Kevin Rudd: Learning Chinese Is a ‘Doorway to Understand China’

Australian Former PM Kevin Rudd: Learning Chinese Is a ‘Doorway to Understand China”

Scroll to [21:00 minutes] Kevin learnt Chinese at 18 years old. He said Chinese is the easiest language in Grammar,  compared to French and German.

It is true, there is no gender (male / female) or plural in Nouns; no tenses (past, present, past perfect, future, subjunctive…); there is no need to have extra subject (主语)/ object (宾语) particles(助词) like Japanese ( は / が ) / Korean (이가, 을를, 은는); there is no special polite forms of sentences like French (soyez, puissiez, …), Korean ( 가요, 먹어요, 좋아애요, 입니디)…

Ref: Compare Chinese, Japanese and Korean by Steve Kaufmann

All these complicated grammar rules are necessary due to the intrinsic weakness of these phonetic-based languages, but not needed in the ‘ideogramic’象形文字 Chinese because they are implicitely accomplished within the squared-form Hanzi (汉字) Characters。