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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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No problem!
People in general (incl. sometimes me) tend to underestimate a bit the complexity associated with syntax, and to overestimate the one from morphology. So when they see a language that uses no conjugation or declension, but lots of small words — like Haitian does — they tend to think it's easier.
Other good examples of that are in category IV, Cantonese and Mandarin. They're also a bit like Haitian, in the sense they'd rather use additional words to mark things than conjugations/declensions; and yet for English speakers they're notoriously harder, even if you use a transliteration or bopomofo (Mandarin). It takes time to wrap your head around stuff like all nouns being intrinsically uncountable — just like you wouldn't say *two waters in English you don't say *两人 *liǎng rén in Mandarin, you need to say ⟨two cups of water⟩ and ⟨两个人⟩ liǎng gè rén "two 'counts of' people" respectively.
Well, I didn't think that alone automatically made it easier, though I do think that no conjugation plus the amount of familiarity in the vocabulary are major factors, not to mention using the same alphabet. So from the admittedly short amount of time I spent on Haitian it felt like a similar difficulty to French, but then I probably didn't get beyond the basics enough to be exposed to the higher difficulty level of syntax you talked about.
But yes, syntax is huge. I spent years on Mandarin, even with a willing native speaker friend to help out, but finally accepted that it was beyond my capabilities (being already in my 40's at the time didn't help either). And it wasn't even the tones so much; the measure words/classifiers you mentioned weren't much problem either. It was indeed the syntax (except for simple straightforward sentences). Often I could recognize every character in a sentence and know its individual meaning, but still be at a loss to understand the overall meaning of the sentence. And with verbs, Haitian clearly marks exactly which tense/aspect is meant, in a system that an English speaker can understand intuitively. Mandarin not so much!