"As far as speaking is concerned, I don't think that Chinese poses a special difficulty for the Western student. Most problems occur with the four tones," he says. Chinese verbs do not change tenses, nouns are not singular or plural, and there is no problem of gender. Chinese declarative sentences and sentence structure are almost completely the same as English.
「就『說』而言，我不認為中文對西方學生特別困難，頂多只有四聲的問題比較大」，他指出，中文動詞沒有時態變化，名詞沒有單、複數，以及性別的問題；中文的直述句，句型結構和英文幾乎完全相同。