Indeed. Chinese and English are totally different families of language altogether. 1. Pronunciation (the 4 tones in Chinese, stresses in English etc) 2. Writing (combinations of "logo" or radicals to form a Chinese characters, a finite number of 26 alphabets in English etc) 3. Grammar (no notion of plural/singular, tenses in Chinese, word order etc) and many other aspects. All these differences cause a change in learning context and there is a need to learn a new set of rules that are so alien to a new learner. It is a challenge for the Chinese to pick up English language and the non-Chinese to pick up Chinese language, _but_ it is definitely not impossible.

Hello Diana, Obviously the different set of alphabets and characters ,I think the characters are more difficult to learn because of its big number and intricate way of design,while the roman alphabet is limited in number, so it would take a Chinese less time to learn the alphabets and be able to read any text before the one learning Chinese could manage to have memorized some of the characters .It would take the later much longer to be able to read any text in Chinese .That is the essential reason making Chinese more difficult to learn .But as for the structure of sentence and the Chinese grammar it is not so difficult just too different from the Latin languages!

Why for foreigners chinese is more difficult than english for chinese people? - because english has 26 letters only and chinese plenty of them. It is one of the reasons but I think there are a lot of other reasons and differences of course.