Though he says that tonal languages are 'weird', I found it to be a bit more troublesome than that. As a lifelong monotone English speaker, I was actually unable to hear tonal differences that changed the meaning of words during my short attempt at learning Chinese. Made me glad I had the good fortune to be born in the country that was 'first to internet'.
The more subtle ones I was unable to pick up on. To me, when people spoke, it sounded monotone, especially on those audio exercise sounds played over speakers. I don't have a problem picking up on the tonal differences in English, because the difference is quite a bit more pronounced to me.
EDIT: I should also point out that asking a question does not require the shift in tone for it to be understood as a question, e.g., saying 'What are we doing next?' without any change in tone is perfectly fine.
Those tonal shifts are a lot more obvious than the ones in Chinese. Despite being a "heritage speaker" of Mandarin, I still sometimes confuse words with the same pronunciation but different tones. I remember my mother once asked me to bring her the "bēizi" (cup) and I instead brought her the "bèizi" (blanket). The difference between the two is quite subtle. Chinese speakers rely on context as much as tonality to distinguish similar-sounding words.
My mother once asked me to bring her a pin, and instead I brought her a pen. Are tones more problematic than homophones (and accent-induced homophones) ?
Yes. In Mandarin, there's a much smaller set of sounds than in English. There are many, many words which sound exactly the same -- same pronunciation, same tone, different hanzi -- before you even get into the issue of same pronunciation, same tones. Hence the reliance on context.
That's the first line of a classic Chinese couplet (duìlián). The second line usually goes: Niūniū qiān niú， niú niù， niūniū níng niú. It translates to "little girl leads along the cow, the cow is stubborn, the little girl pinches the cow".
I had no idea. Even as an ABC who still speaks semi-competently, I'm having trouble figuring out Niūniū, niù, and, níng. What are the characters? Isn't pinch 捏?
妞妞牵牛，牛拗，妞妞拧牛。妞 means girl, 妞妞 is a common name for little girls; 拗 has two different pronunciations, ao and niu; the ao pronunciation is usually used as a verb for bending something, while the niu pronunciation is usually an adjective for stubbornness. I guess 拧 is better translated as to wring or to squeeze and twist, but you get the idea.
As a non-native English speaker, until recently I didn't know ee and i sounded different, eg: bee and bit. Someone explained to me that there are something like 30 vowel sounds in English. Y u no 1 letter = 1 sound???
English is actually a mixture of Anglo-Saxon (i.e., "real" English), Norman French (i.e., French as spoken by Danes), ordinary French, several Celtic tongues, various Scandinavian languages/dialects, Latin, Greek, German, and (more recently) everything from Yiddish to Mandarin.
If the word was from a language written in Latin script it often kept its original spelling even when that was contrary to what passes for English orthography. It's a big mess, but (usually) it works out.
This is exactly why I refer to native English speakers as "sesquilingual".
That word itself is a mongrel of a Latin root, a Latin numeric prefix, and an English adjective-forming suffix. You still knew what I meant by it. I have also tried reading news articles in different languages, or understanding what is going on in a Univision or Telemundo Spanish-language program. It is much easier than one might think.
I have been able to decipher Italian genealogically-relevant municipal records, written in the most self-indulgent cursive script I have ever seen, because English and Italian have a lot of cognates, and bureaucratic record-keeping is about the same everywhere you go.
Chinese, on the other hand, simply has no entry point. I'm with it right up until the number symbols go from 3 to 4, and then it just goes into alienese and never returns.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary" -- James Nicoll
most non-native English speakers don't distinguish between
peek, peak, pick...to them it all sounds the same and gets pronounced similarly...while I have spoken English almost all my life. I generally struggle with such words, which accentuates my accent...so you are not alone:)
I'm a native speaker of English and I was unaware there was any difference in pronunciation between these two words. Unless you mean the difference is between those two and 'pick'?
there is a very subtle difference..it might also depend on your regional accent..."peek" is pronounced with a slight stretching of the 'e' sound, ie pe..ek, where as "peak" is pronounced without...
As another native speaker, no, there is no difference.
"peek" and "peak" are both pronounced identically \ˈpēk\
They are homophones.
Pick is pronounced \ˈpik\.
Piece and peace are also homophones and pronounced identically \ˈpēs\ while piss is pronounced \'pis\.
Apparently you have trouble distinguishing between ē and i sounds but there are only two different sounds in those word triplets, not three.
Each little area of England used to have its own spellings. Heck Shakespeare didn't even spell his own surname consistently! Eventually (1700's IIRC) things started to go national such as dictionaries and newspapers which did start leading to consistency, as well as simplification over a period of about 30 years. However sometimes the consistency came before the simplification. Consequently English has some words from before simplification and most from after. We just see these as exceptions and quirks. Bryson covers this stuff well, and is a very amusing and informative writer. (And there are those who quibble with his content.)
It's been well documented that around 8-10 months, infants lose the ability to distinguish between phonemes that do not meaningfully contrast in their linguistic environment. An English speaker can certainly hear the tones, and may even be able to pick out different tones in isolation, but it takes significant training to be able to interpret them as contrastive as opposed to inflectional, etc.
English uses question tags - you make you voice go up at the end of the sentence you know?
Chinese uses little words like 呢 to indicate a question. Or you can just use correct Chinese grammar for questions - "He said what" or "Who said that" or "This is how much". Tones are used for emphasis (emphasising the tone emphasises the word), but not for questions.
I can also relate to this; it took me a while to hear the differences and even longer to speak the differences. While I'm far from perfect, the more exposure to the language I've been getting the more I've started to notice these intricate details.
I can only imagine the same goes for other languages too i.e. Once the basics are mastered you can start really diving into the language.
If the Chinese had first invented the typewriter/word processor using their ideographs, they wouldn't have used it, and only when alphabetic (or abjad or abugida) language users invented it would it start to get used.
Just like when the Chinese invented printing back around 1000 AD, but didn't use it much. Only when Europeans invented printing with movable types around 1500 AD did printing start to get used.
It's true. If you grow up in a single language environment, you basically train your brain to slot almost all spoken language into the sounds you use for your language. So if your language has 30 phonemes, all language you hear gets slotted into those 30 phonological slots. e.g. "collar" and "caller" have subtly different sounding vowels, and you have a "recognition" slot for each vowel sound so you can tell them apart. But some dialects of English pronounce the two vowels the same and thus speakers of that dialect only have a single phonological slot. Even if you pronounce them in your dialect, they actually process the sounds the same and hear the same sound.
But there's "space" between the slots, and the further a pronunciation is from that slot the more recognizable it is as a unique sound that person without that slot can hear.
The problem of course comes when speakers of a language use phonology that sounds close to what you use, but is subtly different and that difference has a crucial meaning, the tones in Chinese for example. Another great one is the vowel length. In English two vowels of the same pronunciation, but different lengths are the same. But in Japanese they can be different. This also happens with consonants, Korean has a "stressed" consonant system that non-Korean speakers literally can't hear because a "k" and a "k" with a stress end up int the same phonological slot. Or an "s" made with your tongue behind you back teeth is a different "s" than one made with your tongue between your teeth.
This also works its way into pronunciation, we train certain muscle groups, from our chest and neck to our face and mouth to pronounce certain sounds certain ways. And learning to use different sounds (even if you can recognize them as different) sometimes is not enough to try mimicking the sound, but to actually retrain your muscle groups to use them like a native speaker would.
You can develop these additional slots and recognize differences with lots and lots of careful practice. But it's painfully and frustratingly hard.
My advice to anyone who wants to learn Mandarin, especially with respect the tonal aspect, should start as young as possible (i.e., don't make a deliberate decision to put off learning the language until later). I started at age 21, and my impression (from observing other learners over the past 25 years) is that most people who begin much later than that have an especially hard time recognizing and reproducing the tones.
Those are differences in emphasis (DIgest vs diGEST). Tonal differences in Mandarin are more subtle. The same syllable is emphasized, but the "shaping" of the pronunciation is changed.
Also note that OP stated that he or she couldn't distinguish between Mandarin tones, not tonal differences in general. This is not difficult to believe, as your ear becomes trained to recognize differences in your native language and ignore slight differences in pronunciation that don't affect the meaning.
As a Chinese American, this is so true. Despite going to Chinese school every weekend for many years as a child, I still can't write a damn sentence in Chinese and find it impossible to read a newspaper article. Not having a phonetic alphabet is a real killer.
As an American student of Mandarin Chinese, this article provided loads of laughs. To read someone so well-versed in Chinese give such an articulate description of my feelings was satisfying.
The hardest hurdle after overcoming the superficial points the author makes is the fact that Chinese is an incredibly abstract and implicit language. When you read between the lines, you often find entire paragraphs. When comparing it to an extremely explicit language such as English, there's a fundamental difference in how ideas are propagated into words.
What do "implict" and "explicit" languages even mean? Chinese uses a different grammar, so in that sense it puts ideas into words differently, but the idea that Chinese is somehow less literal than English is nonsense.
When written Chinese was simplified there was a short-lived movement to move towards non-logographic system called Bopomofo or Zhuyin Fuhao which has the cool aspect of still looking non-Western, but being a phonetic system with unambiguous "spelling". My understanding though is that it still introduces significant issues with homophones (including tones) which is sorted out in written Chinese by unique characters.
It probably could have been resolved with superscript numbers and a strictly controlled dictionary that mapped each number to a specific dictionary definition for a homophone. But that's not what happened and instead we ended up with Simplified Chinese which is still among the most complex written languages ever created.
I believe it's still used in some dictionaries as a pronunciation guide however.
I can't speak for Chinese, but for Korean there's a large number of Chinese loan words, except spoken Korean doesn't have tones and it does introduce a number of comprehension issues when context is ambiguous and the different words are written with the same Hangul. This wasn't really an issue in the past as Korean used the Chinese system until Hangul started becoming more commonplace.
Transliterations have existed since at least the 19th century, most notably with the Wade Giles system.
Now though Pinyin is the international standard, and is how mainland schools teach pronunciation.
Taiwanese still uses Zhuyin, but in recent years the government has adopted Pinyin for street and city naming.
(I'm not sure if schools are still teaching zhuyin, but friends in their 20s don't know pinyin).
Well sure, but I've found these kinds of systems, and the number of different systems, difficult to use. Latin just isn't a very good alphabet, even for English. I deal with Koreans more and I always find it better to just see the Hangul than whichever transliteration system of the day is in use because trying to shoehorn vowels and consonants that simply don't exist in Latin into Latin is a tough battle.
Zhuyin has the nice aspect of properly representing the spoken language and isn't hard to learn, probably a couple weeks of an hour or two a day and you'll be able to pronounce most things.
I live and grew up in Taiwan. Zhuyin is a learning tool taught to all schoolchildren to teach pronunciation. It also happens to be a computer input method because everyone knows it, and the alphabet fits onto a computer keyboard. No adult regularly uses Zhuyin otherwise.
I've recently switched to using Pinyin for computer input because Zhuyin has a larger alphabet compared to Pinyin, and the Zhuyin keyboard on iOS has smaller keys to fit more characters in the same space, making it much harder to type with. The Pinyin keyboard is essentially an English keyboard that spits out Chinese.
I'm not sure whether or not it's the case with Korean, but in Japanese, many homophones are tonal, though not often explicitly acknowledged as such. words like 神 (kami: god) and 紙 (kami: paper), or 席 (seki: seat) and 咳 (seki: cough) are fairly consistently spoken with a particular distinguishing intonation, which helps, along with context, to disambiguate them from eachother.
Spoken Korean used to have some tones until the 1500s, then lost them. In written Hangul (the original 1400s version) the tones were indicated with a dot diacritic to the left of the character.
It's not known if Hangul influenced the dropping of tones from the spoken language or not, but around the 1500s and into the 1600s tones started being omitted in written Hangul (probably to make it faster to write, like dropping vowel diacritics from Arabic). Hangul also lost some letters and there's been some vowel shift with two different vowels (애 and 에) nearly merging today.
Like in Japanese, it appears the Korean tone system was replaced with a length system to help identify homophones, which lasted until very recently. My understanding is it's still formerly part of the language (and is taught in grade school with this rule), but most Koreans don't really use it anymore.
I think today you still hear vestiges of tone in Spoken Korean but it's more used as part of the phrasing and is distinct from statement/question tone changes like in English. You can hear it in longer conversational Korean like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMnp3efz6s4
Japanese has pitch accent, but usually only one syllable is accented and there are only 2 "tones". It's not fully tonal like Mandarin.
FWIW, I've never bothered to learn Japanese pitch accent properly. I'm sure that gives me a foreign accent, but in 10 years I can't recall a single instance of being misunderstood due to pitch accent. Context takes precedence over pitch accent.
I guess I don't understand the problem with homophones. If two words are pronounced identically, presumably there must be some way to disambiguate when speaking, which could be used in the written text as well.
Chinese has a vast number of homophones, the average word length is much shorter than in many other languages and tone and context is basically used to provide meaning. Now eliminate tone and you're stuck with the Korean problem.
A better way to think about it in English are homonyms, in Korean there's pretty much a 1:1 mapping between pronunciation and spelling so all homophones are pretty much homonyms. In English we can get clever and use different spellings to determine the difference.
So let's assume we can't do that in English and spelling is entirely unambiguous (like in Korean) -- both the words 'Aisle' and 'Isle' are spelled 'Ile'.
So the sentence "she walked down the ile" is now ambiguous. I don't know if she was walking down an island or down the aisle of the bus or what. Now magnify this to 20 or 30% of you language so that sentences like "I bought a car" get confused with "I bought a tea" (both are 차 'cha').
Or "can you walk on the leg?" vs. "can you walk on the bridge?" 다리 'da-li'
or "I have a bag of grass." vs. "I have a bag of glue." 풀 'pul'
It's one of the reasons Korean<->English Machine Translation is so dreadful.
Well, there's some degree of such a problem, but in general they aren't such a big deal.
Think of it this way: if a sentence can have two different meanings based on different Hanja (Chinese characters), then they will be ambiguous when spoken. Obviously, a language cannot function if a lot of sentences are ambiguous. Therefore, when ambiguities arise, native speakers invariably figure out some way of suppressing the ambiguity. (A commonly confused word may lose its position to another similar word with distinct sound. An additional word (say, an auxiliary verb) may be used to disambiguate the context, and given enough time, may even become a grammatical suffix. Or people may just decide "what the hell" and just borrow an English word.)
For example, your example of "I bought a cha" might normally be expressed like this in modern colloquial Korean:
나 차 좀 샀어.
na cha jom sasseo.
I bought a little cha.
(This clearly implies "tea": how would you buy a little "car"?)
나 새 차 샀어.
na sae cha sasseo.
I bought a new cha (= car).
(This is somewhat hard to explain, but it implies that the speaker bought something brand new. It would be a rather odd expression to use on teabags.)
Or even more idiomatically:
나 새 차 뽑았어.
na sae cha ppobasseo.
I "picked up" a new car.
(The verb "ppop-da", literally "to pick up", is a colloquial expression for buying something expensive or worth bragging about.)
In fact, English itself is quite prone to ambiguity (although at a different level): famously, "time flies like an arrow" can be parsed in at least five different ways. Although this is a made-up example, I've seen many English learners struggle to understand complex sentences in, say, New York Times, because pretty much every English word can be a verb or a noun at the same time. Of course, all these sentences are perfectly clear to a native English speaker.
Thanks for fleshing it out. I'd add also that context is often set (in any language) outside of a single example sentence. So a word, or sentence in isolation can be ambiguous, but in the context of a conversation or a book or whatever can be pretty clear.
Ambiguity can be great as well, lots of poetry, clever puns and jokes rely on ambiguity of specific words to add multiple layers of meaning.
This is getting off-topic, but as a native Korean speaker, I'd say Hanja ("Chinese characters" used in Korean) is overrated. :)
(I do think some amount of Hanja education helps learning more Korean words, but using them in everyday documents is another matter.)
Some newspapers banished Hanja entirely in 1988, when many old-generation scholars decried the sorry state of Hanja education and the impending downfall of the Korean culture.
That didn't happen, and one by one, those newspapers that ran the op-eds of worried scholars followed suit, a process hastened by the introduction of the internet. (Writing Chinese characters with a keyboard isn't really an easy process. Especially when you're speaking Korean: you type Korean first and then have to convert each word to Chinese, so why bother?)
Nowadays, Korean culture is just as strong as before, Korean dramas are popular in China, and many official documents are arguably much easier to understand than in the 80s, partly thanks to the efforts to banish esoteric jargons that nobody could understand without writing in Hanja (and only poorly understood even when written in Hanja: think about it, you can't understand what a telephone is even if you know the Ancient Greek words for "far" and "voice". You could only have a vague guess.)
On top of that, many of these "esoteric jargons" were direct import from written Japanese words during the colonization period, so they were never a proper Korean word outside a small group of people.
Please feel free to jump in if I'm misrepresenting your language at all! My Korean is personally pretty bad, but I find language features interesting enough and spending the 3 or 4 days it took to learn Hangul made my times in Korea much better (as well as giving me a great admiration for the alphabet).
I remember back even in the mid to late 90s seeing Hanja in the local Korean newspapers, but these days they seem pretty much absent. My wife (who has a pretty good memory for Hanja) laments the inability to figure out homophones sometimes though.
In the North, my understanding is that Hanja has effectively been eliminated for quite a while and things written in the North are pretty much 100% Hangul (as well as some Korean original neologisms to get rid of Japanese and English loan words).
I can't really speak to the utility of using the characters in practice, but looking back on when I was studying Japanese and Korean, it frustrates me that more emphasis wasn't put on the characters, as learning the roots of the words was incredibly helpful in learning vocabulary, in the same way that learning Latin roots would be helpful in studying English. It was, though, much more of an issue in Japanese, where you run into the characters everywhere. Because of the heavy conversational emphasis in most foreign language classes, I didn't learn about character composition (radicals), or the phonetic element to characters until I took a bit of Chinese. When I did finally learn these things, my reading comprehension got a very significant boost.
I'd maybe argue that the use of Chinese characters in Japanese allows me to read much faster than if all writing were in Hiragana, particularly since people tend to identify words more by their shape, but Hangul does this quite well on its own, so I think maybe there's not as strong of a need for it in Korean.
One theory I heard was that Japanese has a rather limited set of syllables, so the ambiguity is greater. In spoken Japanese some of the ambiguity would be resolved by pitch accent, but accent is not written in Hiragana/Katakana.
On the other hand, Korean has a relatively large number of syllables (so less ambiguity), and modern Korean spelling system is highly morphophonemic (which is a fancy way of saying "words that sound the same in a form may still be written differently, depending on how they sound in other forms"), which also helps a bit.
For example, the words 낫 (scythe) 낮 (day) 낯 (face) all sound the same when in isolation (or when followed by a consonant), but sound different when followed by a vowel.
Bopomofo is still used in Taiwan in schools and until about 15 years ago, as a phonetic alphabet for teaching Mandarin to foreigners.
Pinyin never took root in local schools and the preexisting romanization systems (Yale, Wade-Giles, etc.) are confusing and contradictory and inconsistently used. Look up the history of "Peking" or "T'aipei" to get some insights into this.
You still see Bopomofo on computer keyboards in Taiwan, and it is a popular input system on mobile phones. I learned how to read it 20 years ago, but pinyin is so much easier, even without the tone marks.
I've been following Chinese lessons for 13 months now. One lessen every 2 weeks in a class with 3 people. Our teacher is Chinese.
I must say that I find Chinese to be refreshingly "easy". There is so little grammar and rules that I have fallen in love with the language from day 1. Just learn your words and draw your characters and you'll be fine.
Maybe it is because I'm Dutch and Dutch is known for being one of the hardest languages to learn? I don't really like Dutch actually. Also, I've spend a lot of time learning German, which isn't fun at all.
Not to nit-pick, but Chinese has as much grammar as any other language. The idea that Chinese "lacks grammar" needs to die. It seems to stem from the very eurocentric view that grammar consists of rules for inflecting words according to case, number, gender, etc. While Chinese lacks these, it does have rules and patterns which dictate how sentences are formed (e.g. the use of'le', topic marking, measure words) - it just doesn't use patterns familiar to speakers of indo-european languages.
I'm not saying it doesn't have any grammar at all. But you try to speak Dutch for a month and come back and tell me how you feel about Chinese grammar.
My experience was similar, that at least the basics of the language are easy. The hard part is if you want to learn to read and write-- it's a ton of memorization. It doesn't get any easier, either. Some characters have a radical which is a pronunciation hint, a meaning hint, both, neither, etc.
The other, other part is speaking idiomatically. There are a ton of idioms.
Don't forget about measure words, either. :)
I think you can make yourself understood easily enough, as I could chat a bit with Chinese coworkers or waitresses. But I suspect to truly master it, it's a lot harder than a language (e.g.) with an alphabet.
It's interesting that everyone seems to have the impression that their language is one of the hardest to learn. Growing up for some reason I definitely thought it about English. When I lived in Germany they thought it about German.
What are the difficulties in the Dutch language? I can read a fair bit of Dutch knowing German and English and it seems reasonably straightforward to me, but I am definitely not super familiar with it (which is why I ask).
When I was learning German I found it ridiculously hard - but it only took me about 5 months to become reasonably fluent. In the end I realized it was just that things were _different_, not especially more difficult - and that certain things were actually much easier (e.g. verb conjugations, spelling, pronunciation, more consistent grammar rules).
>>> It's interesting that everyone seems to have the impression that their language is one of the hardest to learn.
True that. I believe it's because you study your native language at much greater detail / more advanced less common issues. While for foreign languages, you usually just study common issues, the every day kind of things. That gives an impression that it's extremely hard because of all the edge cases and etc.
What's hard about Dutch? I haven't studied Dutch at all, but because I speak English, German and Swedish, I understand 75% of written Dutch anyway. I'd have thought it was one of the easiest languages to learn if you already speak a European language or two.
I've been learning some Mandarin on my own (via ChinesePod podcasts, mostly), and tried it out on two trips to Beijing. A friend recommended that I try spoken Mandarin, and that I ignore reading and writing almost completely, since that's quite hard.
Truth be told, I've found learning Chinese to be incredibly fun and exciting. My plan is to take some one-on-one Internet-based tutorials starting in the coming months; the fact that I'll be in China on business three times in the coming eight months just boosts my interest. I've been there twice before, and knowing some Mandarin was VERY useful.
I've been amazed by how simple the basic grammar is; on that part, Chinese seems easier than the other languages I've learned. (I'm a native English speaker, and have fluent Hebrew and took Spanish for a number of years in school.)
The tones do seem to be a problem; I understand the ideas behind them, but the sounds do see fairly subtle to me. I'll keep pushing ahead, though, and hope to improve the sounds I make and those I can understand.
For me, this article seemed spot-on in only one area, namely the lack of cognates. In both Hebrew and Spanish, there are enough words that overlap, particularly for modern terms, that you can sorta kinda figure some things out. I've been amazed by how completely, bafflingly, absurdly different everything is in Chinese. Then again, that's part of the fun for me; every word or phrase I learn, I feel I'm cracking a secret code.
I'm also going to agree with those who say that English is not particularly easy, at least when it comes the grammar and pronunciation. Yes, having an alphabet certainly helps, but my children took quite a while to learn all of the complex rules for English reading, and I'm convinced that in some cases, the only solution is to read the whole word, rather than sound it out.
I'd definitely recommend learning Mandarin, both for the fun and the utility. And people in China are completely amazed and impressed that you're trying to learn their language, which is good for scoring some political points, as well!
This essay has circulated in the Chinese learning community for a long time, and David Moser is both highly respected as well as obnoxiously skilled at Mandarin. As someone who has learnt Chinese to a high degree of proficiency, I agree with many of his points, but it paints a picture that is a bit too grim in my opinion.
The first thing one should note is that Moser started studying Chinese in the late 80s. Things have changed. There is a wealth of accessible, well-written and free learning resources available online. People like Olle Linge have written much about how to study Chinese efficiently. There is a grammar wiki. There is the amazing Pleco dictionary (among others) with built-in OCR, flashcarding, recorded pronunciations. There are podcasts (check out Popup Chinese).
Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months. It was painful, but not impossible thanks to an intensive flashcarding regimen, immersion, and other studying.
Chinese grammar, while not trivial, is much simpler than I found French grammar to be. Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates. When you have built up an internal library of individual characters, the meaning of a word like 海军 (navy) will be obvious since 海=sea and 军=army.
Also, learning Chinese is incredibly rewarding. It opens up a country with 1.4bn+ inhabitants that is quickly gaining prominence in the world, and with one of the most fascinating scripts ever to be designed. Even though I no longer live in China, I still hear Mandarin all time. This makes learning the language exciting! The hardest part is sticking with it. If you want to learn, it will come so much easier to you.
Compare the writing to russian/greek/korean however. The helpfulness of phonetic alphabets can't be overstated. Being able to transcribe and sound-out words is a huge amount of memory you don't have to use that can instead be used for things like grammar/idioms/vocab. I like to think of it as the difference between using some sort of intellisense and memorizing the standard library/documentation when programming.
Seconded. I started learning Mandarin some years ago. The written language remained opaque for a very long time since you need to learn a rather long list of hanzi before you can read anything interesting. And there's little guarantee you'll be able to pronounce any of it anyway.
Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.
Well, when it comes to Arabic, the short vowels should be written out as accents of sorts. However, they are quite often missing in actual written text. However, even as a native Arabic speaker I will struggle with text written like that and it will take me a while to read it. That's because most Arabs(at least the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptians I've mostly been exposed to) do not speak the written Arabic. Rather, we speak a colloquial language that will differ from one region to another. These are visibly descended from the formal, written, Arabic but they are not at all the same language. They have many different words, a completely different grammar, and very different pronunciation. So as far as most Arabs I know, the written Arabic is pretty much yet another foreign language they learn rather than their native language. The similarity between the written and spoken is similar to the difference between say Latin and languages that were descended from it(such as French).
Chinese writing is phonetic, just not for your first 1000-2000 characters. I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters, because things get dramatically easier when you have learnt a lot of them. These are all pronounced "ding": 丁 订 盯 顶 钉, because they all have that T-like phonetic component. Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no. I will agree though that it is daunting to get started with.
The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write.
Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
I don't know if simplification has broken a great deal of the relationships, but it certainly has broken some.
Here is a specific example:
Traditional Chinese
車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident)
不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but)
Simplified Chinese
车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation)
不过 (same meaning/pronunciation)
Notice the 咼 in the Traditional 過 and 禍. This phonetic component gives you some indication that is is pronounced like "luo, huo, guo, wo".
In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively.
The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
But even in that case the relationships weren't completely broken. While 过 changed, 娲wa, 祸 huo，涡 wo，窝wo，锅 guo，蜗 wo，etc. still share the radical to the right, and 过 is a very common character, you shouldn't need to guess how to read it.
I found that simplified characters are much easier to learn than traditional, it is just that much simpler. Enough of the phonetic relations are still there (and some new phonetic relationships were created, I think), and memorizing the base characters is much easier. On top of that, memorizing the characters still requires a lot of practice writing them, and simplified saves enough time that its definitely worth it. For example, for the character for far: 远（yuan), its traditional is much more complicated: 遠. On top of that, a sound relationship is still there, and it is much simpler.
I studied three and a half years of traditional characters, switched to simplified when I went to China, and then started studying Japanese, which uses a mix. I definitely am glad I studied traditional characters, but I feel at least for me, they are much much harder to learn, but that could be different for different people.
Out of curiosity, have you tried learning both simplified and traditional?
Only traditional. My knowledge of simplified, and the debate in Chinese academia about their real value, actually stems from discussion with Chinese linguistic experts, but I have no personal experience with simplified Chinese myself, except casually.
It's not that easy. 灯 is pronounced "dang", not "ding". 汀 is "ting". Phonetic components only indicate "sounds like". And not all those examples you gave had the same tone.
Having phonetic components makes it easier (if you like cryptic crosswords), but not easy.
This is a pretty unfortunately uninformed comment. But I especially want to point out this piece:
> Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no.
I've seen people from all different countries complain about English spelling. But not China. No Chinese person has, in my experience, ever even considered the idea that there's anything to complain about. Rather, they rely on the spelling of English words as a crutch to get English speakers to understand them when their accent gets in the way, for example, by saying something like "Poss. <blank stare from the English speaker> Poss P-A-U-S-E Poss."
And to add to what everyone else is saying, here are some characters using the 丁 component, but not pronounced ding:
打 (da "generic verb", extremely common) 厅 (ting "hall", common) 宁 (ning, used in names, common) 灯 (deng "lamp", common)
sure, in English the exceptions are so frequent you cannot possibly forget that you are supposed to learn each word separately. in French you can fall to a few traps, but most of the vocabulary follows complicated yet regular rules.
French spelling is quite regular. Once you know the system, you know how to spell almost any word. The only issue is that some letters are not pronounced.
Dude no. I am French native speaker, and think that French spelling is way harder. I am even starting to suspect that the spelling of the French language was made hard on purpose, so someone who didn't get a proper education would be spotted easily to his/her bad spelling.
Really? I'd be curious to hear what French words are as bad as the 11 pronunciations of "ough" in English ("Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through)". Or, the other way around, there's the /eɪ/ diphthong, which can be spelled a, a…e, aa, ae, ai, ai...e, aig, aigh, al, ao, au, ay, e (é), e...e, ea, eg, ei, ei...e, eig, eigh, ee (ée), eh, er, es, et, ey, ez, ie, oeh, ue, or uet in the words bass, rate, quaalude, reggae, rain, cocaine, arraign, straight, Ralph, gaol, gauge, pay, ukulele, crepe, steak, thegn, veil, beige, reign, eight, matinee, eh, dossier, demesne, ballet, obey, chez, lingerie, boehmite, dengue, sobriquet. Not to mention place names like Featheringstonehaugh (pronounced "Fan-shaw"). What are the most difficult things about spelling French?
That's a little bit cheating, you're adding silent consonants to the vowel when they're not pronounced at all.
I could say that in Russian the sound [о] can be spelled ол as in солнце, but that would be bullshit. Russian is a largely phonetic language, it's just that consonant clusters get simplified in pronunciation.
Well, in my opinion, English is hard to pronounce (for example, it impossible to know to to pronounce the word 'live' without context) and French is hard to spell.
Since you mention the /eɪ/ diphthong, in French it can be spelled é, ée, et, ed, er, ai, and many others. What is making the French spelling harder, I think, is that many letters are not pronounced, and some words have the same pronunciation with a different spelling (for example: cou - neck - and coup - hit). I can't think of anything in particular, but it all lies in the fact that many letters are not pronounced. I found this website - in French - where you can have fun testing your French spelling: http://timbresdelorthographe.com/
The number depends on the dialect. Wikipedia describes it as "at least six pronunciations in North American English and over ten in British English", listing ten of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_%28orthography%29
There is nothing unfortunately uninformed about my comment. There is something unfortunately condescending about your reply.
I am well aware that Chinese radical phonetic components are not as powerful as a phonetic alphabet. I am impliying no such thing. There are however many characters which carry phonetic information, such as my apparently crude example above. I have found this to be very helpful in remembering pronunciations of characters, even if they are only approximations. HN is a tough crowd.
Further, your experiences with Chinese people are not necessarily the same as mine.
> I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters. [...] These are all pronounced "ding" [...] because they all have that T-like phonetic component.
(emphasis mine)
This is, quite clearly, saying that you can get the pronunciation of an unfamiliar character from its written form. But you can't; that's incredibly dangerous and is nearly guaranteed to backfire within 2-3 guesses. You use the particular example of characters with the phonophore 丁 ding1. Okay. What's the most common character incorporating that component? It's 打, which you seem to have conveniently glossed over, and which, despite using 丁 as the phonophore, is pronounced da3. You also give 顶, which really is pronounced ding(3), but which is backwards like 切, making it fairly problematic to guess which component is hinting at the sound. (For a nice summary of that problem, 致 and 到 are both characters in the same style, with a sound hint and a meaning hint side by side. But for 致 zhi4, the phonophore is the 至 (also zhi4) on the left, and for 到 dao4 the phonophore is the 刀 dao1 (in a special form) on the right; the 至 component is telling you the meaning. It's much more common to have the phonophore on the right.)
I agree that the structure of the characters, such as it is, can be very helpful in remembering how to pronounce them. But that doesn't speak to reading unfamiliar characters in any way. Some components are quite prolific as phonophores: 交 jiao, 方 fang, and 青 qing come to mind. You're not advised to assume that a character incorporating them is pronounced jiao （校，效，咬）, fang (旁), or qing (精，猜 [cai1!]), though.
Not Exactly. Phonetic radicals (like 丁 in 钉) represents the pronounciation in Early and Middle chinese, not modern. For example, 塊 contains 鬼, but their pronounciation in Mandarin are different.
indeed many western writing systems such as English or modern Greek capture an archaic pronunciation, which is basically the reason why they are difficult to learn even if they claim to use phonetic scripts.
Probably the worst western example for this would be French.
Spelling of French is based on the pronunciation of Old French (from ~900 years ago!) and sometimes mixed with spelling based on the original Latin word from which the modern French word derives (from ~2000 years ago).
AFAIK modern Greek orthography is not that bad, if you disregard the madness that polytonic script (which is solely based on how Greek was spoken/written in Antiquity) was used until the 80s.
I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like).
But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun!
So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier.
Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word.
"Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar".
for real. I briefly worked at a Russian news agency, where one guy's entire job was keeping track of the correct transliterations for people and places. I imagine the internet makes it somewhat easier now, but it's still a nightmare.
My parents were both linguists in the military in the 80s, so when I had gotten to around 8 years old or so, they started trying to teach me Russian. Needless to say, it didn't stick, but I've recently been trying it again.
I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/...
And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed.
The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
> Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool.
Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced? Not to mention the phonological rules that must be memorised, like how the ending of words are always devoiced (giving us fun conflicting transliterations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonoff%27s_theorem ).
To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness. I've found Hungarian spelling to be more regular, for example.
Hungarian is thankfully very regular when it comes to pronunciation, though the vowel harmony rules take some getting used to (but are very beautiful once you learn them). I also really enjoy the agglutinative aspects of the language and use of "post-positions" rather than prepositions.
You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.
Well technically English has no rules mandating anything, since there is no central institute or authority for the language. Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.
Practically, rules that people 50 years ago would never break are routinely ignored now, there are a bunch of things that are grammatically correct but you wouldn't ever say, etc... If something is done one way practically all the time, it might as well be a "rule", whether it officially is or not. Makes no difference to the person who has to learn it.
But that doesn't mean that the rules for English orthography aren't insane. There are very few English sentences that can be read by sounding out letter after letter individually (no matter what sound you choose as the basis for each letter.)
There are rules. If you do not follow them, everybody speaking Russian would understand you, but you'll sound like a foreigner who learned Russian via books and had not enough exposure to real spoken language.
Russian writing is seriously un-phonetic. Or, more precisely, Russian pronunciation very often departs from writing. Unstressed vowels are commonly interchanged, voiced and unvoiced consonants too, and rules for correctly writing ь and ъ are so badly known that mistakes can be commonly seen in materials coming from mass media and government offices.
> Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates.
I'm quite glad that the Chinese of the late 19th/early 20th century often took the Japanese approach of coining semantically meaningful neologisms, rather than trying to transliterate everything.
I don't have any references for you, but I can think of a few off the top of my head. As an example, a lot of technological words are compounds containing the 电 (diàn) character, meaning "electricity":
电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television
电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie
电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer
Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be:
火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train
Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.
Oh, I know they use such compounds, but I meant more like the history of the idea forming in the 19th/20th century, and China moving towards the Japanese model of doing so as the commenter claimed.
I'm a Chinese. According to my knowledge, most modern compound words are directly taken from Japanese (since we share lots of characters), who borrowed those words from classical Chinese. Many words like 选举 政治 数学 etc. are actually from classical Chinese articles.
Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words.
Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me.
That sounds about right. We abbreviate whatever we can if ideas become awkward.
For example, in the US military, there are a lot of concepts that are clumsy to say - for example, it's pretty silly to refer to the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization Program seventy times when you're talking about why you need to change a safety protocol, so you just refer to it as the NATOPS. All of these concepts get abbreviated - Physical Fitness Test becomes PFT, Non-Judicial Punishment becomes NJP, Then people turn these into verbs, (Bill got NJP'd yesterday) and those get abbreviated as well, and pretty soon you end up with a totally new language that no one else can understand. I told this story to my girlfriend without even knowing that I was doing it:
"[Name] got caught pencil-whipping a PM on the radar. Top wanted to fix him with "EMI," but the OIC wanted him to burn, so it went to the CO for NJP. The CO is a pilot, so he maxed him out - took his pay, 45/45, reduction to PFC. Then, the SMaj told him he looked fat, so he got sent over to the S3 to weigh in. He's over, and he didn't tape out, so now he's on BCP, too! He's gonna get adsep'd if he keeps going the way he is."
My girlfriend started laughing at me, told me to repeat it, and laughed again. I realized that I was basically speaking another language, and then quickly realized that a bunch of the things I was talking about were alien to her anyway! This 90-second story became a thirty-minute discussion of what exactly "taping out" is, why Extra Military Instruction is a sarcastic term for "told to weed the desert for twelve hours," and what's so bad about the Body Composition Program. All of these concepts have been put into my brain from years of living with them, and describing them to someone else is often really difficult.
The tech world does the exact same thing. So does medicine, laboratory science, theater, band... We all have our own languages, created by common experiences and a need to communicate them to other people.
Exactly! Imagine to put those military people on an island and let them evolve more than 4000 years, then their vocabulary will be very different from nowadays American English.
Compound words in Chinese is something like that. But the good news is: each character in Chinese has its own meaning. So you can sort of guess what's the meaning of words if you know the meaning(s) of the characters.
However, except those compound words, there are lot of common expressions, which we call them 成语, which uses historical stories, poetries and you may never know what people are talking about if they use such expressions (people use them a lot and it is considered as a sign of higher education if they can use those expressions correctly and frequently.)
The literalness of these words may look strange to native English speakers, but they're not too different from their own language, or from other highly literal languages.
"Television" to borrow from the list above is a literal word in English ... if you happen to know Latin, as it's comprised of the words for "far" or "distant" and "seeing". The German (one of those pesky literal languages I had in mind) is "Ferhnsehen", combining the words for "distant" and "seeing". I remember hearing the word "Mehrheit" in a German broadcast, not knowing it, but thinking "Hrm.... 'moreness' -- that probably means "majority" or something like that. It does.
"Movie" is a shortening of "moving picture". Earlier in the technology development path were shadow lanterns and similar slide or silhouette projectors.
"Computers" (a term transferred from those who computed to the machines they used" are also know as "electronic brains" or "thinking machines".
Trains were often called "iron horses", a term sometimes applied to motorcycles (motor + bicycle -> two wheels) today.
The literalness of English is obscured by the many different language roots and influences from which its words are derived: Old German, Celtic, Norse, French, Latin, Greek....
Another example which I found fascinating was the contribution of Arabic to Spanish. The Alhambra comes from the Arabic "Al Hambra", or "the red", for the read clay of the region. From a time when the Arabic Moors controlled much of present-day Spain.
Another fascinating bit of linguistic lore I only learned recently: the Basque language, unrelated to any others in Europe, may be a relic of the Cro-Magnon people. This was an earlier race of humans who occupied parts of Europe and North Africa ~40,000 years ago. Further linguistic analysis (and genetics) have shown relationships with language fragments in North Africa:
Generally, modern Cro-Magnon people can be found in certain parts of Western Europe, North Africa and some of the Atlantic Islands today. Physical anthropologists agree that Cro-Magnon is represented in modern times by the Berber and Tuareg peoples of North Africa, the all but extinct Guanches of the Canary Isles, the Basques of northern Spain, the Aquitanians living in the Dordogne Valley and the Bretons of Brittany; and until lately, those living on the Isle d'Oleron. (Howells, 1967; Lundman, 1977; Hiernaux, 1975, et al.)—this indicated by obviously Cro-Magnoid skulls.
There are other cases of language showing the dispersal and/or subjugation of tribes elsewhere: Jared Diamond includes linguistic evidence showing the sweep of tribes through Africa, and later of words introduced via colonization. Pre-Han populations in China and Taiwan leave traces through language, as do the Roma people, who migrated from present-day India to southeaster Europe.
Yes, I agree. The comparison I like to use as an example is to the word "airport"—it's a port for things in the air, even if you don't think of it that way. It's the kind of thing that language learners and non-native speakers pick up on easier than native speakers, I think, since native speakers are so much more used to these words.
You'll also often find that a regional port authority is responsible for both seaports and airports in a given region.
And while the structure of an airport terminal isn't quite the same as a set of finger quays for a port, there's a certain similarity between the two structures. Both are interfaces, designed for craft to approach closely and transfer cargos to/from the port. They're characterized by a highly crenelated boundary to allow for maximal surface area and transfer region.
Wait, the Japanese didn't just transliterate everything? I remember talking with a friend who was learning Japanese and a lot of the words were taken straight from English, like "antena" or "furaipan" (frying pan).
In modern (broadly speaking, postwar) Japanese, yes. However, during the Meiji era vast numbers of neologisms were minted from Chinese roots, and funnily enough, quite a few of them were imported straight back into Chinese! These include some amazingly common words like 文化 "culture", 革命 "revolution", 歴史 "history", etc.
Fascinating. Do you know why Japanese moved towards using words transliterated from English in the postwar period? Was it a consequence of the American occupation?
Probably because America became a worldwide technological (and cultural) force. In Japanese, importing from the Europeans began in the 16th century, from the Portugese (Tabaco, Pan). It's much easier to import loanwords into a language that already has a tradition of bringing words into the language (wholesale, in the case of chinese->japanese) than one that is used to sandbagging the language against outside influence. Witness the difference between French and English (to the extreme case of French-Canadian, where they even made Arret signs, even though Stop is a perfectly good French imperative, and stop signs in france say "stop").
The American occupation is not the primary cause of E->J or J->E linguistic flow. There exist many transliterated words from English and other languages in the pre-war era (e.g. albrech, from German for "work", became arubaito, for part-time job). There are large numbers of English-origin words or coinages dating to before, during, and after the war, with measurable acceleration after the Period of Rapid Economic Growth.
Incidentally, my tiptoe-around-this-when-in-Japan-because-it-incenses-nationalists opinion as a linguist is that modern Japanese incorporates by reference large portions of English. "Happy" is, for example, a word in modern Japanese. Not the transliteration -- though that is a word, too -- but "happy", itself, written exactly like that. "Happy" is comprehensible to substantially all speakers of the language and appears in many document corpora so frequently that it cannot be excluded from the Japanese language by any rational criterion. There's another few thousand words which superficially resemble English in modern Japanese. (There are also, of course, minimally a few dozen Japanese loanwords in English.)
Cause, no, but definitely the turning point in the tide. Before and during the nationalist fervor of the war, there was a bit of a movement to purge Japanese of foreign loans (敵性語 "enemy language"), similar to sauerkraut turning into "liberty cabbage" etc in the US. Once the war ended, this was swiftly reversed and the floodgates to importing foreign terminology wholesale (re)opened.
China wasn't an "enemy", the Japanese had already conquered large swathes of it. The US and Britain were.
And yes, you can write "pure" yamatokotoba if you try hard enough (see eg. Shinto prayers), but the end result is as contrived as trying to write English without Latin, Greek or French loans.
Uncleftish Beholding (1989) is a short text written by Poul Anderson. It is written using almost exclusively words of Germanic origin, and was intended to illustrate what the English language might look like if it had not received its considerable number of loanwords from other languages, particularly Latin, Greek and French.
The Japanese loanwords in english that are not japanese cultural terms (like sushi, harakiri, etc.) or botanical (shiitake, kudzu) are few. The ones I can think of are: Honcho. Hunky-Dory (of apocryphally valid etymology). Kaizen. Tycoon. Tsunami. Bokeh. I'm glad that Karoshi hasn't made it into english yet.
I don't know if you got caught by autocorrect or something, but the German word for "work" is Arbeit. (Which would indeed transliterate into arubaito.)
I actually thought his article was pretty terrible. It's a fun, casual read for a rant, but I wouldn't hold it as much evidence of anything.
"If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) "
Ha, German people told me the same thing about German when I was in Germany. Guess it depends who you ask. Grammatically, I think Mandarin is pretty simple. Pronouncing it and writing it is another story. Grammatically, I think Japanese is tougher than Chinese, writing is just as hard when using Chinese characters (maybe harder, because many kanji have different, dissimilar readings), but easier when using the kana, and the pronunciation is easy as can be. On another tangent, having sampled various metropolises, I think NY is actually very livable.
English, my native language, has plenty of bonkers exceptions.
It's not properly hard until the verb system has all the necessities to fluently express every time-travel scenario. Also known as HG-hard. Most languages can only describe time-travel scenarios using related concepts - this is called HG-complete.
well, I guess some grammar is crucial to intelligibility, not necessarily the prescriptive grammar. When a lot of people make the same mistakes, they share a new code, new intelligibility expectations, a new grammar.
I think many people forget that when talking about how the newest generation mistreat their language, or whether foreigner's mistakes can be understood.
heck, sometimes it's funny when a native speaker tells me that I speak X very well (I don't), just because I use some prescriptive form correctly.
Of course, every language has bonkers exceptions. But Chinese is actually quite bad. For example, if I tell you "mao mi", and you had never seen the characters before, you have about no chance to figure it out. Conversely, if I show you the characters, but you've never seen them before, you have absolutely no clue what character it is.
Sure, there are radicals. Don't count on them to tell you anything remotely useful. Sure, some characters do tell a proper story with their radicals, but it's laughable to count on them to tell you anything.
As someone who's been learning a bit of Mandarin the past few months, I agree—the essay hits on all the points as to why learning Chinese is challenging, but is unrelentingly pessimistic about it in a way that I think is unjustified.
In particular, it hits on the two biggest barriers to learning Chinese that I've noticed in my recent experience—the writing system, and the linguistic and cultural distance between the East and West. What it doesn't talk about is how, these days, things are much easier, especially with today's technology.
At about the same time I started learning Chinese, I finally bought myself a modern smartphone, and I've been thoroughly impressed at the features it has for Chinese. Using the phone's built-in pinyin keyboard, I don't have to remember how to draw out a character—I just need to know how to write the pinyin (which is a phonetic romanization of the character), and how to recognize it well enough to pick it out of a list. No more problems with writing notes. Using the drawing input mode, where I actually draw out the character on the touchscreen, renders his complaints about dictionary lookup moot, since I can just sketch the character and feed it into an online dictionary. Hell, recently I discovered the iPhone actually has voice recognition for Mandarin—if I know how to say a word but not write it, I can look up the written character by just saying it in a sentence into the microphone. And if I have the opposite problem, where I know the character but not the pronunciation, I just feed it into MDBG [3] or even Google Translate—Google's translations are not very accurate, but it'll give me the phonetic pinyin and let me listen to the Chinese text-to-speech as well.
And the issues with linguistic and cultural distance? That's harder to get around—you still have to make an effort to pick that stuff up. But these days, you have the internet. You might not know what something means, but you have at your fingertips a repository of all human knowledge and culture, from all around the world. For example: the audiobooks I've been learning from had a note about how you should never give a Chinese man a green hat, since that may imply you're sleeping with his wife. It didn't elaborate on that at all, but a quick Google search later and I found a blog post that explains (in English, no less) how that saying has its origins in an old folk tale.[0]
It's definitely harder than learning practically any other language. Tones can be tricky to get used to, learning the writing system at the same time is like learning two languages at once, one spoken, one written, and an unfamiliar character can be a showstopper for comprehension if you don't have a smartphone or dictionary handy. But it's doable, and some things in the language are actually easier than in Western languages—the grammar, for example, is much simpler, and you don't have to worry about conjugations, or even verb tense as much. Through a combination of Pimsleur audiobooks [1] that I checked out of the library for spoken Mandarin, Memrise [2] spaced repetition software for learning vocabulary and characters, MDBG [3] for looking up translations, and Google Translate for other, random stuff, I've been able to learn pretty well even with the limited time I spare to it. I'm not quite at the level where I can be conversational yet, but I can understand and speak enough that I feel I'd be able to stumble my way around adequately were I to travel to Shanghai tomorrow.
As a native Chinese speaker I read that article years ago when my English was just enough to read long articles like that. I found it so damn funny and with a great sense of humor (maybe a Chinese sense of humor). I don't understand why people think it's "unrelentingly pessimistic" that is "unjustified". I even recommended this to my friend who studies linguistics and teaches Chinese to foreigners.
I'm from Peking University and I don't really know "how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 'to sneeze'" either. I think it's a general problem in the era of computer and internet, as people input Chinese with pinyin, not with pen and ink. It's going to be interesting to see how Chinese evolve with modern technology.
Jump in a Beijing taxi and show the taxi driver the pinyin for the address you wish to go to instead of the Chinese characters. Report back on how well it works out for you.
Disregarding your question, which others have answered plenty well already, I find it funny that you refer to them as hieroglyphics, since actual Egyptian hieroglyphics ended up being discovered to be phonetic as well!
They are not hieroglyphs, you will see no pinyin publicaly in China. Many ignorant americans come to China having studied Pinyin and they fall flat on their face.
Some of the characters do actually encode sounds, typically in the right side of the character. However, the encoding is more like a memory aid than it is phonetical. 中 (zhong1), 钟 (zhong1), 种 (zhong3/zhong4); 艮 (gen3), 跟 (gen1) 根 (gen1), but 很 (hen3). And it doesn't always work: 立 (li4), 位 (wei4), 拉 (la1).
pretty close, except 神马 actually means Godly Horse, 神么actually means God? Not really funny when I explain it out, it's the typo and pronunciation variance that's kinda funny.
Well, since most audience here are non-Chinese speaking people, how about let's be clear. So in this context, "神马／神么" are Mandarin words, and I believe that people in HK speak Cantonese and don't usually use these Mandarin words.
On the other hand, IMHO, just IMHO, "God" being translated into Chinese(Cantonese) as "神" is not thoughtful as it introduces confusion.
I've been using pimsleur as well, was able to find a pdf transcript to use alongside, which i found helpful. Also, anki (SRS flashcard system) works really well. I found a language coach at italki.com that sends me lists of words in a word doc and spoken into mp3, which i convert into flashcard using this method: http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/2011/05/creating-audio-flashc... (a lot of work the first time, about 5 minutes for 30 words the times after that).
"Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months"
That is impressive. I took two years of Chinese in college and did not get anywhere close to that ability. How many hours a day did you practice Chinese during that 10 months?
The problem with Chinese characters is that they are idiosyncratic. For example, I orally tell you "mao mi": how do you write it? If you've never seen it before, your chances of figuring this out is very sad.
You claim that 90% of Chinese writing are phonographs. Perhaps this is true to the most technical sense, but to most students this is useless. Try taking that 90% claim into a Chinese language test at university. The teacher will laugh at you as you arrogantly think you can decipher the phonetics of characters just because you know the "radicals". There is absolutely no reliable system for translating radicals to character phonetics, because it's all just so messy and hit and miss.
I once did a little project where I looked for phonetic components of about 20,000 characters. More than 90% had a phonetic component, but most of those characters are extremely rare.
In the first 300 characters a learner would study, there were about 5 characters with phonetic components. Phonetics don't really start to make a difference until about 2000 characters in.
This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473
I talked with Professor Moser before and his article happened to come up (it always seems to). He agrees with you about Chinese becoming more approachable.
Brendan O'Kane, a translator, said it pretty well: learning Chinese use to be a vocation, something you'd do for your entire life. That's no longer true, which is a good thing.
As someone who is french and has spent a year in Beijing learning chinese, I have to agree on what you said. French grammar must be the worst, I haven't run into a more difficult language at the moment, and I found chinese quite easy to learn.
It's easier to learn a language that uses a latin alphabet of course, but chinese has almost no grammar, it's so easy to build sentences in the language!
I don't think it's fair to say that chinese is a difficult language to learn when compared to other languages.
But yeah now we have pleco, nciku, sergemelnyks, mgdb...
Shameless plug: I just released Eight Brains as an iPhone Chinese dictionary targeted at new Chinese learners.
I do like the simplicity of the grammar, no conjugating, no adj/verb agreement, just naked words. But the simplicity it is compensated for with a variety of grammatical constructions: 要...了, 是...的, 挺...的, etc. (Simple grammar is summarized in the above-mentioned dictionary :)
I have discussed that article with David Moser and he highlights more or less the same differences between learning then and now as you do. He has also started writing an article about this (and some other things), but it isn't quite ready yet (although the draft looks very promising).
There are definitely huge differences between learning now and before the advent of smart phones (OCR, handwriting input, pop-up dictionaries). The number of free resources available online is also incredible! I try to contribute and write articles about learning Chinese (thanks for the mention) on http://www.hackingchinese.com
I think learning Chinese has been interesting at all levels, but for completely different reasons. In the beginning, I thought it was exotic and a bit cool, on the intermediate level, I found it fascinating to be able to start actually communicating with people and on the advanced level I've found that mastering Chinese really is a lifetime project. Naturally, I spend more and more time teaching and writing about Chinese, but I have a lot to learn myself and keep studying as much as I can.
I actually really want to learn Mandarin Chinese, and I was wondering if anyone here knows of a good app for this, ala Duolingo. I'm ok with just Pinyin/pronunciations.
If you can find the time, I recommend just going for it and studying abroad in China like I did. I took two semesters of intensive Chinese at Beijing Language University, and it was a life changing experience. http://english.blcu.edu.cn/
Though if I were to return for more classes, I might try a different city, perhaps Xian. The air quality in Beijing is nasty.
You can do half days or full days. I did half days - 8am to 12. You will have plenty of homework, but plenty of time to see the sights or do work. I chose to study Chinese with the help of my many female friends. :)
You _can_ make progress without moving to China, but you need to have much more time and will power than most people can muster with work and other things. I know a guy in the UK who spends about 5-6 hours per week studying Chinese (3-4 hours on Skype with a tutor, plus time studying) and he's made steady progress. However, you've got to put in dedicated time outside your lessons to try composition, practice listening etc.
Having said that, below are some resources worth investigating:
Audio courses:
- Pimsleur Mandarin (3 sets of 30 half-hour lessons. Available on CD.)
- ChinesePod.com (short audio lessons based around different topics/tasks. Generous free trial last time I checked.)
You really need to get your pinyin and tone pronunciation down. Just search google for 'learning pinyin' and you will find lots of free resources. There are three things worth trying to master here:
- Pronunciation of each of the four tones (actually five, as there is also a neutral tone)
- Pronunciation of each of the 21 initials (b, p, m, f etc., most of which are the same as English, but some, like x, z, c, zh are very different) and each of the 35 ‘finals’ (like -ong, -uang, -in etc.)
- (later) Some words consist of more than one syllable, and there are some rules for when tones change based on the tone of the following syllable.
Dictionary:
- Pleco for iphone or Android: the free version is a must-have. There are bundles for additional functionality. The two additional functions I use(d) are the full-screen handwriting input (paid on iphone) and the spaced-repetition flashcard functionality (paid). This app is the reason I bought my first iOS device.
- Nciku (online dictionary; search by pinyin or by writing the character)
Reading/writing characters (probably work on some basic oral Chinese before doing this):
- Skritter.com (subscription-based service best used with a mouse or Wacom tablet; doesn’t work well with a laptop touchpad)
Much of this article focuses on the writing system, but it's possible to learn to converse in a language without being literate in it. It's a fallacy to say that Chinese is "hard" because it is written with characters (and besides, there's always romanisation via Pinyin).
I'm glad it made sure to state that difficulty is relative in language - the Chinese learn their languages just fine afterall.
I don't think tone is as big of a problem as it's made out to be. As a foreiger who studies Mandarin I've found that with enough listening I began to pick out the tones well (although I still can't reproduce them as acurately!).
Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation surrounding Chinese. A good book mentioned in the bibliography is The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.
Foreign language learning in general has a strange emphasis on literacy over speaking.
I don't understand why we don't make people learn foreign languages the same way that children learn native languages. Children spend years learning to speak before they start to learn to read and write. It seems to work well. Perhaps older people need to learn differently, but I'm not convinced.
I have to imagine that learning Chinese would be a lot easier if you learned to speak it reasonably well first, and then started learning the writing system only after attaining some mastery of the spoken language. Instead, you're trying to learn new phonetics and tones and grammar and trying to learn stroke order and radicals and a bunch of other stuff all at the same time.
It's all about environment when you try to speak around. I believe your Chinese teachers encourage you practice speaking in class, but trying to speak Chinese to others after class?
If you have Chinese friends, then you are lucky! :)
(Disclaimer: I can't speak a single Chinese word.)
TL;DR: The author tries to write "Chinese characters are damn weird" in five different ways (items 1,2,3,5,7). OK, I got the point, but a bit less repetition might have been better.
Also, if you want to objectively assess just how difficult the Chinese language is, I guess native Chinese speakers are exactly those people you don't want to ask. After all, Chinese is the native language for them: how can they reliably compare it to any other language which are foreign to them?
Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both. I had memorized roughly a thousand Chinese characters in high school. Sure, it would be nothing compared to what's actually needed to read Chinese, but learning each character isn't much more difficult than learning how to pronounce catastrophe, cooperate, thesaurus, and the likes.
> Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both.
You seem to be implying that you've provided evidence that Chinese is not, in fact, more difficult than English. Or at least that you have reason to believe that. What is that reason? Is it so hard to believe that maybe Chinese is objectively more difficult to learn?
Well, as I said, I personally found remembering Chinese characters about as difficult as remembering English spellings. Of course, either comprises a very small part of the difficulty of learning either language (and I don't speak Chinese so I can't really say anything about it), but since everybody seemed to be fixating on Chinese characters... (shrug)
I am ready to be persuaded if there's a convincing argument that Chinese is objectively more difficult. What I was trying to say is that asking Chinese people how hard it is proves nothing. And (I presume) a native English speaker comparing Chinese and European languages doesn't instill a lot of confidence, either. Of course Chinese is harder than French... to an average English speaker.
It seems like the more apt comparison would be between Chinese and Russian or Arabic. New alphabet, little-to-no cognates, but still phonetic. In an all-languages-are-equal world, an English speaker would have equally difficult times learning any of those; I wonder how it goes in practice.
From a practical point of view I feel like the tones are the biggest hinderance for many people. Anyone, with some work, can memorize the characters (and the radicals that make up their component parts) but for some people the tones are just not doable, no matter how hard they try. Anyone that gets praised by Chinese for having good pronunciation is likely familiar with the mush-mouthed pronunciation of a great many foreigners.
I've met people with much larger vocabularies than myself, and with better grammar, but whose pronunciation was almost insurmountably poor. Someone like me, who has generally good pronunciation, will get praised by Chinese people as having "amazing" pronunciation (and yes, a certain amount of this is just Chinese people being polite but over the years one learns where one stands on this issue) but my comprehension and vocabulary is far and away from fluent yet I will be viewed as having "better" spoken Chinese... never mind that I can only read at an elementary school level.
No matter how much vocabulary you amass and no matter how perfect your grammar not mastering the tones can completely kill any hope you have of Chinese people understanding you. There's nothing worse than the confused look on someone's face after you say something that you think is perfectly comprehensible, only to discover you (ever so slightly, to your ear) screwed up a key tone... it's like suddenly discovering the brakes on your car don't work.
I took Chinese for a couple years, and while the tones can be annoying for the first few weeks, there's only 4 (or 5) of them. It ain't rocket science. If you can recognize the melodies of songs, then your brain has the necessary parts to recognize tones too. Nobody in any of our beginner Chinese sections ever found the tones "just not doable". Some people would take a few days to get the hang of them, and other people a couple of months, but if more than a billion people in China can do it, you almost certainly can do it too.
(And if you're really having trouble you can always hire a private tutor. Honestly, most people with pronunciation problems in any language, just need some individualized help. A group classroom might not do it, but one-on-one tutoring almost certainly will.)
On the other hand, most people simply don't have the time to memorize the characters and pronunciation. The fact that there are virtually no cognates makes the hurdle to amassing vocabulary simply gigantic, let alone the characters. You say that "anyone, with some work, can memorize the characters", but "some work" in this case is a truly gigantic amount of work.
The characters also fall out of your memory after long periods of disuse. Like many Chinese Americans, I went to Chinese school on the weekends as a child. Eight years later, I can't even compose a basic sentence in Chinese.
This. If you can sing along to a song, you can definitely figure out tones. It might take some associating each word with a tiny little snippet of music, but that is essentially what it is.
Re: figuring out whether your tones or speech is correct, try talking to Siri or Google voice search. I tried my French on the French Siri and it was humbling.
> This. If you can sing along to a song, you can definitely figure out tones.
I think you understate the difficulty of recognizing and reproducing tones. Quite a few people can't carry a tune to save their life. Even among the majority who passably can, doing so extremely well - aka having "perfect pitch" - is recognized as a rarity.
First of all, that's not what perfect pitch is -- it is rare, but it has absolutely nothing to do with how well you can carry a tune.
But secondly, if the entire population of China can do it, then statistically, you're almost guaranteed to be able to do it too. And the tones in Chinese are really very, very simple. They're no different from the way you end a question with your voice moving upwards, or the recognizable "valley girl" pattern. It's the same idea, just applied to single words instead of whole sentences.
Some of these are good points, some are just silly.
(First, background: my wife is Chinese, I took a year of formal classes in college, and have subsequently learned by exposure. I can speak and understand a fair amount, enough to survive on my own in Beijing if need be, but I wouldn't consider myself fluent by any means. In particular, I can't read or write worth a damn.)
I think this article would be better if it were titled, "Why written Chinese is so damn hard." Spoken Chinese is actually pretty easy. To the extent that it is hard, it's hard only because it's different. It's hard for the same reason that Japanese or Arabic or Sanskrit are hard. The comparison with French is a bit off, because languages like French where an English speaker can take advantage of vast quantities of shared vocabulary and history are rare. Most languages are hard in this way. So that stuff is really just, "Why learning almost any language is so damn hard." And while that can be interesting, there's no reason to focus on Chinese there.
And in fact, spoken Chinese is relatively easy. The grammar is extremely simple. There are effectively no tenses, and there is no conjugation. Learning French, I spent weeks, possibly months, learning the proper ways to state that an event happened in the past. And while I do consider myself fluent in French, I'm far from perfect here. While I think I get it right most of the time, I really couldn't explain why one case demands the passé composé and another case demands the imparfait. Even knowing which to use, completely learning the conjugation rules for them took quite a bit of effort. By contrast, it takes about five seconds to learn how to say that something occurred in the past in Chinese, assuming you already know 1) how to say that it happened in the present and 2) how to state the time in question. You just stick the time in the right part of the sentence, and bam, it's now in the past. You go from "I eat" to "I yesterday eat". Couldn't be simpler. My Chinese vocabulary still stinks after years of exposure because there are almost no cognates to build on, but the grammar is one of the easiest around.
Written Chinese, on the other hand, is practically a different language. There is little link between the characters on the page and the sound you make to indicate the same words. It's common for people who speak completely mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects to still be able to communicate through writing. Chinese TV is almost universally subtitled for this reason. Lots of people can't understand what the people on TV say, but they can read the subtitles.
Written Chinese is hard. It's the vocabulary problem turned up to 11. It effectively doubles the work needed to learn a word. Worse if you're not good at the sort of visual learning and recognition needed to distinguish between thousands of characters. Unlike the spoken version, where it's only hard for reasons that any language is hard, written Chinese is just inherently hard. Native speakers take longer and require more study to become literate, too.
Because of this, I think you need to treat spoken and written Chinese completely differently when it comes to learning them and the question of the difficulty of learning them. And the fact that this article freely mixes the two is unfortunate because of that, especially since it gives the impression that spoken Chinese is hard to learn, and it really is not.
As a side note, technology is starting to really help out here. You can get apps that are able to do live character recognition using a smartphone's camera, and offer basic translations on the fly. I used one called Waygo during a recent visit to China and it was really helpful. Even if the translation sucks, it'll give you the pronunciation of the characters so you can look them up more easily, or ask somebody what they mean, or whatever.
(My background: 6 months exposure + 2 months of self-taught reading + 6 months of formal studies + 12 further years exposure, 8 in country. Also recently married)
Over the last near decade and a half I have met hundreds of foreign learners of Chinese across the mainland and Taiwan, and the most obvious thing is that it is pointless to learn to read before speaking. Just as children first learn to speak by imitating their parents and guardians, so too must language learners learn to recognize and reproduce the sounds of a new language.
Once that's done and some rarified stem of grammar has been acquired by environment, the absolute joy of making sense of characters in their written form will propel the learner forward with far more speed and ease than a rote-learning non-speaker.
The article whinges about romanzation but Pinyin is great. It's only the stubborn Taiwanese who refuse to use it, as the product of the Communist enemy! For a truly scary alternative, look at what the French did to the Vietnamese language.
I'll soon have to decide whether to enroll my child in the dual language immersion program at our public elementary school. Subjects such as math, social studies, science are taught in Chinese.
Anyone have experience with or know of any good studies on kids learning language in this way? How valuable is it for an American to speak Chinese vs something like Spanish or French?
Immersion is definitely the best way to learn a language, at any age. With very few exceptions, it is much more valuable for an American to know Mandarin than Spanish or French.
But is a 3-4 hours per day for 4-5 days per week true immersion? And is it enough to master a complex language such as Mandarin Chinese?
I suspect that, using this model with Chinese, a child can become conversationally proficient and gain some basic reading comprehension. Whereas, with a more simple language, they may be able to read, write, and speak on the same level as a native-speaker. Looking for evidence to prove me wrong.
> Subjects such as math, social studies, science are taught in Chinese.
Why? I don't really see much use in this unless the sole aim is for your children to become fluent in Chinese. Having an understanding of math, history, and science will be more useful to them in the future than being fluent in Chinese. I don't think Chinese fluency is worth making it more difficult for them to learn the other subjects by having it taught in a language they aren't as familiar with.
For math and science especially, this doesn't really make much sense, as English is the lingua franca of the technical world. My father is a native Chinese speaker and a biologist. I majored in computer engineering and now work as a software engineer. Many of my classmates and coworkers are native Chinese speakers. Even when they speak in Chinese, the technical vocabulary is all English because that is the language they learned the material in.
While what the author says is true, I feel like there's a hint of ethnocentrism - his complaints all (over)emphasize the use of the link between the pronunciation of a word and its written representation. Whenever the author discusses things like writing the word "president" or forgetting how to spell "tin can", implicit and unmentioned is that the hypothetical person knows the pronunciation of the word, and is attempting to translate it into writing, which, of course, is a natural thing for someone coming from a phonetic language to assume the importance of. Yes, more logographic languages like Chinese have a weaker link between pronunciation and written form, but this is a tradeoff, not simply bad design. One could similarly make an argument about English speakers forgetting what words mean (or for that matter, just that it takes forever to say anything in English).
> One could similarly make an argument about English speakers forgetting what words mean
The implication here seems to be that the Chinese written word gives hints as to meaning, right? How can that be so, if 10 years of studying isn't enough to read a newspaper? Your claim would imply that reading in Chinese would be easier to pick up (compared to non-character languages), while speaking would be more difficult - one seemingly immediately shown to be false.
Not to mention that a language can both give hints to meaning and have a link between writing and speaking. At the very least, English does - the example closest to hand is that I've never heard the word ethnocentrism before, but I immediately understood it.
That said - great point about possibly overemphasizing the link between spoken and written words. From an English background, that seems like something so obviously important that it hardly bears thinking about, but clearly there could be other important considerations (even if I don't know what they might be).
Familiarity with a character is a lot like familiarity with a latin root word in English - if you know most or all of the characters that compose a word, you can usually do a pretty good job guessing the meaning of it. Certainly there are exceptions (and there may be more in Chinese than Japanese, which I'm more familiar with, as Chinese uses non-phonetic characters explicitly), but I'd still argue that it's quite useful. In Korean, which has a phonetic alphabet (though based on the same characters), I can always sound out a word, but I'll often have no idea what it means, whereas in Japanese, often I can't read a word out loud, but I know exactly what it means. For every "uptight", there are a dozen 心電図 (心:heart + 電:electric + 図:map = electrocardiogram). It works with spoken language as well, though - often times I'll hear someone say a new word, and I'll ask "is this the right character/syllable breakdown?", and if it is, then I already know what it means.
Edit: To your point regarding English having both connection to meaning and pronunciation - that's definitely true, it's just not as immediately clear/visually identifiable, and not as dense. One could certainly argue that, if native speakers are having serious issues learning pronunciation in a language, then the language makes a poor tradeoff with density there.
That sounds good in theory, but you've largely missed my point - a language that worked the way you're describing Chinese would be significantly easier to read than, say, English. However, the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. What explains this apparent discrepancy?
Sorry, I just noticed that I didn't really properly respond there. "Reading" can mean "pronouncing" or "comprehending" - I'm arguing that overall comprehension (including both word identification and reading speed) is easier in languages like Chinese or Japanese than in English. Just from personal anecdote, I feel that many English speakers learning Japanese that have trouble with reading comprehension have issues not because of the language itself, but because they try to study vocabulary as if it's a phonetic language, as many classes are taught that way - memorization focus is on how characters or words sound, rather than the meaning of the characters or radicals they're composed from. The situation may be worse with Chinese if it's as common as the author implies for students to still have trouble reading newspapers after 10 years of study.
I hadn't thought about the differences between how one goes about learning phonetically vs...whatever the optimal way of learning Chinese/Japanese would be called.
At the college I went to, which had a good Chinese department, as far as I could tell, classes were taught entirely by native Chinese professors. I would expect them to teach in a way that works for the language, but as pretty much everyone there had previously learned a Romance language to some degree (very typical of the high schools in the area), I wonder if they brought preconceptions from that experience.
I knew many of the students in the department, and their experience lines up pretty well with what the author explains (they studied intensively for 4 years and could still only read at any reasonable pace from textbook passages/speak passably on certain predefined topics).
English must be pretty damn hard, too. When I studied conversational Mandarin a few years ago, it gave me a real sympathy for native Chinese speakers learning English. Basically, in Mandarin, there are no verb tenses or cases or persons. I go, you go, he go, they go, or I is, you is, he is, they is. You don't know when it happened. Today, yesterday, tomorrow. You get the timing from the context. How hard it must be to understand that it's a different word if I went yesterday, we are going tomorrow, he might have gone, if we could have gone....I can't do more than basic conversation in Mandarin, but studying it really helped me to understand the challenges some of my friends and coworkers have faced.
Even something as trivial-seeming as gender causes trouble. I know a lot of Chinese speakers who I'd happily describe as fluent in English, and just about all of them routinely mix up he/she, him/her, and the like.
It's like the trouble that English speakers have with noun genders in Romance languages, but taken to an extreme.
Chinese also mix up "last" and "next", just as English-speakers learning Chinese mix up 上 and 下 for time words. The English metaphor for time is climbing a mountain, whereas the Chinese one is script written top to bottom.
You're right, it is kind of surprising. I guess the spoken takes precedence over the written somehow. There's even occasionally an incorrect "it" thrown in for good measure.
It's not that surprising when you consider that native English speakers routinely mix up "your" and "you're". Native Chinese just aren't used to thinking about pronoun gender when speaking.
It's not quite the same, though. Native English speakers don't mix up 你的 and 你是 when speaking Chinese. Although "your" and "you're" sound the same, it seems that we still inherently consider them to be different words, and the mixup when writing is more of a spelling problem.
I can't think of a better equivalent, though. Fiancé and fiancée come close, but most English speakers don't even know that there are different ways to write that for male and female.
Also, things like articles (the, a, an). My Chinese father, an academic biologist, sometimes asked me to help him copy-edit papers. It was difficult for me to explain when to use the definite article, the indefinite article, or no article at all. For me, as a native speaker of English, there wasn't a hard-and-fast rule. One way just "felt right".
Tell me about it. I still do not understand why you need to put am after I but is after he. Isn't it clear 'I is' is different from 'he is'? Another thing troubling me is whether to reply yes or no on questions like "didn't you agree?". I also think it would be nice for English to have more compound words like "sunflower". I am not even starting on the cultural part yet, since I am still studying the evolvement from illegal to undocumented.
All of the different forms of "to be" come from different words in old languages. We get "am" and "is" from Latin, but I am not sure about the other tenses. Google says that all of the others are a collection of words "Indo-European," which indicates that it is some language from ancient times.
As for answering questions with a presumed answer, one of the best things to do is to restate the verb when you answer. "Didn't you agree with him?" "Yes, I agreed with him." This way, it is clear to everyone.
> Another thing troubling me is whether to reply yes or no on questions like "didn't you agree?"
Native English speakers often get confused by this one too. You can respond either yes or no in those situations as long as you specify the one you wanted afterwards.
e.g. "Don't you agree?"
"Yes, I agree" and "No, I agree" would both be acceptable.
I've heard of many situations where East Asian students of English cause confusion by answering "Yes. Yes, I don't agree." — which doesn't sound natural in English.
Too long, didn't read completely, but having more than "dabbled" for a few years in the Chinese language, I agree that you have to be attracted to the language for the intrinsic reward of the learning process itself, while external goals probably are not enough.
The essay is mostly about the chinese writing system, which, indeed, is terrible.
However, if you forget about reading/writing and focus on the language itself, it's a delight to learn. Mandarin is highly analytic, parsimonious and systematic.
To indicate that something happened in the past, add "le" to the sentence. Compare that to any Indo-european language. There, you can literally write books about how to express past tense.
I was born and raised in HK. I came to the US after graduating sixth grade, so I am still fluent in Chinese.
I think the whole article can be summarized down to just one point: unless you live in China or Taiwan or HK or Macau, you are not going to be fluent in Chinese.
There is no magic in learning Chinese. As I said, I was raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. My teachers taught us single words and compound words. I learned to construct simple sentences like Hello World.
It may be true that you need over three thousands Chinese words (remind you a word is a single word like 海, which means sea, or ocean) to be truly fluent, but honestly I don't think I need more than two hundreds words to understand Chinese. As @msvan has shown, 海军 (navy) is composed of two words sea and army. If you see anything beings with 海, you can quickly assume there is something about sea. You can assume it may even have something to do with color blue.
Sometimes it is funny to see things like this:
海闊天空. Individually, you may read it as SEA, WIDE, SKY, EMPTY. 海闊 describes something wide and broad like the ocean. 天 by itself is sky or divine but you can make it even more explicit or redundant by saying 天空 to point to the sky.
Those four words are often used in this famous quote: "忍一時，風平浪靜。退一步，則海闊天空". Basically "hold on to your emotions and worries to keep the peace; take a step back and you will see the bigger picture." Yes. This kind of old quotes are hard to intrepert even for a native, but this is the art of language. You have to read each word, think of the author's origin, bring in any historical and environment context, and figure out the best interpretation. We do that every day even in America.
Of course, sometimes you can't get away with single word interpretation easily. Take a newspaper headline: 華人當選 (Chinese, person/people, ? , elect/choose). Note how I skip the 3rd one?
當 by itself is ambiguous. In theory it has a "when" and "where" context
當你 means when you
當下 means right now at this moment
當中 means inside or within this
當心 means be careful
當然 means of course
當選 means elected
So you have to know compound words.
Even funnier if you write 當心上人對你徵笑 (when your crush smiles at you). Look at 當心 and 心上人. Where is the "be careful"? It's not there because 心上人 (crush) takes over the compound.
You need to know the compound words. You need to read and talk to people. So you can get away with 200 words, but you need 1000 compound words to be fluent. But this is not something I learn overnight. I pick up Chinese as I grow up.
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http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_66674dbd01019jpz.html
i find this difficult to believe. how can you tell when someone is asking you a question when speaking to you in casual conversation?
EDIT: I should also point out that asking a question does not require the shift in tone for it to be understood as a question, e.g., saying 'What are we doing next?' without any change in tone is perfectly fine.
má http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/2.mp3
vs.
"Bring me the mǎ"
mǎ http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/3.mp3
One will get you some hemp, the other a horse.
If the word was from a language written in Latin script it often kept its original spelling even when that was contrary to what passes for English orthography. It's a big mess, but (usually) it works out.
That word itself is a mongrel of a Latin root, a Latin numeric prefix, and an English adjective-forming suffix. You still knew what I meant by it. I have also tried reading news articles in different languages, or understanding what is going on in a Univision or Telemundo Spanish-language program. It is much easier than one might think.
I have been able to decipher Italian genealogically-relevant municipal records, written in the most self-indulgent cursive script I have ever seen, because English and Italian have a lot of cognates, and bureaucratic record-keeping is about the same everywhere you go.
Chinese, on the other hand, simply has no entry point. I'm with it right up until the number symbols go from 3 to 4, and then it just goes into alienese and never returns.
It's a messy language.
I'm a native speaker of English and I was unaware there was any difference in pronunciation between these two words. Unless you mean the difference is between those two and 'pick'?
now try piece,peace and piss :)
Piece and peace are also homophones and pronounced identically \ˈpēs\ while piss is pronounced \'pis\.
Apparently you have trouble distinguishing between ē and i sounds but there are only two different sounds in those word triplets, not three.
Each little area of England used to have its own spellings. Heck Shakespeare didn't even spell his own surname consistently! Eventually (1700's IIRC) things started to go national such as dictionaries and newspapers which did start leading to consistency, as well as simplification over a period of about 30 years. However sometimes the consistency came before the simplification. Consequently English has some words from before simplification and most from after. We just see these as exceptions and quirks. Bryson covers this stuff well, and is a very amusing and informative writer. (And there are those who quibble with his content.)
I actually put together an MP3 with sounds from Swedish pop songs and told her "look it all sounds like German 'sch', not like 'ch'".
She disagreed. There's no question, it is definitely more 'ch'...
Chinese uses little words like 呢 to indicate a question. Or you can just use correct Chinese grammar for questions - "He said what" or "Who said that" or "This is how much". Tones are used for emphasis (emphasising the tone emphasises the word), but not for questions.
Edit: Grammar
Just like when the Chinese invented printing back around 1000 AD, but didn't use it much. Only when Europeans invented printing with movable types around 1500 AD did printing start to get used.
But there's "space" between the slots, and the further a pronunciation is from that slot the more recognizable it is as a unique sound that person without that slot can hear.
The problem of course comes when speakers of a language use phonology that sounds close to what you use, but is subtly different and that difference has a crucial meaning, the tones in Chinese for example. Another great one is the vowel length. In English two vowels of the same pronunciation, but different lengths are the same. But in Japanese they can be different. This also happens with consonants, Korean has a "stressed" consonant system that non-Korean speakers literally can't hear because a "k" and a "k" with a stress end up int the same phonological slot. Or an "s" made with your tongue behind you back teeth is a different "s" than one made with your tongue between your teeth.
This also works its way into pronunciation, we train certain muscle groups, from our chest and neck to our face and mouth to pronounce certain sounds certain ways. And learning to use different sounds (even if you can recognize them as different) sometimes is not enough to try mimicking the sound, but to actually retrain your muscle groups to use them like a native speaker would.
You can develop these additional slots and recognize differences with lots and lots of careful practice. But it's painfully and frustratingly hard.
Also note that OP stated that he or she couldn't distinguish between Mandarin tones, not tonal differences in general. This is not difficult to believe, as your ear becomes trained to recognize differences in your native language and ignore slight differences in pronunciation that don't affect the meaning.
It probably could have been resolved with superscript numbers and a strictly controlled dictionary that mapped each number to a specific dictionary definition for a homophone. But that's not what happened and instead we ended up with Simplified Chinese which is still among the most complex written languages ever created.
I believe it's still used in some dictionaries as a pronunciation guide however.
I can't speak for Chinese, but for Korean there's a large number of Chinese loan words, except spoken Korean doesn't have tones and it does introduce a number of comprehension issues when context is ambiguous and the different words are written with the same Hangul. This wasn't really an issue in the past as Korean used the Chinese system until Hangul started becoming more commonplace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/zhuyin.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters
http://hunjang.blogspot.com/2005/04/koreans-reading-comprehe...
Now though Pinyin is the international standard, and is how mainland schools teach pronunciation.
Taiwanese still uses Zhuyin, but in recent years the government has adopted Pinyin for street and city naming. (I'm not sure if schools are still teaching zhuyin, but friends in their 20s don't know pinyin).
Zhuyin has the nice aspect of properly representing the spoken language and isn't hard to learn, probably a couple weeks of an hour or two a day and you'll be able to pronounce most things.
I've recently switched to using Pinyin for computer input because Zhuyin has a larger alphabet compared to Pinyin, and the Zhuyin keyboard on iOS has smaller keys to fit more characters in the same space, making it much harder to type with. The Pinyin keyboard is essentially an English keyboard that spits out Chinese.
It's not known if Hangul influenced the dropping of tones from the spoken language or not, but around the 1500s and into the 1600s tones started being omitted in written Hangul (probably to make it faster to write, like dropping vowel diacritics from Arabic). Hangul also lost some letters and there's been some vowel shift with two different vowels (애 and 에) nearly merging today.
Like in Japanese, it appears the Korean tone system was replaced with a length system to help identify homophones, which lasted until very recently. My understanding is it's still formerly part of the language (and is taught in grade school with this rule), but most Koreans don't really use it anymore.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2014/01/tonal-vestige-in-kore...
I think today you still hear vestiges of tone in Spoken Korean but it's more used as part of the phrasing and is distinct from statement/question tone changes like in English. You can hear it in longer conversational Korean like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMnp3efz6s4
FWIW, I've never bothered to learn Japanese pitch accent properly. I'm sure that gives me a foreign accent, but in 10 years I can't recall a single instance of being misunderstood due to pitch accent. Context takes precedence over pitch accent.
A better way to think about it in English are homonyms, in Korean there's pretty much a 1:1 mapping between pronunciation and spelling so all homophones are pretty much homonyms. In English we can get clever and use different spellings to determine the difference.
So let's assume we can't do that in English and spelling is entirely unambiguous (like in Korean) -- both the words 'Aisle' and 'Isle' are spelled 'Ile'.
So the sentence "she walked down the ile" is now ambiguous. I don't know if she was walking down an island or down the aisle of the bus or what. Now magnify this to 20 or 30% of you language so that sentences like "I bought a car" get confused with "I bought a tea" (both are 차 'cha').
Or "can you walk on the leg?" vs. "can you walk on the bridge?" 다리 'da-li'
or "I have a bag of grass." vs. "I have a bag of glue." 풀 'pul'
It's one of the reasons Korean<->English Machine Translation is so dreadful.
Well, there's some degree of such a problem, but in general they aren't such a big deal.
Think of it this way: if a sentence can have two different meanings based on different Hanja (Chinese characters), then they will be ambiguous when spoken. Obviously, a language cannot function if a lot of sentences are ambiguous. Therefore, when ambiguities arise, native speakers invariably figure out some way of suppressing the ambiguity. (A commonly confused word may lose its position to another similar word with distinct sound. An additional word (say, an auxiliary verb) may be used to disambiguate the context, and given enough time, may even become a grammatical suffix. Or people may just decide "what the hell" and just borrow an English word.)
For example, your example of "I bought a cha" might normally be expressed like this in modern colloquial Korean:
나 차 좀 샀어. na cha jom sasseo. I bought a little cha. (This clearly implies "tea": how would you buy a little "car"?)
나 새 차 샀어. na sae cha sasseo. I bought a new cha (= car). (This is somewhat hard to explain, but it implies that the speaker bought something brand new. It would be a rather odd expression to use on teabags.)
Or even more idiomatically: 나 새 차 뽑았어. na sae cha ppobasseo. I "picked up" a new car. (The verb "ppop-da", literally "to pick up", is a colloquial expression for buying something expensive or worth bragging about.)
In fact, English itself is quite prone to ambiguity (although at a different level): famously, "time flies like an arrow" can be parsed in at least five different ways. Although this is a made-up example, I've seen many English learners struggle to understand complex sentences in, say, New York Times, because pretty much every English word can be a verb or a noun at the same time. Of course, all these sentences are perfectly clear to a native English speaker.
Ambiguity can be great as well, lots of poetry, clever puns and jokes rely on ambiguity of specific words to add multiple layers of meaning.
http://api.ning.com/files/iINqnIBAPQtK2AiQcRXTrRTfMH51FKVu6Y...
(I do think some amount of Hanja education helps learning more Korean words, but using them in everyday documents is another matter.)
Some newspapers banished Hanja entirely in 1988, when many old-generation scholars decried the sorry state of Hanja education and the impending downfall of the Korean culture.
That didn't happen, and one by one, those newspapers that ran the op-eds of worried scholars followed suit, a process hastened by the introduction of the internet. (Writing Chinese characters with a keyboard isn't really an easy process. Especially when you're speaking Korean: you type Korean first and then have to convert each word to Chinese, so why bother?)
Nowadays, Korean culture is just as strong as before, Korean dramas are popular in China, and many official documents are arguably much easier to understand than in the 80s, partly thanks to the efforts to banish esoteric jargons that nobody could understand without writing in Hanja (and only poorly understood even when written in Hanja: think about it, you can't understand what a telephone is even if you know the Ancient Greek words for "far" and "voice". You could only have a vague guess.)
On top of that, many of these "esoteric jargons" were direct import from written Japanese words during the colonization period, so they were never a proper Korean word outside a small group of people.
I remember back even in the mid to late 90s seeing Hanja in the local Korean newspapers, but these days they seem pretty much absent. My wife (who has a pretty good memory for Hanja) laments the inability to figure out homophones sometimes though.
In the North, my understanding is that Hanja has effectively been eliminated for quite a while and things written in the North are pretty much 100% Hangul (as well as some Korean original neologisms to get rid of Japanese and English loan words).
I'd maybe argue that the use of Chinese characters in Japanese allows me to read much faster than if all writing were in Hiragana, particularly since people tend to identify words more by their shape, but Hangul does this quite well on its own, so I think maybe there's not as strong of a need for it in Korean.
On the other hand, Korean has a relatively large number of syllables (so less ambiguity), and modern Korean spelling system is highly morphophonemic (which is a fancy way of saying "words that sound the same in a form may still be written differently, depending on how they sound in other forms"), which also helps a bit.
For example, the words 낫 (scythe) 낮 (day) 낯 (face) all sound the same when in isolation (or when followed by a consonant), but sound different when followed by a vowel.
Pinyin never took root in local schools and the preexisting romanization systems (Yale, Wade-Giles, etc.) are confusing and contradictory and inconsistently used. Look up the history of "Peking" or "T'aipei" to get some insights into this.
You still see Bopomofo on computer keyboards in Taiwan, and it is a popular input system on mobile phones. I learned how to read it 20 years ago, but pinyin is so much easier, even without the tone marks.
I must say that I find Chinese to be refreshingly "easy". There is so little grammar and rules that I have fallen in love with the language from day 1. Just learn your words and draw your characters and you'll be fine.
Maybe it is because I'm Dutch and Dutch is known for being one of the hardest languages to learn? I don't really like Dutch actually. Also, I've spend a lot of time learning German, which isn't fun at all.
Or maybe I've just found the right teacher.
The other, other part is speaking idiomatically. There are a ton of idioms.
Don't forget about measure words, either. :)
I think you can make yourself understood easily enough, as I could chat a bit with Chinese coworkers or waitresses. But I suspect to truly master it, it's a lot harder than a language (e.g.) with an alphabet.
What are the difficulties in the Dutch language? I can read a fair bit of Dutch knowing German and English and it seems reasonably straightforward to me, but I am definitely not super familiar with it (which is why I ask).
When I was learning German I found it ridiculously hard - but it only took me about 5 months to become reasonably fluent. In the end I realized it was just that things were _different_, not especially more difficult - and that certain things were actually much easier (e.g. verb conjugations, spelling, pronunciation, more consistent grammar rules).
True that. I believe it's because you study your native language at much greater detail / more advanced less common issues. While for foreign languages, you usually just study common issues, the every day kind of things. That gives an impression that it's extremely hard because of all the edge cases and etc.
My understanding is that Dutch is actually one of the easiest languages for native English speakers to learn.
Truth be told, I've found learning Chinese to be incredibly fun and exciting. My plan is to take some one-on-one Internet-based tutorials starting in the coming months; the fact that I'll be in China on business three times in the coming eight months just boosts my interest. I've been there twice before, and knowing some Mandarin was VERY useful.
I've been amazed by how simple the basic grammar is; on that part, Chinese seems easier than the other languages I've learned. (I'm a native English speaker, and have fluent Hebrew and took Spanish for a number of years in school.)
The tones do seem to be a problem; I understand the ideas behind them, but the sounds do see fairly subtle to me. I'll keep pushing ahead, though, and hope to improve the sounds I make and those I can understand.
For me, this article seemed spot-on in only one area, namely the lack of cognates. In both Hebrew and Spanish, there are enough words that overlap, particularly for modern terms, that you can sorta kinda figure some things out. I've been amazed by how completely, bafflingly, absurdly different everything is in Chinese. Then again, that's part of the fun for me; every word or phrase I learn, I feel I'm cracking a secret code.
I'm also going to agree with those who say that English is not particularly easy, at least when it comes the grammar and pronunciation. Yes, having an alphabet certainly helps, but my children took quite a while to learn all of the complex rules for English reading, and I'm convinced that in some cases, the only solution is to read the whole word, rather than sound it out.
I'd definitely recommend learning Mandarin, both for the fun and the utility. And people in China are completely amazed and impressed that you're trying to learn their language, which is good for scoring some political points, as well!
The first thing one should note is that Moser started studying Chinese in the late 80s. Things have changed. There is a wealth of accessible, well-written and free learning resources available online. People like Olle Linge have written much about how to study Chinese efficiently. There is a grammar wiki. There is the amazing Pleco dictionary (among others) with built-in OCR, flashcarding, recorded pronunciations. There are podcasts (check out Popup Chinese).
Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months. It was painful, but not impossible thanks to an intensive flashcarding regimen, immersion, and other studying.
Chinese grammar, while not trivial, is much simpler than I found French grammar to be. Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates. When you have built up an internal library of individual characters, the meaning of a word like 海军 (navy) will be obvious since 海=sea and 军=army.
Also, learning Chinese is incredibly rewarding. It opens up a country with 1.4bn+ inhabitants that is quickly gaining prominence in the world, and with one of the most fascinating scripts ever to be designed. Even though I no longer live in China, I still hear Mandarin all time. This makes learning the language exciting! The hardest part is sticking with it. If you want to learn, it will come so much easier to you.
Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.
Sort of.
The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write.
Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
Here is a specific example:
Notice the 咼 in the Traditional 過 and 禍. This phonetic component gives you some indication that is is pronounced like "luo, huo, guo, wo".In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively.
The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
I studied three and a half years of traditional characters, switched to simplified when I went to China, and then started studying Japanese, which uses a mix. I definitely am glad I studied traditional characters, but I feel at least for me, they are much much harder to learn, but that could be different for different people.
Out of curiosity, have you tried learning both simplified and traditional?
Having phonetic components makes it easier (if you like cryptic crosswords), but not easy.
> Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no.
I've seen people from all different countries complain about English spelling. But not China. No Chinese person has, in my experience, ever even considered the idea that there's anything to complain about. Rather, they rely on the spelling of English words as a crutch to get English speakers to understand them when their accent gets in the way, for example, by saying something like "Poss. <blank stare from the English speaker> Poss P-A-U-S-E Poss."
And to add to what everyone else is saying, here are some characters using the 丁 component, but not pronounced ding:
打 (da "generic verb", extremely common) 厅 (ting "hall", common) 宁 (ning, used in names, common) 灯 (deng "lamp", common)
I could say that in Russian the sound [о] can be spelled ол as in солнце, but that would be bullshit. Russian is a largely phonetic language, it's just that consonant clusters get simplified in pronunciation.
Funny how half of your list are also French words
Since you mention the /eɪ/ diphthong, in French it can be spelled é, ée, et, ed, er, ai, and many others. What is making the French spelling harder, I think, is that many letters are not pronounced, and some words have the same pronunciation with a different spelling (for example: cou - neck - and coup - hit). I can't think of anything in particular, but it all lies in the fact that many letters are not pronounced. I found this website - in French - where you can have fun testing your French spelling: http://timbresdelorthographe.com/
thought, though, through, tough, trough, plough, and, somewhat questionably, hiccough.
What are the others supposed to be?
I am well aware that Chinese radical phonetic components are not as powerful as a phonetic alphabet. I am impliying no such thing. There are however many characters which carry phonetic information, such as my apparently crude example above. I have found this to be very helpful in remembering pronunciations of characters, even if they are only approximations. HN is a tough crowd.
Further, your experiences with Chinese people are not necessarily the same as mine.
> I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters. [...] These are all pronounced "ding" [...] because they all have that T-like phonetic component.
(emphasis mine)
This is, quite clearly, saying that you can get the pronunciation of an unfamiliar character from its written form. But you can't; that's incredibly dangerous and is nearly guaranteed to backfire within 2-3 guesses. You use the particular example of characters with the phonophore 丁 ding1. Okay. What's the most common character incorporating that component? It's 打, which you seem to have conveniently glossed over, and which, despite using 丁 as the phonophore, is pronounced da3. You also give 顶, which really is pronounced ding(3), but which is backwards like 切, making it fairly problematic to guess which component is hinting at the sound. (For a nice summary of that problem, 致 and 到 are both characters in the same style, with a sound hint and a meaning hint side by side. But for 致 zhi4, the phonophore is the 至 (also zhi4) on the left, and for 到 dao4 the phonophore is the 刀 dao1 (in a special form) on the right; the 至 component is telling you the meaning. It's much more common to have the phonophore on the right.)
I agree that the structure of the characters, such as it is, can be very helpful in remembering how to pronounce them. But that doesn't speak to reading unfamiliar characters in any way. Some components are quite prolific as phonophores: 交 jiao, 方 fang, and 青 qing come to mind. You're not advised to assume that a character incorporating them is pronounced jiao （校，效，咬）, fang (旁), or qing (精，猜 [cai1!]), though.
Spelling of French is based on the pronunciation of Old French (from ~900 years ago!) and sometimes mixed with spelling based on the original Latin word from which the modern French word derives (from ~2000 years ago).
AFAIK modern Greek orthography is not that bad, if you disregard the madness that polytonic script (which is solely based on how Greek was spoken/written in Antiquity) was used until the 80s.
I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like).
But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun!
So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier.
Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word.
"Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar".
I felt like the king of the world. :-)
I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/...
And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed.
The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
So my advice as a native speaker is: speak slowly and clearly. Speak as it is written. And good luck.
Heh, I have the opposite problem: I tend to mumble when speaking English (I'm a native Russian speaker). Wanna trade?
Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced? Not to mention the phonological rules that must be memorised, like how the ending of words are always devoiced (giving us fun conflicting transliterations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonoff%27s_theorem ).
To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness. I've found Hungarian spelling to be more regular, for example.
You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.
> To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness.
It does, but again you can pronounce all words letter for letter, and although it may sound a bit strange it'll be valid Russian.
Well technically English has no rules mandating anything, since there is no central institute or authority for the language. Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.
Practically, rules that people 50 years ago would never break are routinely ignored now, there are a bunch of things that are grammatically correct but you wouldn't ever say, etc... If something is done one way practically all the time, it might as well be a "rule", whether it officially is or not. Makes no difference to the person who has to learn it.
One implicit rule of Russian is that if you pronounce each word phonetically, it is never wrong (unless you put the stress wrong).
And indeed, when publicly speaking or announcing via speakers in e.g. airport, words are pronounced almost phonetically.
Compare that to English where pronouncing phonetically is impossible and also rather undesirable.
But that doesn't mean that the rules for English orthography aren't insane. There are very few English sentences that can be read by sounding out letter after letter individually (no matter what sound you choose as the basis for each letter.)
http://zompist.com/spell.html
The first step in trying to pronounce an English word is to subconsciously guess its language of origin.
I'm quite glad that the Chinese of the late 19th/early 20th century often took the Japanese approach of coining semantically meaningful neologisms, rather than trying to transliterate everything.
电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television
电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie
电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer
Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be:
火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train
Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.
Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words.
Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me.
Edit: typo.
For example, in the US military, there are a lot of concepts that are clumsy to say - for example, it's pretty silly to refer to the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization Program seventy times when you're talking about why you need to change a safety protocol, so you just refer to it as the NATOPS. All of these concepts get abbreviated - Physical Fitness Test becomes PFT, Non-Judicial Punishment becomes NJP, Then people turn these into verbs, (Bill got NJP'd yesterday) and those get abbreviated as well, and pretty soon you end up with a totally new language that no one else can understand. I told this story to my girlfriend without even knowing that I was doing it:
"[Name] got caught pencil-whipping a PM on the radar. Top wanted to fix him with "EMI," but the OIC wanted him to burn, so it went to the CO for NJP. The CO is a pilot, so he maxed him out - took his pay, 45/45, reduction to PFC. Then, the SMaj told him he looked fat, so he got sent over to the S3 to weigh in. He's over, and he didn't tape out, so now he's on BCP, too! He's gonna get adsep'd if he keeps going the way he is."
My girlfriend started laughing at me, told me to repeat it, and laughed again. I realized that I was basically speaking another language, and then quickly realized that a bunch of the things I was talking about were alien to her anyway! This 90-second story became a thirty-minute discussion of what exactly "taping out" is, why Extra Military Instruction is a sarcastic term for "told to weed the desert for twelve hours," and what's so bad about the Body Composition Program. All of these concepts have been put into my brain from years of living with them, and describing them to someone else is often really difficult.
The tech world does the exact same thing. So does medicine, laboratory science, theater, band... We all have our own languages, created by common experiences and a need to communicate them to other people.
Compound words in Chinese is something like that. But the good news is: each character in Chinese has its own meaning. So you can sort of guess what's the meaning of words if you know the meaning(s) of the characters.
However, except those compound words, there are lot of common expressions, which we call them 成语, which uses historical stories, poetries and you may never know what people are talking about if they use such expressions (people use them a lot and it is considered as a sign of higher education if they can use those expressions correctly and frequently.)
"Television" to borrow from the list above is a literal word in English ... if you happen to know Latin, as it's comprised of the words for "far" or "distant" and "seeing". The German (one of those pesky literal languages I had in mind) is "Ferhnsehen", combining the words for "distant" and "seeing". I remember hearing the word "Mehrheit" in a German broadcast, not knowing it, but thinking "Hrm.... 'moreness' -- that probably means "majority" or something like that. It does.
"Movie" is a shortening of "moving picture". Earlier in the technology development path were shadow lanterns and similar slide or silhouette projectors.
"Computers" (a term transferred from those who computed to the machines they used" are also know as "electronic brains" or "thinking machines".
Trains were often called "iron horses", a term sometimes applied to motorcycles (motor + bicycle -> two wheels) today.
The literalness of English is obscured by the many different language roots and influences from which its words are derived: Old German, Celtic, Norse, French, Latin, Greek....
Another example which I found fascinating was the contribution of Arabic to Spanish. The Alhambra comes from the Arabic "Al Hambra", or "the red", for the read clay of the region. From a time when the Arabic Moors controlled much of present-day Spain.
Another fascinating bit of linguistic lore I only learned recently: the Basque language, unrelated to any others in Europe, may be a relic of the Cro-Magnon people. This was an earlier race of humans who occupied parts of Europe and North Africa ~40,000 years ago. Further linguistic analysis (and genetics) have shown relationships with language fragments in North Africa:
http://www.atlantisquest.com/Linguistics.html
Generally, modern Cro-Magnon people can be found in certain parts of Western Europe, North Africa and some of the Atlantic Islands today. Physical anthropologists agree that Cro-Magnon is represented in modern times by the Berber and Tuareg peoples of North Africa, the all but extinct Guanches of the Canary Isles, the Basques of northern Spain, the Aquitanians living in the Dordogne Valley and the Bretons of Brittany; and until lately, those living on the Isle d'Oleron. (Howells, 1967; Lundman, 1977; Hiernaux, 1975, et al.)—this indicated by obviously Cro-Magnoid skulls.
There are other cases of language showing the dispersal and/or subjugation of tribes elsewhere: Jared Diamond includes linguistic evidence showing the sweep of tribes through Africa, and later of words introduced via colonization. Pre-Han populations in China and Taiwan leave traces through language, as do the Roma people, who migrated from present-day India to southeaster Europe.
And while the structure of an airport terminal isn't quite the same as a set of finger quays for a port, there's a certain similarity between the two structures. Both are interfaces, designed for craft to approach closely and transfer cargos to/from the port. They're characterized by a highly crenelated boundary to allow for maximal surface area and transfer region.
It could as well have been proculvision or teleopsis, or why not, proculopsis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Words_...
Incidentally, my tiptoe-around-this-when-in-Japan-because-it-incenses-nationalists opinion as a linguist is that modern Japanese incorporates by reference large portions of English. "Happy" is, for example, a word in modern Japanese. Not the transliteration -- though that is a word, too -- but "happy", itself, written exactly like that. "Happy" is comprehensible to substantially all speakers of the language and appears in many document corpora so frequently that it cannot be excluded from the Japanese language by any rational criterion. There's another few thousand words which superficially resemble English in modern Japanese. (There are also, of course, minimally a few dozen Japanese loanwords in English.)
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/敵性語
Historically, the Japanese people have been very willing to borrow words from other languages.
And yes, you can write "pure" yamatokotoba if you try hard enough (see eg. Shinto prayers), but the end result is as contrived as trying to write English without Latin, Greek or French loans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
"If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) "
Ha, German people told me the same thing about German when I was in Germany. Guess it depends who you ask. Grammatically, I think Mandarin is pretty simple. Pronouncing it and writing it is another story. Grammatically, I think Japanese is tougher than Chinese, writing is just as hard when using Chinese characters (maybe harder, because many kanji have different, dissimilar readings), but easier when using the kana, and the pronunciation is easy as can be. On another tangent, having sampled various metropolises, I think NY is actually very livable.
English, my native language, has plenty of bonkers exceptions.
I think many people forget that when talking about how the newest generation mistreat their language, or whether foreigner's mistakes can be understood.
heck, sometimes it's funny when a native speaker tells me that I speak X very well (I don't), just because I use some prescriptive form correctly.
Sure, there are radicals. Don't count on them to tell you anything remotely useful. Sure, some characters do tell a proper story with their radicals, but it's laughable to count on them to tell you anything.
In particular, it hits on the two biggest barriers to learning Chinese that I've noticed in my recent experience—the writing system, and the linguistic and cultural distance between the East and West. What it doesn't talk about is how, these days, things are much easier, especially with today's technology.
At about the same time I started learning Chinese, I finally bought myself a modern smartphone, and I've been thoroughly impressed at the features it has for Chinese. Using the phone's built-in pinyin keyboard, I don't have to remember how to draw out a character—I just need to know how to write the pinyin (which is a phonetic romanization of the character), and how to recognize it well enough to pick it out of a list. No more problems with writing notes. Using the drawing input mode, where I actually draw out the character on the touchscreen, renders his complaints about dictionary lookup moot, since I can just sketch the character and feed it into an online dictionary. Hell, recently I discovered the iPhone actually has voice recognition for Mandarin—if I know how to say a word but not write it, I can look up the written character by just saying it in a sentence into the microphone. And if I have the opposite problem, where I know the character but not the pronunciation, I just feed it into MDBG [3] or even Google Translate—Google's translations are not very accurate, but it'll give me the phonetic pinyin and let me listen to the Chinese text-to-speech as well.
And the issues with linguistic and cultural distance? That's harder to get around—you still have to make an effort to pick that stuff up. But these days, you have the internet. You might not know what something means, but you have at your fingertips a repository of all human knowledge and culture, from all around the world. For example: the audiobooks I've been learning from had a note about how you should never give a Chinese man a green hat, since that may imply you're sleeping with his wife. It didn't elaborate on that at all, but a quick Google search later and I found a blog post that explains (in English, no less) how that saying has its origins in an old folk tale.[0]
It's definitely harder than learning practically any other language. Tones can be tricky to get used to, learning the writing system at the same time is like learning two languages at once, one spoken, one written, and an unfamiliar character can be a showstopper for comprehension if you don't have a smartphone or dictionary handy. But it's doable, and some things in the language are actually easier than in Western languages—the grammar, for example, is much simpler, and you don't have to worry about conjugations, or even verb tense as much. Through a combination of Pimsleur audiobooks [1] that I checked out of the library for spoken Mandarin, Memrise [2] spaced repetition software for learning vocabulary and characters, MDBG [3] for looking up translations, and Google Translate for other, random stuff, I've been able to learn pretty well even with the limited time I spare to it. I'm not quite at the level where I can be conversational yet, but I can understand and speak enough that I feel I'd be able to stumble my way around adequately were I to travel to Shanghai tomorrow.
[0] If you're curious: http://an-american-family.blogspot.ca/2010/04/dont-wear-gree...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Mandarin-Pimsleur-Language-Pro... — They'...
I'm from Peking University and I don't really know "how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 'to sneeze'" either. I think it's a general problem in the era of computer and internet, as people input Chinese with pinyin, not with pen and ink. It's going to be interesting to see how Chinese evolve with modern technology.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#B...
Said differently: why do we keep writing English like this, instead of using a phonetic alphabet? Same reason.
In fact, typing this on a pinyin keyboard, I can see why this is the case
Literally, "神" doesn't mean "God", "God" in Chinese is "上帝".
I'm a native Chinese.
On the other hand, IMHO, just IMHO, "God" being translated into Chinese(Cantonese) as "神" is not thoughtful as it introduces confusion.
That is impressive. I took two years of Chinese in college and did not get anywhere close to that ability. How many hours a day did you practice Chinese during that 10 months?
You claim that 90% of Chinese writing are phonographs. Perhaps this is true to the most technical sense, but to most students this is useless. Try taking that 90% claim into a Chinese language test at university. The teacher will laugh at you as you arrogantly think you can decipher the phonetics of characters just because you know the "radicals". There is absolutely no reliable system for translating radicals to character phonetics, because it's all just so messy and hit and miss.
In the first 300 characters a learner would study, there were about 5 characters with phonetic components. Phonetics don't really start to make a difference until about 2000 characters in.
This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473
Brendan O'Kane, a translator, said it pretty well: learning Chinese use to be a vocation, something you'd do for your entire life. That's no longer true, which is a good thing.
It's easier to learn a language that uses a latin alphabet of course, but chinese has almost no grammar, it's so easy to build sentences in the language!
I don't think it's fair to say that chinese is a difficult language to learn when compared to other languages.
But yeah now we have pleco, nciku, sergemelnyks, mgdb...
I do like the simplicity of the grammar, no conjugating, no adj/verb agreement, just naked words. But the simplicity it is compensated for with a variety of grammatical constructions: 要...了, 是...的, 挺...的, etc. (Simple grammar is summarized in the above-mentioned dictionary :)
There are definitely huge differences between learning now and before the advent of smart phones (OCR, handwriting input, pop-up dictionaries). The number of free resources available online is also incredible! I try to contribute and write articles about learning Chinese (thanks for the mention) on http://www.hackingchinese.com
I've also started working on a book. I'll give anyone from HN 10% off once the book is released, just mention HN in the comment when you sign up: http://www.hackingchinese.com/about/hacking-chinese-book-pro...
I think learning Chinese has been interesting at all levels, but for completely different reasons. In the beginning, I thought it was exotic and a bit cool, on the intermediate level, I found it fascinating to be able to start actually communicating with people and on the advanced level I've found that mastering Chinese really is a lifetime project. Naturally, I spend more and more time teaching and writing about Chinese, but I have a lot to learn myself and keep studying as much as I can.
http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/
Cheers, I'm using that right now. The real teaching power is in apps.
Though if I were to return for more classes, I might try a different city, perhaps Xian. The air quality in Beijing is nasty.
Having said that, below are some resources worth investigating:
Audio courses:
- Pimsleur Mandarin (3 sets of 30 half-hour lessons. Available on CD.)
- ChinesePod.com (short audio lessons based around different topics/tasks. Generous free trial last time I checked.)
- http://popupchinese.com/ (similar to ChinesePod. Worth trying both.)
- Clavis Sinica’s collection of short audio samples: http://clavisinica.com/voices.html
Pronunciation/Pinyin:
You really need to get your pinyin and tone pronunciation down. Just search google for 'learning pinyin' and you will find lots of free resources. There are three things worth trying to master here:
- Pronunciation of each of the four tones (actually five, as there is also a neutral tone)
- Pronunciation of each of the 21 initials (b, p, m, f etc., most of which are the same as English, but some, like x, z, c, zh are very different) and each of the 35 ‘finals’ (like -ong, -uang, -in etc.)
- (later) Some words consist of more than one syllable, and there are some rules for when tones change based on the tone of the following syllable.
Dictionary:
- Pleco for iphone or Android: the free version is a must-have. There are bundles for additional functionality. The two additional functions I use(d) are the full-screen handwriting input (paid on iphone) and the spaced-repetition flashcard functionality (paid). This app is the reason I bought my first iOS device.
- Nciku (online dictionary; search by pinyin or by writing the character)
Reading/writing characters (probably work on some basic oral Chinese before doing this):
- Skritter.com (subscription-based service best used with a mouse or Wacom tablet; doesn’t work well with a laptop touchpad)
- Book: http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Simplified-Cha...
I'm glad it made sure to state that difficulty is relative in language - the Chinese learn their languages just fine afterall.
I don't think tone is as big of a problem as it's made out to be. As a foreiger who studies Mandarin I've found that with enough listening I began to pick out the tones well (although I still can't reproduce them as acurately!).
Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation surrounding Chinese. A good book mentioned in the bibliography is The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.
I don't understand why we don't make people learn foreign languages the same way that children learn native languages. Children spend years learning to speak before they start to learn to read and write. It seems to work well. Perhaps older people need to learn differently, but I'm not convinced.
I have to imagine that learning Chinese would be a lot easier if you learned to speak it reasonably well first, and then started learning the writing system only after attaining some mastery of the spoken language. Instead, you're trying to learn new phonetics and tones and grammar and trying to learn stroke order and radicals and a bunch of other stuff all at the same time.
TL;DR: The author tries to write "Chinese characters are damn weird" in five different ways (items 1,2,3,5,7). OK, I got the point, but a bit less repetition might have been better.
Also, if you want to objectively assess just how difficult the Chinese language is, I guess native Chinese speakers are exactly those people you don't want to ask. After all, Chinese is the native language for them: how can they reliably compare it to any other language which are foreign to them?
Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both. I had memorized roughly a thousand Chinese characters in high school. Sure, it would be nothing compared to what's actually needed to read Chinese, but learning each character isn't much more difficult than learning how to pronounce catastrophe, cooperate, thesaurus, and the likes.
You seem to be implying that you've provided evidence that Chinese is not, in fact, more difficult than English. Or at least that you have reason to believe that. What is that reason? Is it so hard to believe that maybe Chinese is objectively more difficult to learn?
I am ready to be persuaded if there's a convincing argument that Chinese is objectively more difficult. What I was trying to say is that asking Chinese people how hard it is proves nothing. And (I presume) a native English speaker comparing Chinese and European languages doesn't instill a lot of confidence, either. Of course Chinese is harder than French... to an average English speaker.
I've met people with much larger vocabularies than myself, and with better grammar, but whose pronunciation was almost insurmountably poor. Someone like me, who has generally good pronunciation, will get praised by Chinese people as having "amazing" pronunciation (and yes, a certain amount of this is just Chinese people being polite but over the years one learns where one stands on this issue) but my comprehension and vocabulary is far and away from fluent yet I will be viewed as having "better" spoken Chinese... never mind that I can only read at an elementary school level.
No matter how much vocabulary you amass and no matter how perfect your grammar not mastering the tones can completely kill any hope you have of Chinese people understanding you. There's nothing worse than the confused look on someone's face after you say something that you think is perfectly comprehensible, only to discover you (ever so slightly, to your ear) screwed up a key tone... it's like suddenly discovering the brakes on your car don't work.
I took Chinese for a couple years, and while the tones can be annoying for the first few weeks, there's only 4 (or 5) of them. It ain't rocket science. If you can recognize the melodies of songs, then your brain has the necessary parts to recognize tones too. Nobody in any of our beginner Chinese sections ever found the tones "just not doable". Some people would take a few days to get the hang of them, and other people a couple of months, but if more than a billion people in China can do it, you almost certainly can do it too.
(And if you're really having trouble you can always hire a private tutor. Honestly, most people with pronunciation problems in any language, just need some individualized help. A group classroom might not do it, but one-on-one tutoring almost certainly will.)
On the other hand, most people simply don't have the time to memorize the characters and pronunciation. The fact that there are virtually no cognates makes the hurdle to amassing vocabulary simply gigantic, let alone the characters. You say that "anyone, with some work, can memorize the characters", but "some work" in this case is a truly gigantic amount of work.
Re: figuring out whether your tones or speech is correct, try talking to Siri or Google voice search. I tried my French on the French Siri and it was humbling.
I think you understate the difficulty of recognizing and reproducing tones. Quite a few people can't carry a tune to save their life. Even among the majority who passably can, doing so extremely well - aka having "perfect pitch" - is recognized as a rarity.
But secondly, if the entire population of China can do it, then statistically, you're almost guaranteed to be able to do it too. And the tones in Chinese are really very, very simple. They're no different from the way you end a question with your voice moving upwards, or the recognizable "valley girl" pattern. It's the same idea, just applied to single words instead of whole sentences.
(First, background: my wife is Chinese, I took a year of formal classes in college, and have subsequently learned by exposure. I can speak and understand a fair amount, enough to survive on my own in Beijing if need be, but I wouldn't consider myself fluent by any means. In particular, I can't read or write worth a damn.)
I think this article would be better if it were titled, "Why written Chinese is so damn hard." Spoken Chinese is actually pretty easy. To the extent that it is hard, it's hard only because it's different. It's hard for the same reason that Japanese or Arabic or Sanskrit are hard. The comparison with French is a bit off, because languages like French where an English speaker can take advantage of vast quantities of shared vocabulary and history are rare. Most languages are hard in this way. So that stuff is really just, "Why learning almost any language is so damn hard." And while that can be interesting, there's no reason to focus on Chinese there.
And in fact, spoken Chinese is relatively easy. The grammar is extremely simple. There are effectively no tenses, and there is no conjugation. Learning French, I spent weeks, possibly months, learning the proper ways to state that an event happened in the past. And while I do consider myself fluent in French, I'm far from perfect here. While I think I get it right most of the time, I really couldn't explain why one case demands the passé composé and another case demands the imparfait. Even knowing which to use, completely learning the conjugation rules for them took quite a bit of effort. By contrast, it takes about five seconds to learn how to say that something occurred in the past in Chinese, assuming you already know 1) how to say that it happened in the present and 2) how to state the time in question. You just stick the time in the right part of the sentence, and bam, it's now in the past. You go from "I eat" to "I yesterday eat". Couldn't be simpler. My Chinese vocabulary still stinks after years of exposure because there are almost no cognates to build on, but the grammar is one of the easiest around.
Written Chinese, on the other hand, is practically a different language. There is little link between the characters on the page and the sound you make to indicate the same words. It's common for people who speak completely mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects to still be able to communicate through writing. Chinese TV is almost universally subtitled for this reason. Lots of people can't understand what the people on TV say, but they can read the subtitles.
Written Chinese is hard. It's the vocabulary problem turned up to 11. It effectively doubles the work needed to learn a word. Worse if you're not good at the sort of visual learning and recognition needed to distinguish between thousands of characters. Unlike the spoken version, where it's only hard for reasons that any language is hard, written Chinese is just inherently hard. Native speakers take longer and require more study to become literate, too.
Because of this, I think you need to treat spoken and written Chinese completely differently when it comes to learning them and the question of the difficulty of learning them. And the fact that this article freely mixes the two is unfortunate because of that, especially since it gives the impression that spoken Chinese is hard to learn, and it really is not.
As a side note, technology is starting to really help out here. You can get apps that are able to do live character recognition using a smartphone's camera, and offer basic translations on the fly. I used one called Waygo during a recent visit to China and it was really helpful. Even if the translation sucks, it'll give you the pronunciation of the characters so you can look them up more easily, or ask somebody what they mean, or whatever.
(My background: 6 months exposure + 2 months of self-taught reading + 6 months of formal studies + 12 further years exposure, 8 in country. Also recently married)
Over the last near decade and a half I have met hundreds of foreign learners of Chinese across the mainland and Taiwan, and the most obvious thing is that it is pointless to learn to read before speaking. Just as children first learn to speak by imitating their parents and guardians, so too must language learners learn to recognize and reproduce the sounds of a new language.
Once that's done and some rarified stem of grammar has been acquired by environment, the absolute joy of making sense of characters in their written form will propel the learner forward with far more speed and ease than a rote-learning non-speaker.
The article whinges about romanzation but Pinyin is great. It's only the stubborn Taiwanese who refuse to use it, as the product of the Communist enemy! For a truly scary alternative, look at what the French did to the Vietnamese language.
Anyone have experience with or know of any good studies on kids learning language in this way? How valuable is it for an American to speak Chinese vs something like Spanish or French?
I suspect that, using this model with Chinese, a child can become conversationally proficient and gain some basic reading comprehension. Whereas, with a more simple language, they may be able to read, write, and speak on the same level as a native-speaker. Looking for evidence to prove me wrong.
Why? I don't really see much use in this unless the sole aim is for your children to become fluent in Chinese. Having an understanding of math, history, and science will be more useful to them in the future than being fluent in Chinese. I don't think Chinese fluency is worth making it more difficult for them to learn the other subjects by having it taught in a language they aren't as familiar with.
For math and science especially, this doesn't really make much sense, as English is the lingua franca of the technical world. My father is a native Chinese speaker and a biologist. I majored in computer engineering and now work as a software engineer. Many of my classmates and coworkers are native Chinese speakers. Even when they speak in Chinese, the technical vocabulary is all English because that is the language they learned the material in.
The implication here seems to be that the Chinese written word gives hints as to meaning, right? How can that be so, if 10 years of studying isn't enough to read a newspaper? Your claim would imply that reading in Chinese would be easier to pick up (compared to non-character languages), while speaking would be more difficult - one seemingly immediately shown to be false.
Not to mention that a language can both give hints to meaning and have a link between writing and speaking. At the very least, English does - the example closest to hand is that I've never heard the word ethnocentrism before, but I immediately understood it.
That said - great point about possibly overemphasizing the link between spoken and written words. From an English background, that seems like something so obviously important that it hardly bears thinking about, but clearly there could be other important considerations (even if I don't know what they might be).
Edit: To your point regarding English having both connection to meaning and pronunciation - that's definitely true, it's just not as immediately clear/visually identifiable, and not as dense. One could certainly argue that, if native speakers are having serious issues learning pronunciation in a language, then the language makes a poor tradeoff with density there.
At the college I went to, which had a good Chinese department, as far as I could tell, classes were taught entirely by native Chinese professors. I would expect them to teach in a way that works for the language, but as pretty much everyone there had previously learned a Romance language to some degree (very typical of the high schools in the area), I wonder if they brought preconceptions from that experience.
I knew many of the students in the department, and their experience lines up pretty well with what the author explains (they studied intensively for 4 years and could still only read at any reasonable pace from textbook passages/speak passably on certain predefined topics).
It's like the trouble that English speakers have with noun genders in Romance languages, but taken to an extreme.
I can't think of a better equivalent, though. Fiancé and fiancée come close, but most English speakers don't even know that there are different ways to write that for male and female.
As for answering questions with a presumed answer, one of the best things to do is to restate the verb when you answer. "Didn't you agree with him?" "Yes, I agreed with him." This way, it is clear to everyone.
Native English speakers often get confused by this one too. You can respond either yes or no in those situations as long as you specify the one you wanted afterwards.
However, if you forget about reading/writing and focus on the language itself, it's a delight to learn. Mandarin is highly analytic, parsimonious and systematic.
To indicate that something happened in the past, add "le" to the sentence. Compare that to any Indo-european language. There, you can literally write books about how to express past tense.
I think the whole article can be summarized down to just one point: unless you live in China or Taiwan or HK or Macau, you are not going to be fluent in Chinese.
There is no magic in learning Chinese. As I said, I was raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. My teachers taught us single words and compound words. I learned to construct simple sentences like Hello World.
It may be true that you need over three thousands Chinese words (remind you a word is a single word like 海, which means sea, or ocean) to be truly fluent, but honestly I don't think I need more than two hundreds words to understand Chinese. As @msvan has shown, 海军 (navy) is composed of two words sea and army. If you see anything beings with 海, you can quickly assume there is something about sea. You can assume it may even have something to do with color blue.
Sometimes it is funny to see things like this:
海闊天空. Individually, you may read it as SEA, WIDE, SKY, EMPTY. 海闊 describes something wide and broad like the ocean. 天 by itself is sky or divine but you can make it even more explicit or redundant by saying 天空 to point to the sky.
Those four words are often used in this famous quote: "忍一時，風平浪靜。退一步，則海闊天空". Basically "hold on to your emotions and worries to keep the peace; take a step back and you will see the bigger picture." Yes. This kind of old quotes are hard to intrepert even for a native, but this is the art of language. You have to read each word, think of the author's origin, bring in any historical and environment context, and figure out the best interpretation. We do that every day even in America.
Of course, sometimes you can't get away with single word interpretation easily. Take a newspaper headline: 華人當選 (Chinese, person/people, ? , elect/choose). Note how I skip the 3rd one?
當 by itself is ambiguous. In theory it has a "when" and "where" context
當你 means when you
當下 means right now at this moment
當中 means inside or within this
當心 means be careful
當然 means of course
當選 means elected
So you have to know compound words.
Even funnier if you write 當心上人對你徵笑 (when your crush smiles at you). Look at 當心 and 心上人. Where is the "be careful"? It's not there because 心上人 (crush) takes over the compound.
You need to know the compound words. You need to read and talk to people. So you can get away with 200 words, but you need 1000 compound words to be fluent. But this is not something I learn overnight. I pick up Chinese as I grow up.
You forgot Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand.
This is the same how spelling contests look ridiculous to me as a Croatian.