Languages: Chinese

Bill Ratliff writes: As a Sinitic language, Chinese has no genders, conjugations etc. For example, the word for "he," "she" and "it" has been "ta" so that like Iranian speakers, mentioned in EdJajko's note, native Chinese speakers may confuse the three when speaking a Western language. Sometimes in written form "he" is distinguished from "she," but never in spoken. Also, time usually is designated by adding yesterday, today or tomorrow (or whatever), for example, to "I go." There are ways to get around this sometimes, such as indicating past tense by adding a suffix, but usually the above holds true. So in some respects spoken Chinese is a whizz when (compared to Russian or German) with no grammatical complications, just the tones. Reading and writing, where all the linguistic ambiguities are resolved, are something else entirely. 

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