Is there a language that is most difficult to learn?

Chinese is the most difficult language to learn.

Question: Is there a language that is most difficult to learn?
Position‹2 of 2: Yes, some languages are more difficult than others
Argument‹2 of 2: Chinese is the most difficult language to learn.

The argument

On lists that rank languages by their complexity and difficulty to learn for foreigners, Chinese is the one that consistently comes out on top. Most languages have alphabets composed of letters that can be combined in many ways to form words and sentences, or syllabaries where each written character represents one syllable; the Chinese language, however, is comprised of over 50,000 characters that may represent a singular syllable or an entire word. The characters themselves are complex visually, and could be representative of pronunciations, abstract concepts, or physical objects (For example, the Chinese symbol for mountain is 山, which is visually similar to a mountain). There are a total of 6 kinds of Chinese characters. In order to be considered truly fluent in Chinese, you need to know around 8,000 of these characters. In addition to an extensive dictionary, there are several subdivisions of written Chinese which can appear quite different from one another: simplified, traditional, and pinyin. Simplified Chinese uses less strokes for each character; this form is used primarily in Singapore and mainland China. In order to preserve the original written language, the traditional style is still used predominantly in some areas such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. Someone who wants to learn to read Chinese would have to choose between these two forms; although they can be very similar, some characters may vary greatly (for example, 压 and 壓 both represent the same syllable, but are visually very different). Pinyin is a style of writing that uses Roman letters; the words are spelled based on their pronunciation in Chinese. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the Chinese language is the presence of hundreds of different dialects. Mandarin is the most widely spoken and recognized dialect, but every single one has its own pronunciations, vocabulary, colloquialisms and slang; many native Chinese speakers cannot even understand dialects that are not from their own region. Lastly, Chinese has four distinctive tones that can give one syllable completely different meanings depending on how it is said. Using the wrong tones may make it difficult to communicate with others in Chinese; most non-native speakers never completely get the hang of it. This factor, as well as the ones previously mentioned, make Chinese the most difficult language to learn.

Premises

[P1]Chinese consistently tops difficulty rankings: it uses over 50,000 complex characters, requires around 8,000 for fluency, and splits into simplified, traditional, and pinyin forms. [P2] It also has hundreds of often mutually unintelligible dialects and four tones that change a syllable's meaning entirely, which most non-native speakers never fully master. [C] Therefore, Chinese is the most difficult language to learn, showing that some languages are more difficult than others.

Counter-arguments

Mandarin Chinese is actually one of the easiest languages to learn (excluding its written component because linguists usually ignore written components when measuring objective linguistic complexity). Mandarin has a simple grammar structure and lacks tenses or complex morphology. Dialect-wise, the number of Mandarin speakers far exceeds even the next most widely-used dialect - 65.7% of Chinese speakers as opposed to the Min dialect, which is only 6.2%. Since Mandarin is the dialect most often taught in schools, learners should not have any trouble unless they visit the more rural areas of China.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] "Consistently comes out on top" cites no ranking, and the best-known one — the US Foreign Service Institute's grouping by hours to proficiency — places Mandarin alongside Japanese, Korean and Arabic rather than uniquely above them, and measures difficulty for English speakers specifically. The character figures are inflated too: dictionaries list tens of thousands, but a few thousand cover the great majority of running text, which the premise's own 8,000 figure implicitly concedes. Pinyin is a romanisation used for input and teaching, not a third script a learner must choose between. [Rejecting P2] The dialect point is not a property of the language a learner studies. Learners study Mandarin, which is standardised and taught throughout the school system, and the mutual unintelligibility described holds between varieties many linguists treat as separate languages. Tone is a real difficulty for speakers of non-tonal languages, but a large share of the world's languages are tonal — and the counter-argument's objection stands unanswered: Mandarin has no inflection, no grammatical gender, no case and no tense marking, so "most difficult" depends entirely on which features are counted and on the learner's first language, which is the sibling position's claim.