Everyone’s gonna tell you it’s biáng, but it’s not. Biáng is easy to write, actually, because it’s constructed purely of radicals, and commonly used ones at that.

All you have to do is add together: ‌穴月幺長言馬幺長刂心辶. Easy as pie! (Especially if you know the poem)

But this isn’t the hardest character. Let’s go through the characters from easy to hard. This is ALL based on my own opinion and experience (four years in Taiwan learning traditional Mandarin)

The easiest Chinese characters, for me, are as follows:

口日月目人木元光 etc.

This is because each one has its own distinct shape, and you can tell what it is as soon as you look at it. They’re memorable and iconic.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have:

龍爾食濕龘

That last one (龘) is totally inscrutable unless you zoom in. It’s three dragons (龍) put together, and it means “talking.” The thing is, 龍 is relatively easy to remember. So to make that famous 48-stroker, you just have to write “dragon” three times.

This is not the hardest word to learn.

Here it is, the moment you’ve been waiting for. The hardest words to learn how to write:

• 還 hái
• 壞 huài

Four years immersed in Mandarin, and only last year did I finally learn to tell them apart. I still have trouble with them. Not only do they consist of similar characters, they also sound similar, meaning I need a keyboard to guess which one I want to use.

There are lots of words like this.

• 遊 yóu
• 旅 yóu
• 游 yǒu

Again, similar sounds and similar radicals.

With characters that look like their own person and sound distinct, you can remember them in a flash. But similar radicals and similar sounds? Good luck, sir/madam.

What are some of the hardest words you’ve had to learn in Mandarin?