Yes it's true, Brighton College, an independent school in East Sussex, became the first to make the language compulsory, alongside French, Spanish and Latin.
But why is it so tough to learn?
Firstly, the script poses problems. There is no alphabet, just thousands of characters. There are so many that no one can give a definitive total, but it is believed to be around 60,000.
Secondly, the tonal system is hard for Westerners. While the meaning of English words does not change with tone, the same is not true for Mandarin.
The good news is that grammar is easier in Mandarin. For example there are no verb tenses, no relative clauses and no singular or plural.
Actually, Chinese has more than 500,000 character. Every morpheme has a character assigned to it. But to get by in daily life, most people know about 40,000 - 60,000 characters. Just like in English we have more than 1.5 million words but most people know about 50,000 of them by sight. The rest we'd need a dictionary for.
Also, although compared to English basic Chinese grammar is simpler(there's no verb aspect/tense system for example), once you get to expressing complex ideas Chinese grammar can be really, really hard as it has a totally different way of combining ideas. And although there may not be a complex verbal system, Chinese makes up for that by having a complex classifactory system, so that every class of noun has its special "measure word" which needs to be learnt, almost like gender needs to be learnt with certain Indo-European languages. However, there are a lot more than just 3 measure words in Chinese.
Finally, the lack of easily memorable cognates in Chinese can be really frustrating for the English learner.
Thanks for that, it's very interesting. I'd heard about the grammar but didn't know about these "measure" words. Eek!
A while ago since this was posted, but nevertheless, on Chinese grammar: it is counterproductive to talk about Chinese grammar in the context of English grammar. For example, Chinese is more concerned with aspect than tense (much like Hebrew and Arabic), although tense can be explicitly marked, it is rarely seen as necessary. In English only the continuous aspect exists (the '-ing' form of the verb), whereas Chinese marks for a number of aspects by appending various grammatical particles to the verb: the progressive aspect, the continuous aspect (where the continuous marks an ongoing, static, action, while the progressive marks a dynamic action in which there is a change of state), the perfect aspect, the completive aspect, the experiential aspect, and the exhaustive aspect are among the more common.