Well, as a Taiwanese-Egyptian, I’ve lived in both Arabic and Chinese speaking environments throughout my life. Hence, I can tell you right away that both languages are definitely some of the hardest in the world.

In terms of speaking, I believe that Chinese is easier than Arabic, since it’s much harder to pronounce so many Arabic words and phrases. For example, say you want to say hello. In Arabic, that would be “سلام عليكم” (Salam Alaykum), while its Chinese translation is “你好” (Ni Hao). Notice how the Arabic translation takes longer to pronounce and sort of “runs on” compared to the short and sweet Chinese translation.

However, reading and writing is a completely different story. You see, Arabic consists of only 28 “letters” each with certain pronunciations (sounds) that could be combined like English letters to form a word. Hence, one simply has to combine the letter sounds to form or read a word.

The same can’t be said for Chinese. First off, there are over 50,000 Chinese characters out there. As the BBC (linked below) notes “An educated Chinese person will know about 8,000 characters, but you will only need about 2-3,000 to be able to read a newspaper.” Heck, many of my Taiwanese friends sometimes even fail to recognize certain Chinese characters when we’re out in the street. Compared to the 28 Arabic characters, I think you get my point.

Now, to make matters even more confusing, different meaning (looking) characters in Chinese can sound the same and same characters could mean different things (and sound differently).

For example, 夠 (go) means enough, yet 購 (go) means purchase. As for the latter, 長 (chang) means long, while a similar pronunciation of the same character (zhang) means grow/elder.

Hopefully this answer gives you a deeper insight into both Arabic and Chinese, and I really encourage everyone to try checking out these two beautiful languages!

BBC Link: Real Chinese - Mini-guides - Chinese characters