Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

by barry-cotter • 16 years ago

97 103 16 years ago

pinyin.info

barry-cotter• 16 years ago

1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.

3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.

4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.

5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).

7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.

8. Because tonal languages are weird.

9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.

An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question.

zasz3• 16 years ago

I used to think the writing system was ridiculous too, but think of how many different dialects of Chinese there are! I am Shanghainese and don't understand Mandarin, and I'm sure there's a lot of Cantonese people with similar issues. We can't talk to each other, because the phonemes of our respective dialects are still so different, but the beauty of these non-phonetic ideographs is that we can still read the same newspaper. And that's very important! If we had a phonetic alphabet, it would be nearly impossible to communicate in any kind of written medium.

tokenadult12• 16 years ago

we can still read the same newspaper

Only if your schooling has exposed you consciously to the vocabulary and grammatical structures of written Chinese that differ from your regional dialect, as it surely has. Lessons in literacy in vernacular Chinese literature ( 白話文 ) are in part lessons in the spoken grammar and vocabulary of the language reflected in that literature, which these days is usually Modern Standard Chinese.

If we had a phonetic alphabet, it would be nearly impossible to communicate in any kind of written medium.

The experience of Western cognate languages suggests that people can always more readily communicate in writing in sound-indicating scripts than they can speak over the telephone. After edit: for example, I have read several Spanish-language letters that came randomly to business offices I worked in, without any formal course in Spanish, but I would certainly have great difficulty carrying on a conversation in Spanish.

lars512• 16 years ago

Languages are constantly evolving. Sharing a written script encourages different dialects to borrow words from each other in their written form. Sharing a phonetic script would instead encourage them to also borrow words in their phonetic form. So dialects might drift closer over time.

Long term changes aside, a phonetic script would make learning standard Chinese and dialects faster, so children could learn both their local dialect and the government standard (Mandarin) as part of their schooling.

The main problem with a phonetic script would probably be the varying phonetic inventories of the different dialects/languages within China. I'm not sure if you could make a phonetic script that would work beyond the main dialects.

zasz3• 16 years ago

Criticisms 1-5 are basically identical and have no useful alternative for a linguistically diverse country like China until you finally get everyone speaking the same dialect.

Criticism 6--uhh, well, there's also Shakespeare for the English equivalent of incomprehensible classical language. The first time I heard idioms like "one fell swoop" I was totally all like wtf bro. And you don't need to know classical Chinese to be reasonably useful in day to day life.

7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names.

8/9--yeah, that's about the only reason Chinese is really that difficult to learn in my opinion. English speakers belong to one language family, and Chinese speakers belong to another. Tonal languages are weird to you. I assure you, Chinese people find pluralization, verbal conjugation (past, present, perfect, subjunctive...), spelling (threw, through, bought, bot), "r"s, and articles to be pretty fucking weird.

lanaer• 16 years ago

I don't think I'd call these criticisms so much as _reasons_ why Chinese is so damn hard (for a Western speaker). It’s not like there's anyone around who designed the language to complain to.

Anyway:

Reasons 1-5 aren't about the many languages used in China (if French & Spanish are different languages, then I consider Mandarin & Cantonese to be different languages). These difficulties are due to the lack of a concise phonetic alphabet (like the roman alphabet used in English, French, Spanish…, or the hiragana alphabet used in Japanese). If the Chineses languages all used a common (small!) phonetic alphabet of some sort, many of those difficulties would dissolve (and there is no particular reason why that could not be done, technically, except that it throws out a huge part of their culture). Even if only Mandarin existed, those first 5 difficulties would remain.

Edit: OK, so using a phonetic alphabet would mean that each language would be written differently... except that this is already true, essentially. You can actually write in Cantonese in a way that a Mandarin speaker could not understand (using the same characters), and there are those who do this. I think he says this in there (I read this a long time ago), that the Mandarin writing system is just that; Mandarin. The whole country knows how to read it (without necessarily knowing how to pronounce it), so it's more about the non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese people having 2 languages that they use: their own for speaking, and Mandarin for writing. Using a purely phonetic alphabet may make this bi-lingual usage more difficult... or not. The existing writing system is already pretty painful, whether you're a native or not (though natives have more time to get used to it before they're expected to be able to use it, I suppose).

Reason 6: this isn't like reading Shakespeare (Modern English, though an earlier version of it), as far as I understand. It seems more like trying to read The Canterbury Tales (Middle English) or Beowulf (Old English, more like German than English, really). You're completely correct about it not being relevant to practical usage of any of the Chinese languages, though.

lftl• 16 years ago

Additionally, 8 (and somewhat 9) are the only ones that apply to speaking/listening to Chinese. The rest are fully restricted to writing and reading.

I only spent 6 weeks studying Chinese so I'm sure I have some misconceptions, but speaking Chinese (and to a lesser extent hearing it) were actually pretty easy to pickup. Most of my classmates just threw up their hands and quit on intonation, but it's not THAT hard especially if you're just speaking slowly. This might have been a consequence of short study of the language, but grammatically I thought it was vastly simpler than Western languages particularly in respect to verb conjugation.

wisty4• 16 years ago

Yes, English is also a pain. "The bandage was wound around the wound". From the famous article "Dumb English" (copy here: http://www.beautifulperth.com/dumbenglish.html)

unavoidable2• 16 years ago

As a Chinese and English speaker, I assure you that it is far easier to learn English than Chinese.

I grew up with Chinese and still consider myself a learner, despite being surrounded by the language for the first half of my life time. I spent only a few years with English before I considered myself fully fluent and 'native' at the language.

The 'families' of the language do not much matter. Chinese is just not designed/evolved to be learned by non-native people.

kowen• 16 years ago

7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names.

My sister uses bo-po-mo-fo a great deal - but then she's in Taiwan, not mainland China.

wisty4• 16 years ago

I'm not an expert at Chinese (so please point out the errors), but I think he missed a few:

10. Hanyu Pinyin (which is the one everyone uses) overloads every second letter, to make it more condensed.

r = r, or zhr, tchzr, or something like that (it's up to the speaker)

j = zh (kinda), as in Beijing

zh = j (WTF? Are they trying to make things hard?)

z = ts

c = ts ... but a different ts to z. (aspirated)

q = tch

x = tsh

none of which should be confused with ...

ch = ch (dark)

sh = sh (dark)

s = s

That's about it for consonants. Remember to carry a pack of tissues.

11. Then there's vowels. Don't get me started. There's lots of vowels, and getting them wrong will completely change what you said.

12. Idioms. Though this relates to number 9 - cultural differences, and I guess it's an issue in all languages.

13. Regional dialects. Every village has it's own language, which isn't really comprehensible to anyone else. You can speak Chinese, and still not be understood, simply because you are talking to somebody who doesn't know putonghua (standard).

Chinese has some advantages. It's rare to run into sesquipedalian loquaciousness, if only because few people can be bothered learning all the synonyms. There are synonyms (of course), but they just don't seem to get used as much as in English.

- I can only thing of one way to say "big" in Chinese. In English, there's "big, large, enormous, huge, gigantic, gargantuan, grand", and about a dozen others. In Chinese, if something is big, it's '大 (da)', or maybe 'very big'. Except the great wall, which is the "long wall" (not big).

- If something is "good", it's "好 (hao)", or "really good", or "very good", or "double good" or possibly "佳 (jia)". Not "good, excellent, splendid, magnificent, superb, superlative, wonderful, fantastic, marvelous", or anything else your third grade teacher said about the short story that even you knew was crap.

The best way I've found to learn a little Chinese is to get a idiom dictionary, and look up idioms. You learn interesting stuff about the culture (lots of food and trade analogies, mythology, nature, and some analogies to bodily functions that are so visceral Kevin Smith used one in Clerks), and it's a good way to practice common words.

But yeah, it's not easy.

OmniBus5• 16 years ago

Chinese is not lack of characters and words to describe things. There are lots of ways to do that.

- (big) the synonym of 大. 大, 巨, 宏, 偉, 碩, 巨大, 巨大無比, 碩大無朋, 無窮,　無盡, 無崖, 無窮無盡, 無止境, 堂煌, 海量, 寬敞, 不可尺量, 重大. It is overlapped with wide (寬, 闊), deep (深), heavy(重), large quantity (豐). - (good) the synonym of 好. 好, 佳, 優, 正, 良, 妙, 善, 美. (best) 頂級, 極品, 完美, 完善, 盡善盡美, 美不勝收, 嘆爲觀止, 無宇倫比. You can combine them like 良好, 優良, 妙好. You can describe the extreme with 極, 絕, 最, 頂 like 極佳, 極好, 絕妙, 頂好. In spoken languages, 誇啦啦, 頂呱呱. If you describe a good song, it could be 天籟 or 天籟之音, or 絕唱.

Above are just a few of them. It is too numerous to exhaust the list.

aristoxenus• 16 years ago

It's really hard to get that kind of straight-talk from instructors or native speakers.

The best rationalization I can think of for someone learning this language, is that if you enjoyed the meditative focus of learning how to write cursive as a child, or you miss the wonder of constantly discovering new words as an adolescent, you can re-live that for the rest of your life with Chinese!

Fortunately for Chinese (Mandarin at least), it is a very beautiful language, and every dose of that beauty seems to make you want more.

trevelyan• 16 years ago

David Moser (author of this article) appeared in the Sinica podcast this week along with Gady Epstein, Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Kuo. All familiar names for China watchers.

http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/maos-legacy-and-forei...

Quite a good episode. Strongly recommended.

pspda5id• 16 years ago

At least Mandarin grammar is relatively simple, and it has only 4-5 tones compared to Cantonese or Minnanese. But don't get me started on the multitude of Chinese dialects.

The point about classical Chinese isn't fair, the language itself has evolved little in the past few thousand years. To achieve the same utility in English, you will have to learn Modern English, Middle English, Norman, Old Saxon, Latin etc.

wisty4• 16 years ago

Good point, though considering how old Classical Chinese (let along Old Chinese) is, you might want to throw in Hebrew and Greek. Or maybe Proto-Germanic and a little PIE.

elblanco5• 16 years ago

Having an interesting conversation with a Korean the other day. She mentioned that in Korean there are various word and conjugation choices you have to make based on honorifics. What she didn't realize is that English has something similar but we don't recognize it for indicating formality -- often as a class or education signal, or to use differently depending on audience.

I was confused but she explained...

Most English words of German origin are vulgar or informal, while most of Latin, Greek or French origin are formal. Like "shit" vs. "feces", "fight" vs. "quarrel", "drink" vs. "imbibe", etc. In general, where we have synonyms, and those synonyms can be ranked on a scale of informal to formal, German words are towards the informal end, and romantic origin words are towards the formal end.

She said it's been one of the hardest things to learn when learning English (and she's quite fluent), is this concept of "formal" English vs. "informal" that is separate from "colloquial", mainly because nobody recognizes it and nobody teaches it.

So apparently this is also something one has to learn in English - word origin, in order to gauge proper usage.

totalc• 16 years ago

Chinese: the language so hard the Koreans made a new language!

OmniBus5• 16 years ago

You are misleading. Koreans have their own languages. Only the written form is drastically changed. It is not a new language.

It is more than hard and easy. Remember there is politics and culture. The disuse of Chinese character is pretty recent, post-WWII.

Recently, some Koreans suggest to pick up Chinese character in Korean. In the past, Korean culture and history are written in these characters. After a few generation, only very few people can recognise them properly. Also, Characters differentiate homonym. With characters, it would cause much confusion with numerous homonyms.

teaspoon• 16 years ago

For those curious about the idiom, "It's Chinese to me," here's the directed graph of prevailing "It's X to me" idioms among world languages:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1024

dfreidin• 16 years ago

Interesting. The fact that there are no loops means that there might be something close to a well ordering of language difficulty.

sliverstorm3• 16 years ago

Actually, I don't think you can draw such a conclusion. Notice that, generally speaking, the arrows move towards languages of greater age?

kqr2• 16 years ago

Japanese is missing. Does anyone know their equivalent?

sliverstorm3• 16 years ago

Allegedly, "The Japanese use a string of nonsense syllables which imitate the sounds of unknown languages, especially Chinese"

http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php

^ Worth noting that 'chinpunkanpun' is the word; the rest of the phrase is accurate Japanese.

harisenbon• 16 years ago

I thought about that for a whole when that post first came up, but came to the conclusion that there really isn't one. English would be the closest example of what people say they can't speak, but there's no "it's xx to me" that I'm aware of...

Except of course for the phrase "it's your mom to me"

Jun85• 16 years ago

This article is great fun to read and overall very informative. Yet I had a few gripes about it.

* Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols directly refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term.

The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".

* Writing system not phonetic: Any other European language than English would have formed a much better argument, since English is notorious for its haphazard mapping of mapping phonemes to the alphabet, partly caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch with bare knowledge of English.

One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent. Compare with, say, Greek grammar which has baffling complexity or Lithuanian that still has noun 9 cases! Some exotic native Indian languages have 10-15 noun classes (German has three, which we call gender). In pure writing complexity, some people rate Japanese to be even more complicated (with its three sub systems). Or for an older example, consider Mayan hieroglyphs.

tel2• 16 years ago

Anecdotally, the "nonexistence" of Chinese grammar is very refreshing. Speaking in Chinese makes you very aware of the grammatical infrastructure of English (especially polite English).

wisty4• 16 years ago

For example: "Give me an example of this" can be a perfectly polite request in Chinese.

mootothemax• 16 years ago

caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch

This is the first time that I've heard this; could you supply some further reading?

m0tive• 16 years ago

I remember being told this at school, a quick wiki search turns up some stuff here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#History

"[Printing] introduced further inconsistencies, partly because of the use of typesetters trained abroad, particularly in the Low Countries. For example, the h in ghost was influenced by Dutch."

Jun85• 16 years ago

I recommend three really good books:

[1] The Stories of English by David Crystal http://www.amazon.com/Stories-English-David-Crystal/dp/15856...

[2] The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/B001W6RRF...

[3] The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil http://www.amazon.com/Story-English-Third-Revised/dp/0142002...

All of these make a delightful read, I especially like [2].

A number of factors combined to make English orthography as unique as it is. First, there was no central authority of the English language for about three centuries, after the Norman invasion. Then, as French usage receded and English words were becoming more frequent people adopted the spelling of one part of the country and the pronunciation of another, e.g. Western England spellings for "busy" and "bury", but London pronunciation of "bizzy" and Kentish pronunciation of "berry" [2, p, 124] On top of that, the Great Vowel Shift happened.

OK, back to the printers. The problem was that English spelling started to become fixated due to printing, around 1650s, just when the language was undergoing a huge change. William Caxton, who may be considered the first English editor, published the oldest English book in Bruges, in 1475. By 1640, it is estimated that there were more than 20,000 titles available in Britain.

The final touch came from prescriptive orthographers who fiddled with word spellings to make them "right" according to classical languages, in the seventeenth century. Thus we have the b in "debt", the s in "island", h in "anchor" etc.

English is an interesting language indeed.

tokenadult12• 16 years ago

Chinese major who later worked for years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator replying here.

Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial

He didn't say that, because Chinese is chock-full of difficult grammar. Take a look at the page count (847 pages) of the book A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. His book is thorough, but by no means exhaustive. Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (713 pages) is familiar to many English-speaking students of Chinese. It too is far from exhaustive. Many of the mistakes made in speaking standard Chinese by second-language speakers that impair understanding are GRAMMAR mistakes, and that is true even of native speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") who don't know Modern Standard Chinese as a first language. And almost half the population of Chinese, according to a survey by the Chinese government, self-rates as unable to converse in Modern Standard Chinese.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...

Moreover, despite what that article says, written Chinese characters are frequently a barrier to understanding among Chinese citizens from different regions too. There is first of all the problem of high rates of illiteracy in China, because of the old-fashioned writing system Moser mentions. Many literate Chinese persons tend to write in the regional vocabulary and grammar--there is that again--of their native Sinitic language when they write, and I have seen numerous occasions of Chinese people traveling out of region and not being able to read hand-written signs at markets or even printed official signs posted by the local government.

Jd5• 16 years ago

I'm also a Chinese major who later worked as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator.

Compared to German (which I know) / Japanese (which I've studied) / aforementioned exotic languages Chinese grammar is trivial.

There may be many inconsistencies (and difficulties when you encounter literary Chinese), but grammar rules are pretty basic.

OmniBus5• 16 years ago

You get confused in the Chinese languages system. Spoken and written are very different beasts in Chinese language. The literacy relies on the meaning of characters. It is just like one can understands the meaning "1234" and "+, -" while reading them out loud in their own language. I write "1 + 2" and read it "yat ka yi" when you read "one plus two". It does not hinder the understand of mathematics.

Although there are numerous Chinese languages, the characters are basically the same. Although there are many variants in text, the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.

In the past, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages. But, you know, they are from different language families.

elblanco5• 16 years ago

The world would be a much better place if China just moved on to Bopomofo (Zhuyin Fuhao) which most people know pretty well from elementary school. It captures Mandarin morphology pretty well (better than Latin captures English for sure) and is relatively easier to learn.

est• 16 years ago

> For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".

oh no, anchor is 锚, you can tell it's metal, but you can't tell it's something about sea.

elblanco5• 16 years ago

And sometimes the radical can give you hints at pronunciation because often the words will rhyme.

varjag• 16 years ago

I see 'ideogram' used in Chinese (printed in Hong-Kong) tutorials dating from late 1980s. Maybe it's less widespread now, but it is by no means antiquated.

X-Istence• 16 years ago

That was the part I loved the most about learning Chinese, in school we were required to learn a certain amount of radicals, and once we learned those we learned what they looked like squished next to other characters at that point I knew there was a metal involved if I saw the character for metal, even if I didn't understand the rest of it. Gold being one exception :P

Vivtek• 16 years ago

This is an old article, because he says he's only been studying Chinese for six years and I remember Doug Hofstadter talking about him, as a Chinese expert, in the 90's.

In fact, Moser gained some renown as being good enough at Chinese (after writing this article, obviously - but not too long, as the date that appears on it is 1991 and I heard about this in about 1996 or so) that he appeared on a Chinese game show involving language mastery, apparently something along the lines of a linguistic Jeopardy.

So clearly, Chinese is in fact damned hard, but not impossible for an obsessed genius.

I wonder if anything has been done about the dictionary situation.

robobenjie• 16 years ago

As a study abroad student in Japan I was encouraged to buy an electric dictionary that came with a stylus. You write the character you see and it gives the definition.

(unfortunately these are designed for Japanese people so it doesn't get the character if you write it with the wrong stroke order, and it brings you to a page of japanese text explaining all about the character and its uses in different contexts, but still, pretty useful)

Figs• 16 years ago

We have the internet, Unicode, and powerful computers now, so I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991. I don't know much about Chinese in particular -- my foreign language was Japanese -- but I have recently looked up kanji using a variety of search engines, including tools that allow you to draw characters. (For example: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html) If you have the kanji as text, it's not much more difficult to look up an unfamiliar word in Japanese than it is in English, although it may still be difficult to figure out the exact sense if the writing isn't literal.

For example, suppose you're trying to read something on the Japanese Wikipedia. I'm horribly out of practice, but I can still go and take something like "第六回執筆コンテストの入選記事が決定しました。結果発表をご覧下さい。" (found on the front page of ja.wikipedia.org) and reason that it means something along the lines of "The best articles of the sixth writing competition have been chosen. Please look at the results." just by copying the parts I'm unfamiliar with into a kanji search engine like Jlex (http://jlex.org/) a bit at a time until I get something reasonable back.

Estragon3• 16 years ago

  I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991.

The firefox extension peraperakun is damn handy.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349/

brazzy• 16 years ago

That's a lot of words to say "because there's too damn many characters".

BTW, the Japanese also believe they speak the most difficult language in the world. Probably a lot of others too. That means very little.

0_o• 16 years ago

I am from China, my advise for western Chinese learners is:don't learn it based on Pinyin which seems helpful at the beginning but leads you to nowhere at all. If you just want to be able to read CHinese books or novels you simply don't have to know how to speak it. Most of the European Chinese experts in the last century were like that. And if you just want to speak it fluently, find a Chinese gf/bf,in two years you can flirt with others in Chinese.

starkfist2• 16 years ago

It's interesting that almost all of the reasons apply to the written language. I took Mandarin in college and found the tricks I was taught to learn the characters were mostly useless. You simply had to memorize everything by brute force.

The spoken language has a simple grammar and aside from the tones you can probably get to a passable level within a year if you live in Beijing and actually interact with people in Chinese.

tokenadult12• 16 years ago

Setting aside literacy is costly, and I have seen a lot of learners of Chinese who go over to Chinese-speaking places do that. But I agree with the statement that Chinese people will probably be well able to intercommunicate with a dedicated Westerner who immerses himself in the standard language of China for a year--but largely because the speakers of the standard language in China are well used to nonstandard speech from the lips of their own compatriots who grew up in other regions. I can pass for a native of China over the telephone--not because my Chinese is so wonderful, but because China is so full of citizens who speak Mandarin poorly as a second language.

starkfist2• 16 years ago

It depends what you consider costly. I switched to Japanese after college and moved to Japan for a year. Rather than learning anything about the writing system, I took a 6 week conversation crash course before leaving. When I got there I just mastered the accent and some of the cultural communication idosyncrasies like "active listening" rather than spending time reading and writing anything. I ended up going on far more dates with women than I ever have in my life prior (or after) and had two really cool girlfriends. In contrast my friend who was obsessed with mastering Japanese had no friends at all for about 3 years. Nobody wanted to talk to him because his accent was so grating. I feel like his approach was far more "costly" if you consider "social cost" a real factor.

In terms of real economic value I have come to the conclusion that a native english speaker mastering another language rarely pays off, in a financial sense. The main benefit is establishing relationships with people you wouldn't be able to meet, otherwise.

rsheridan62• 16 years ago

I used the Heisig method to learn about 2100 characters in 9 months (about an hour a day). I'm sure I would not have been able to do that by brute force.

dkarl2• 16 years ago

I am on hiatus from learning Japanese while I do Heisig. I intend to start learning Japanese again after finishing book one of RTK. Do you think that's a good idea? I found that kanji frustration was a huge drag on my learning, to the point of making it really boring, so I figure once I've got Heisig down cold, I'll be able to pick up kanji quickly and learn Japanese at a more natural (and more fun) pace. I'd be very interested to hear what you think about that idea since you went through the entire Heisig program.

andreshb• 16 years ago

I read hundreds if not thousands of articles on a daily basis. Most of the time, I skim them. But this essay/article despite being so long, kept me interested the whole way, and made me laugh several times. Amazing writer.

fgf7• 16 years ago

Me too, it's five in the morning here and I'm afraid I woke up my roommates when I (repeatedly) laughed out loud.

OmniBus5• 16 years ago

There ain't too much Chinese characters as one perceives. A Chinese character is like a word in English. They are just using different vehicles to load meaning. For example, the Chinese character 早 is equivalent to "morning" or "early" in English. When you learn to write it, it is the combination of 日 and 十. When Chinese learner struggles for the combination of components, English learner struggles for that of letters(, or stem root). They are pretty the same. It is much easier to remember that 早 (morning) is associated with 日 (sun). Once you master the skill, it is as easy as spelling. You can complain too much characters when comparing the number of words in English.

I like classical Chinese. It is the minimalistic form of Chinese languages. Concise and Poetic.

Modern Chinese is heavily polluted by Western languages, both English and Russian. Modern Chinese text is crippled by Western grammar. This makes the text filled with empty words, and long sentences, and odd construction, mechanical, and confusion.

Writing Chinese never emphases grammar, but the sequence and context. It is dramatically different approach from Indo-European languages. For example, In English "When the rain falls, there are fewer and fewer people on the street." Alternative, you can write, "there are fewer and fewer people on the street when the rain falls." The order of words and phrases is not so important. In Chinese, it can be "天雨，街上人漸疏"(sky rain => on street people fewer), or more concisely, 雨下人疏(rain fall => people fewer), or 天雨人疏(sky rain => people fewer). You can't reverse the word order in Chinese. You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought and scene. It is what the idiomatic phrase from. For example, if you describe a person fails to break up a relationship, you can say 欲斷難斷 (want to break => (but) hard to break). This saves lots of words.

pradocchia• 16 years ago

You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought and scene.

Linguists call this a topic-comment language: 雨下, 人疏 -> [as for when it] rains, [there are] fewer people [out].

It does makes for some nice poetry.

Ujjwol• 16 years ago

English is phonetic. What A JOKE ? The author forget the language which is difficult to what difficult can be BUT it depends on your effort. The language is so phonetic that even a breath won't be missed out. And a person can write a book accurately as read by other people if pronounced correctly. And the language is Sanskrit. Hindi, Nepali, Marathi are it ruined form but they bring most phonetic features.

fgf7• 16 years ago

This is difficult to understand.

ivankirigin2• 16 years ago

I studied Japanese for about 2 years in college. I estimated that to learn a single kanji, it took the time to learn 40 other vocabulary words.

I wished I had focused on speaking instead. Academic japanese seems to treat starting students like they're going to get a PhD in the language. That is absurd. Written Japanese beyond hiragana and katakana (the two phonetic alphabets), should only start in the 3rd or 4th year of undergraduate study.

chousuke• 16 years ago

I don't understand this sentiment. Kanji are an integral part of the japanese language, and much of it doesn't make sense without them.

You can and should start studying kanji as soon as you have a reasonable command of hiragana. Every time you learn a new word you should at least check the characters it's written with instead of pretending that it's okay to use hiragana for everything.

My experience has been that I sometimes actually understand words I've never heard before because I can connect the syllables with kanji whose meaning fits the context.

It's up to you to balance your time between learning the written language and learning the spoken language, but they are not independent of each other, and ignoring kanji in the beginning is a mistake.

ivankirigin2• 16 years ago

Kanji are important for written language. I see no reason the language should avoid eliminating kanji, given the available alternatives.

In my experience, there wasn't a single case of being able to infer meaning from context or radicals or anything.

jarek• 16 years ago

Unsurprisingly the article seems to focus a lot on the non-phonetic script.

I've been thinking about this — considering the difficulties even with the simplified characters and even for native users of the language if this article is to be believed, what are HN's thoughts on potential official shift by China from simplified to pinyin or a derivative of pinyin?

yuan• 16 years ago

Pardon my cynicism, but, those who haven't learnt Chinese well tend to exaggerate its difficulty as a pretext to their failure, and those who have do the same to accentuate their achievement. If you are weighing whether to learn Chinese and deterred by its supposed difficulty, I hope you'd take that into account.

Jun85• 16 years ago

Some interesting facts about the Chinese writing system:

* The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no anagrams, and no Morse code! To get around the last problem, The Chinese have devised a system where each word was assigned a number, e.g. "Person" was 0086 [The Mother Tongue]

Massive statistical tests in the past two decades have repeatedly demonstrated that 1,000 characters cover approximately 90% of symbols in typical texts, 2400 cover 99%, 3,800 cover 99.9%. Based on the study of other logographic systems (Mayan writing, Egyptian hieroglyphs), it seems that there's an upper limit on the number of unique forms that can be tolerated in a script. For most people, this value seems to be in the range 2000-2500.

* A Chinese character is generally confused with a word, the assumption being that Sinitic language are exclusively monosyllabic. This is not true. In modern Mandarin the average length of a word is almost exactly two syllables.

* The Chinese writing system is very well suited to writing Classical Chinese but ill-equipped to record the vernaculars (local dialects/languages) of which there are many in China. Consequently, to write Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Shanghainese, it is necessary to invent characters or resort to romanization.

The source is The World's Writing Systems by Oxford University Press. I recommend this book to everyone who's interested in these matters.

[Edit] In case you're wondering, Chinese has palindromes, but not the letter-based ones like we're used to. Hofstadter in Le Ton beau de Marot relates an anecdote with a Chinese professor. Prof. Wu first shows them a famous Chinese palindrome: Ye luo tian luo ye (At leaves-fall season, fall the leaves). In turn, H shows him the quintessential Panama palindrome, but Prof. Wu has difficulty understanding it because he was reading it word by word (p. 143)

Estragon3• 16 years ago

  The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large.

The probable social consequences are perhaps the most profound. It must distort an education system to have such a large part of the curriculum accessible only by rote learning.

GiraffeNecktie• 16 years ago

And then there's Dashan (Mark Roswell) who studied Chinese in Canada for four years and then went to China. Within a year he was appearing on Chinese television and now is a huge superstar performing xiansheng, which is an oral comedic tradition that even native speakers find pretty frickin difficult. I'd love to know how he managed to learn Chinese so well, so quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashan.

gaiusparx• 16 years ago

Chinese is not hard. For example the most complicated object in the world, human being or people, is written using just 2 strokes 人. Simple.

setori88• 16 years ago

I took great pleasure reading aloud many sections of this humorous article to my Chinese wife. This article resonates closely with my experiences / frustrations - my dear wife had a good chuckle at my exasperated face.

skybrian• 16 years ago

I wonder if this is true?

From: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/chinesewriting.html

"Since Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other nonstandard varieties differ from Mandarin not just in sound but also in vocabulary and grammar, the characters cannot bridge this gap by themselves, even with their relative neutrality toward sound.7 Much of the core vocabulary of non-Mandarin Chinese has no counterpart in Mandarin and no recognized character representation. Conversely, many Mandarin terms for which characters do exist are foreign to non-Mandarin speakers. The fact that nonstandard speakers can read a text in the standard language simply means that these speakers are bilingual. They have learned written Mandarin as a second language. They know enough vocabulary and grammar to make sense of Mandarin texts, much as I know enough French words and grammar to read that language (without being able to pronounce it convincingly, much less to speak it fluently). If Chinese characters have unified the Chinese languages, then the alphabet has unified French and English.

"The characters do allow nonstandard speakers to use their own pronunciations to read Mandarin texts. So instead of acclimating to the national standard, nonstandard speakers reinforce their own speech habits and add to the vitality of their "dialect" by introducing new vocabulary from Mandarin, which they pronounce their own way by analogy. Whether alphabetic scripts should be used to provide China's non-Mandarin speakers with the means to become literate in their own language is a political question outside the scope of the present inquiry. But one thing is certain: since non-Mandarin speakers are forced anyway to learn a second language, it would make more sense from the viewpoint of those promoting unity if this bilingualism were achieved through Mandarin written in the pinyin alphabet.8 The incentive to learn the national standard, including its pronunciation, would be higher than it is today if one's ability to read depended on it. As it is now, nonstandard speakers work their way through standard texts using whatever pronunciation comes naturally, not fully learning Mandarin and not reading their own languages either."

tokenadult12• 16 years ago

Yes, the quoted statement is true. Observing examples of this phenomenon (in either direction, whether Mandarin speakers not being able to read other Sinitic languages in Chinese characters, or speakers of those languages not being able to read quite standard Mandarin in Chinese characters) was what motivated some of my earlier comments in this thread.

Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard

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