The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic—which can itself be almost absurdly limiting—but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words end in an “n” or “ng” sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average seventy words. Just one sound, “yi,” can stand for 215 separate words. Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising or falling pitches to vary the sounds fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling “i” can still represent almost forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as when we differentiate between “oh” and “oh?” and “oh!” but essentially we function by relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds.

I bet learning Chinese is harder than learning English.