places and organizations, according to the survey made by the Ministry of Education and the State Language Commission on the current situation of Chinese language.

The survey is based on 900 million characters in more than 8.9 million text files chosen from newspapers, magazines, TV stations and the Internet.

"That means Chinese is not that difficult to learn," said Li Yuming, director of the language information administration department of the Ministry of Education.

Only 900 characters, 11,000 phrases and 110,000 words. A doddle! I must have the grey matter of a parakeet, because clearly I should be able to xiangsheng like a sixty-year old teahouse owner by now, instead of struggling to communicate basic concepts to the guy who called to tell me my phone bill is overdue, as happened this morning.

Peking Duck also posted about this, based on Reuters' repackaging of Xinhua's story. Unfortunately the Reuters version missed out on a critical distinction which was made rather better (for once) in the Xinhua version: the difference between characters and words.

The two are not equivalent. While individual characters can represent words, it's more complex words formed by combinations of characters that account for the vast majority of the language. Thus, to provide a staggeringly simple example for my friends who don't speak Chinese:

头 (tou) = head
发 (fa) = to send out
头发 (toufa) = hair from the head (as opposed to body hair or hair from your cat)

Now, if you didn't know that toufa mean't hair, you could look at the characters and guess. What emits from the head? Vomit? Telekinesis? Gossip? Earwax? Boogers? It could be any of those things. Maybe context could help you to decode. After all, who goes for a booger trim or a vomit styling? Ancient Romans? (One of the commenters on the Duck's site has a somewhat more literate example of the same phenomenon.) But there is no guarantee, and the more complex and abstract the word the lower the chance of a successful decoding.

Imagethief can vouch for the importance of the distinction between characters and words. Often, when scanning newspaper headlines, Imagethief will recognize all the characters but only, say, half the words (exaggerated by Chinese newspapers' inclination to use hundreds of cryptic shorthand words).

Nevertheless, it's reassuring to know that my difficulties stem not from Chinese, but from my own cerebral limitations. Thank god I didn't study Latin, speaking of the ancient Romans (although I have at times studied French, German and Japanese, each of which can be headbreaking in its own way). Chinese, for all its complextities, has no conjugation, no gender on nouns and relatively simple tenses. The whole basic grammar, while odd from an English speakers' point of view, is manageable and relatively consistent.

Now Latin, that's a different matter. In Latin if you change the conjugation of one word it apparently ripples back through the entire sentence in a cascade of grammatical interdependence that is only concluded when you compute a differential based on the total number of characters. It's the only language that you need a slide rule to speak. A language for geniuses. I have seen arguments break out in the letters page of The Economist over the correct translation of a Latin phrase (really).

Yep, Latin is for geniuses. Chinese? That's for mouthbreathers like me. I should be ashamed.