[Frazzydee]

I had a similar experience as the author I broke my cell phone in Chongqing, China. If you have a chance to go to China, I highly recommend it. The society is just so different there, and it's incredible in so many ways.

You may be able to do it without speaking Chinese, but it would be much more difficult, and I'd be afraid of mutual misunderstanding of what I wanted the repairperson to do.

I learned the basics of Chinese before I went to the country, and took an intensive course in Mandarin the first time I went there.

I think learning a new programming language is more about logic. There's not a lot of memorization, but you need practice (some need it more than others) to make the connections. After learning one programming language, other languages may have different structures, but the logic required is not all that different.

In my experience learning Chinese, there's no shortcut to putting the hours in and memorizing vocabulary. I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.

Learning a new programming language is difficult mentally. Learning a new human language is extremely tedious, but I think anybody can do it if they put in enough time.

[omaranto]

    I think this is even more true for Chinese than most other languages.

Commonsense indicates the difficulty of learning a language doesn't depend solely on the language in question, but on how similar it is to languages you already know. An extreme example is that if you already speak Mandarin, learning Mandarin is a no-op. As a less extreme example, I'm sure that learning Mandarin is easier for a Cantonese speaker than for someone who only knows English and French.

[lmm]

Commonsense does suggest that, but I've heard such a wide variety of people with different linguistic backgrounds say that Mandarin was the hardest language they learnt that I'm inclined to believe there is some real underlying difference.