alt Hacker NewsDepends on if the Chinese can get over foreigners messing up the tones all the time.
English has the advantage that it already had a lot of different ways of pronouncing it before becoming the world language, so the expectations for how perfect people's pronunciation should be was lower.
That’s just not true though. Sure English doesn’t have tones, but there are other tricky parts of the language. Additionally, Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.
The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over decades.
Americans will do fine learning Chinese if it ever becomes an economic necessity.