Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) actually isn't that bad, it just looks that way. If you read it aloud, you can understand it pretty easily. Old English or Anglo-Saxon actually looks more like Danish than German and is a totally different language from modern English - modern Spanish has more cognates and other similarities.

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.

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)

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.

No, I think my point was misunderstood about the "families" of the languages. I know English, so picking up French is easier--they have cognates, and considerable overlap in the set of sounds, and they share a lot of grammatical similarity. This similarity is due to their both being Indo-European languages.

Now, I would have a much harder time learning, say, !Kung, because !Kung comes from a very different language family, Bantu. The first problem, and a very big problem, would be learning how to do glottal clicks. If English had a lot of those, it wouldn't be such an issue, but since English is descended from a very different set of languages, I'd find it extremely difficult to pick up !Kung.

Now, given my background in Shanghainese, I'm going to find it infinitely easier to pick up Mandarin or Cantonese than someone who speaks only English. It's not that any language is intrinsically more difficult, but if you start out knowing a language that's quite unrelated (English to Chinese), it will seem much harder than learning a language that is related (English to French).

So, you don't have to be a native speaker of Chinese. If you know a closely related language, you would pick up Chinese (spoken, at least) fairly easily, with whatever ease an Englishman has picking up French. Chinese isn't "made" only for native speakers. That's just a wrong statement--all babies are born not knowing anything, after all.

And that's why I hate this article whenever I see it pop up on reddit.com or HN. Most of the problems this guy has are because he was born speaking an Indo-European language. Of course he'll think anything from the Sinitic family is difficult.

And I am also a Chinese/English speaker. I can't read or write at all, but my verbal fluency is quite good, and it's damn good considering I can only talk to my parents and I hardly ever hear Shanghainese outside my home. Perhaps your issues are due to not being surrounded by enough Chinese people, and not because Chinese is magically harder.

Language family actually doesn't have that much to do with it because the differences within families are so coarse. One of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn is Bahasa Indonesia, and it definitely is not an Indo-European language. Most Indic languages, like Hindi, are much harder despite being Indo-European.

that's very interesting, I mostly find seo garbage trough google, any links to more on this?

http://indonesianlanguage.net/learn-bahasa-indonesia

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.

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.

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.

You are Chinese and I claim my £5.

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