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2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.
To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in this respect, it might be a good idea to spell out (no pun intended) why that of English is so easy. Imagine the kind of task faced by the average Chinese adult who decides to study English. What skills are needed to master the writing system? That's easy: 26 letters. (In upper and lower case, of course, plus script and a few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes, dashes, parentheses, etc. -- all things the Chinese use in their own writing system.) And how are these letters written? From left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries. Forgetting for a moment the problem of spelling and actually making words out of these letters, how long does it take this Chinese learner of English to master the various components of the English writing system? Maybe a day or two.
Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study Chinese. What does it take for this person to master the Chinese writing system? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. How many such components are there? Don't ask. As with all such questions about Chinese, the answer is very messy and unsatisfying. It depends on how you define "component" (strokes? radicals?), plus a lot of other tedious details. Suffice it to say, the number is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form characters? Well, you name it -- components to the left of other components, to the right of other components, on top of other components, surrounding other components, inside of other components -- almost anything is possible. And in the process of making these spatial accommodations, these components get flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are supposed to fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed in two dimensions, rather than in the neat one-dimensional rows of alphabetic writing.
2. 因为中文没有按照常识使用字母
为了进一步解释为什么中文书写系统如此之难，也许应该先说清楚为什么英语那么简单。想象一个普通的成年中国人决定学习英文时面对的任务吧。要掌握这个书写系统需要什么技能呢？很简单，26个字母而已（当然是大小写，再加上一些书写方式和变体。还有引号，分号，破折号，括号等等，这些中国人自己也用的。）这些字母怎么书写？从左到右，水平书写。保留空格来分开各词。先不考虑拼写的问题，这个中国人学习这些英文书写系统的各个要素需要多久？也许只要一两天吧。
现在再看看另一个决定学习中文的美国大学生。要掌握中文书写系统需要什么呢？完全没有和字母对应的东西，虽然汉字里会重复出现一些构件。这些构件有多少个？别问我。就跟所有关于中文的问题一样，这个问题的答案也是繁复而无迹可寻 ，令人不满。它取决于你如何定义“构件”，以及很多其他冗长的细节问题。这么说吧，有很多个，比26个拉丁字母多多了。那么，这些构件如何组成汉字呢？嘛，你说吧，可以从左到右加到别的构件身上，也可以从右至左，或者从上到下，或者包围起别的构件，或者钻进别的构件里……怎样都有可能。而在这些空间组合过程中，这些构件们或变平，或延伸，或压扁，或缩短，总之会扭曲到能够符合所有汉字应满足的方块区域为止。换句话说，中文汉字的构件们是在二维上排列，而不是字母系统的简单明了的一维。
Okay, so ignoring for the moment the question of elegance, how long does it take a Westerner to learn the Chinese writing system so that when confronted with any new character they at least know how to move the pen around in order to produce a reasonable facsimile of that character? Again, hard to say, but I would estimate that it takes the average learner several months of hard work to get the basics down. Maybe a year or more if they're a klutz who was never very good in art class. Meanwhile, their Chinese counterpart learning English has zoomed ahead to learn cursive script, with time left over to read Moby Dick, or at least Strunk & White.
This is not exactly big news, I know; the alphabet really is a breeze to learn. Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American. Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing else hard about Chinese, the task of learning to write characters alone would put it in the rogues' gallery of hard-to-learn languages.
Ok，先不考虑优雅的要求，一个西方人要学中文多久，才能看到一个新字的时候至少知道怎么动笔写出一个差不多的模仿来？难说，不过我估计平均的学习者要花几个月的努力来掌握基本功。要是个从来不擅长图画课的笨手脚的家伙，也许要一年或更多。有这个时间，那个同时学习英文的中国人已经学会了书写英文花体，而且还有空读读Moby Dick，或者至少是Strunk&White。
（译者：Moby Dick即《白鲸记》，赫尔曼·梅尔维尔发表于1851年的小说，“被视为美国文学史上最伟大的小说之一”；Strunk&White又名the Elements of Style，即《英文写作指南》，著名的写作指导工具书。）
这不是什么新鲜事，我知道的：字母学起来很容易。我认识的中国人学过几年英文后常常能写出一手跟美国人无法区别的书法。另一方面，只有很少的美国人能够写出自然一点的，至少是比一个笨拙的三年级小孩要好点的中文书法。就算中文其他都不难，光是学习写汉字的难度就足以把中文放进“难学语言”的陈列室里了。
3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.
So much for the physical process of writing the characters themselves. What about the sheer task of memorizing so many characters? Again, a comparison of English and Chinese is instructive. Suppose a Chinese person has just the previous day learned the English word "president", and now wants to write it from memory. How to start? Anyone with a year or two of English experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling rules-of-thumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along. The word really couldn't start with anything but "pr", and after that a little guesswork aided by visual memory ("Could a 'z' be in there? That's an unusual letter, I would have noticed it, I think. Must be an 's'...") should produce something close to the target. Not every foreigner (or native speaker for that matter) has noted or internalized the various flawed spelling heuristics of English, of course, but they are at least there to be utilized.
Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day encountered the Chinese word for "president" (总统 zǒngtǒng ) and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are. You can repeat the word as often as you like; the sound won't give you a clue as to how the character is to be written. After you learn a few more characters and get hip to a few more phonetic components, you can do a bit better. ("Zǒng 总 is a phonetic component in some other character, right?...Song? Zeng? Oh yeah, cong 总 as in cōngmíng 聪明.") Of course, the phonetic aspect of some characters is more obvious than that of others, but many characters, including some of the most high-frequency ones, give no clue at all as to their pronunciation.
All of this is to say that Chinese is just not very phonetic when compared to English. (English, in turn, is less phonetic than a language like German or Spanish, but Chinese isn't even in the same ballpark.) It is not true, as some people outside the field tend to think, that Chinese is not phonetic at all, though a perfectly intelligent beginning student could go several months without noticing this fact. Just how phonetic the language is a very complex issue. Educated opinions range from 25% (Zhao Yuanren) to around 66% (DeFrancis), though the latter estimate assumes more knowledge of phonetic components than most learners are likely to have. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn't really become very useful until you've learned a few hundred characters, and even when you've learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.
3. 因为书写系统并不太与其发音对应。
关于书写汉字本身的过程就不多说了。那么记忆如此之多汉字的艰巨任务又如何呢？同样的，比较中英两种语言有助于说明。假设，一个中国人前一天学了英文词儿“president”，现在呢想依靠记忆写出它来。怎么办？任何学过英文一两年的人都能找到大量的线索和窍门（即使不那么完美的）来帮助自己。这个词儿肯定只能以“pr”开头，之后呢稍微猜一下再加上视觉记忆（“会有个字母z么？z不太常见，所以有的话我应该会注意到。那么肯定是字母s了。”），他就能弄出一个差不多的东西了。不是每个外国人（母语人士也算）能注意到或者不自觉的运用英文中这些有一定缺陷的拼写窍门的，但至少它们存在。
现在想象你一个学习中文的，昨天刚刚碰到中文里的president“总统”。现在你想写它。你如何回忆起这个词儿呢？首先呢，你 (很可能)已经忘掉怎么写了，生活中很少能忘得如此彻底和干净…… 你可以尽情地重复学习这个词，而发音绝不会帮助你记起如何书写。当你学了较多汉字，掌握一些发音构件的规则时可以情况会好些。（“总”有时出现在其他汉字里，也发类似的音，对吧？Song？Zeng？对了！“总”在“聪明”里有。）当然有些发音的构件要更明显一些，不过很多汉字，包括一些最常见的高频率汉字，对它们的读音完全不给任何线索。
这些要表达的是中文跟英文比较起来不怎么表音。（英文呢，反过来又比不上德文或者西班牙文表音，然而中文根本不在一个数量级上。）有些外行觉得中文完全不表音，这是不对的，不过一个非常聪明的初学者也完全可能几个月都发现不了中文表音的地方。中文的表音程度是个复杂的问题。研究观点从25%（赵元任）到66%（DeFrancis）都有，只是后一个估计要求掌握很多发音构件的知识，而这些知识绝大多数学习者都不会拥有。你可以这么说，中文是一种表音语言，就好象性爱是一种有氧运动：技术上讲的确如此，但实际上并不是最明显的特点。而且呢，中文表音的部分只有在你学了几百个汉字之后才能为你所用，而即使你已经学了两千汉字，中文的薄弱的表音成分仍然不会提供类似英文表音那样的对记忆的帮助。
Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.
This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character.
这些就意味着，你常常会完全忘记怎么写一个汉字，完毕。如果字根上没有语义的明显线索，也没有什么表音构件来帮忙，你就完蛋了。即使中国人自己也是如此：跟普遍的迷信正相反，中国人并没什么天生的记忆字迹的能力。实际上，一个外国学习者最感安慰的时候，就是看到一个中国人被要求写一个常见汉字时一个笔画也写不出来。看到一个母语人士遇到你每天经历的困难时，你真是感到那些委屈得到了莫大的伸冤和解脱。
事实上，这种经历如此令人宽慰，以至于我干脆记了一个单子，上面列着我看到的中国人提笔忘掉的汉字（提笔忘字？）（一个有病的，强迫症的行为，嗯我自己也知道……）。我见过很有学问的中国人忘掉如何书写“罐头”的“罐”，“膝盖”的“膝”，“改锥”的“锥”，“捻拇指”的 “捻”，“胳臂肘”的 “肘“，“姜”，“垫子”的“垫”，“鞭炮”的“鞭”，等等。我说的忘，指的是他们常常连第一笔画都不知道怎么写。你能想象一个教育良好的英语人士完全不会书写“膝盖”或者“罐头”么？（译者注：分别是knee和tin can）或者哪怕“scabbard”或“ragamuffin”这种少见的词，他们也不会忘。我有一次和三个北京大学中文系的三个博士生吃午饭，他们三个都是中国人（一个来自香港）。我那天正好感冒，打算给一个朋友写个纸条取消我们一个约会。我发现自己想不起来怎么写“喷嚏”中的“嚏”了。于是我问那三位该怎么写。结果吓我一跳，他们仨都尴尬而难为情地耸耸肩。谁都不能正确地写这个字儿。各位同学！北京大学常常被认为是中国的哈佛啊。你能想象三个哈佛大学英文系的博士生不会写“sneeze”（喷嚏）？然而这种情况在中国绝不少见。英文就是大大地比中文容易书写和记忆。不管这个词频率多低，拼写多奇怪，英语人士总能整出点儿什么来，就是因为拼写和发音是有一定对应关系的。你可能不记得“abracadabra”里面有没有连接符，或者“rhinoceros”最后几个字母不会拼，但最糟的家伙也能差不多点儿的拼出来几乎任何词。与此相反，即使是教育最好的中国人在写某些特别难记的汉字时也可能束手无策，只能问问别人。
As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing system, here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered constantly while I was in France. (Again I use French as my canonical example of an "easy" foreign language.) I wake up one morning in Paris and turn on the radio. An ad comes on, and I hear the word "amortisseur" several times. "What's an amortisseur?" I think to myself, but as I am in a hurry to make an appointment, I forget to look the word up in my haste to leave the apartment. A few hours later I'm walking down the street, and I read, on a sign, the word "AMORTISSEUR" -- the word I heard earlier this morning. Beneath the word on the sign is a picture of a shock absorber. Aha! So "amortisseur" means "shock absorber". And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur". Before long I can retrieve the word easily, use it in conversation, or write it in a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign language begins to seem less daunting.
When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street (more on dictionary look-up later), and so I didn't get nearly as much phonetic reinforcement as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any of the characters unless I first look them up. And even then, the next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up again. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily.
作为一个表音书写系统优势的平凡例子，我在法国时常常遇到这样一些情况（再一次地我用法语作为“容易”外语的经典例子）。在巴黎有天早上我醒来打开广播，听到一个广告，其中有个词儿“amortisseur”出现了几次。“amortisseur”是什么意思？我想了一下，不过由于当时正要见人，我匆忙离开的时候忘了查字典。几小时后我正好在街头一个标志上看到了“amortisseur”，这个我早上刚听过的词。“amortisseur”这个词下面是一张减震器的图片。哈哈，看来“amortisseur”的意思是减震器。就这样，我学了一个新词，快捷无痛。仅仅是因为我试图读这个词儿的时候发音是和我早上听到的词一样的。两者互相印证。接下来一周我几次看到这个词，每次我都能通过照字面阅读而找到它的发音“a-mor-tis-seur”。没多久，我就能轻松想起这个词儿，在对话中使用，或者在给朋友的信里写出来。这样一来，学外语的过程就没那么可怕了。
当我第一次去台湾呆几个月的时候，情况则完全不同。我被汉字的大海完全淹没了，它们看起来很有趣，可是完全不给什么发音线索。我带了一个小字典来查陌生的字，不过在拥挤的街道上查中文字典实在是不可能的任务（后面还会说关于查字典的事儿）。所以我一点儿也没得到类似在法国的那种发音的帮助。在台湾，我可以走过一个卖减震器的商店，却完全不知道该如何发任何一个汉字的音，除非我先查字典。即使查了一遍，下次走过的时候我还得再查一遍。然后，再查，再查。记忆增强的过程一点也不自然易行。
4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.
I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.
What was going on here? Why was this "foreign" language so transparent? The reason was obvious: cognates -- those helpful words that are just English words with a little foreign make-up. I could read the article because most of the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing these words as just English words in disguise is about as difficult as noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his glasses. That these quasi-English words are easier to learn than Chinese characters (which might as well be quasi-Martian) goes without saying.
Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor's office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork ("diabetes" is just "diabetes" and "insulin" is "insulina", it turns out), you're saved. In China you'd be a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary with you, and even then you would probably pass out while frantically looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which brings me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.
4. 因为你不能取巧使用同根词。
我还记着，当我刻苦学习了中文三年的时候，有过一次有趣的经历。有天我正好在旁边座位上找到一张西班牙文的报纸。我好奇地拿起来看，“嗯～”我想说，“我从来没学过西班牙语。看看我到底能懂多少。”我随机挑了一篇关于空难的小文开始看。结果我发现稍微猜一下就能获取大部分的文章信息。空难发生在洛杉矶附近，186人遇难。没有幸存者。飞机起飞后一分钟后即坠毁。飞行记录上没有什么特殊状况的提示，而塔台则并不知道任何紧急情况。飞机三天前刚维护过，也没发现什么机械故障。等等等等。看完文章后我突然沮丧地意识到：从没学过一天西班牙文，我读起它的报纸却比学了三年的中文报纸还容易……
这到底是怎么回事？为啥西班牙这个“外语”这么容易？原因很明显：同根词。这些同根词跟英文词汇相比只有小小的改造。我能读懂文章，因为绝大多数关键词基本都是英文：aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia,等等。认出这些词儿不过是一些英文词穿了马甲，这难度大约和发现超人不过是肯克拉克不戴眼镜的难度差不多。不用说，这些类英文词比中文汉字好学（中文汉字则多半是类火星文……）。想象一下，一个糖尿病人在西班牙发现自己需要注射胰岛素。他跑进诊所，只需很少的西班牙语和猜测的过程，他就能获救（其实，英语"diabetes" 翻成西班牙语就是 "diabetes" ， "insulin" 等于"insulina"。）在中国呢，他肯定完蛋了。除非他带了一本中文字典，即便如此，他多半也会在字典里疯狂地查胰岛素第一个汉字时不支晕倒。这正好说明了我下一个要说的中文难的原因。