alt Hacker NewsChinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language. Chinese morphology, tense, and overall grammar are far easier to learn than most European languages. Chinese speakers are extremely forgiving too because modern Chinese speakers span dozens of dialects but all (except 东北人) learn a second dialect: Mandarin.
The characters are indeed a nuisance, but can be overcome with Anki/SRS. Chinese learners struggle with its tonal nature due to a lack of exposure to speaking/listening because they have no experience with tones. English speakers always decry Chinese tones as insurmountable as if it’s the only tonal language, but half of all languages are tonal, so it’s doable with practice.
In fact, Chinese has become more similar to Indo-European languages over the past century. Chinese now has an odd form of hypotaxis (think: conjugation, inflection, etc.), whereas it previously only had parataxis (combine two characters to generate something new). For example, 药性 (medicinal) is OG Chinese (ish), but now you have words like 科学性 and 简化, which make a lot more sense to an English speaker because they were noun-ified. Modern Chinese does this (literally) everywhere: all you see is 是, 性, 化, 的, 被. This makes the language much more amicable to an Indo-European native speaker.
Perhaps your difficulty is due to modern Chinese’s verbose (almost bureaucratic) syntax? These examples you gave make sense to me if you follow their literal reading. They sound stupid if translated to English, but not necessarily nonsensical.
The question is why European/Arabs/Africans aren't moving to China.
> Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language.
It is much easier for me, as a Canadian, to move to basically any European country and learn the language there than to move to China. I would also earn more money than in China. This is true for much of the world.
Chinese is a better language to learn initially but that's like APL being better than ALGOL. Most of the world doesn't want to learn "{⍵[⍋⍵]}X" to sort an array "X". The network effects are key.
I'm still learning Chinese because it is obvious that with the demographic crunch there will be heavy incentives to migrate in the near future. I also have to work with Chinese suppliers and colleagues on a regular basis; it is rapidly growing in %age of workforce.
But I'd have to earn American salaries to move there, because otherwise I would just move to the USA and speak English, a language I already know and can be highly productive in.