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Comment by yuan | Hacker News Reader

No. The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system.

As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, I think you are full of shit. No native Chinese speaker I know thinks English is easier to learn than Chinese. And I prefer the Chinese writing system myself if I have a choice.

It's true that many people are learning English, because today Chinese are producing and selling. When the day comes when Chinese become buyers and the rest of the world are trying to get sales from Chinese, they will start learning Chinese.

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I seem to remember that the common Chinese idiom for a tough to learn language is 跟天书一样. "Hard as the heavenly script". If you really refer to your own language as yardstick for complexity, his post has a point.

The German idiom translates to "Polish backwards".

> I seem to remember that the common Chinese idiom for a tough to learn language is 跟天书一样. "Hard as the heavenly script". If you really refer to your own language as yardstick for complexity, his post has a point.

What is the point? I use my own language as a reference point because it's the language I know best. And I hope others would do the same: comment on things you know best and stop spreading lies, myths, pointless memes about things you know little.

When we say "天书", we usually refer to "无字天书" (the divine book without letter); i.e., a blank book for those of us without magical power. Again, I don't see relevancy here. We don't need magical power to learn Chinese.

Everyone knows their native language best.

If you lay apart the expletives, the poster said that Chinese realize their language is hard to pick up for foreigners. So their strategy seems to be learning English instead of holding their breath for rest of the world learning Mandarin. Do you disagree with this assessment?

If you do, where exactly? Do you suggest that all languages and writing systems are equally easy to learn as a second language? If not, do you consider Mandarin to be easier or as easy to learn as English?

I, for one, find Mandarin damn hard to learn (doing it my first year), and the script is indeed the toughest part. While I find it visually elegant, it is fairly irregular, prompting for massive amount of drill and memorization in learning. (I knew two other foreign languages and two natively before approaching Mandarin, so I have some perspective here). Many people seem to share such experience, i.e. people reliably find Chinese hard.

Oh, and I found where from that reference to the heavenly script stuck in my head: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

From the western perspective a prosperous China is a good thing. Unfortunately, China is speeding towards one of the largest economic walls the world has ever seen. Mix a rapidly aging population, high levels of corruption, high savings rates, and an unstable government and you have a recipe for disaster.

Growing the Chinese GDP to 3 or 4 times its current size should still be easy, but as per person income starts to approach Japan it’s going to be really rough sailing.

You lack some perspective and tact, you silly goose. It's not very surprising you and your friends think your native language is easier and that you prefer your own writing system. Way to navel-gaze, hello?

As someone whose native language is neither, having studied both, I'd say English is much easier.

The tones in Chinese really fuck with someone whose native language isn't tonal (and most aren't), and wouldn't you rather become literate by learning 26-30 symbols than by learning thousands of symbols? Makes sense, doesn't it?

Words in Chinese don't get conjugated much (if at all), but you've got a relatively strict word order, whereas in English, you've got particles and a more relaxed word order.

Not having tones and no huge obstacle to becoming literate makes English a hell of a lot easier to learn.

> The tones in Chinese really fuck with someone whose native language isn't tonal (and most aren't),

I speak Chinese by learning the sounds of words, but not the tones, in my active learning. If I speak quickly, in complete contextual sentences, using two-syllable words (instead of the one-syllable ones), then people generally understand me. I learn the tones passively afterwards.

> and wouldn't you rather become literate by learning 26-30 symbols than by learning thousands of symbols?

Most Chinese symbols are made up of components, of which there's about 400 to 600, depending on how you count them. E.g. the one character 解 is made up of four components 勹用刀牛.

> but you've got a relatively strict word order,

Introductory lessons in Chinese only present the standard word order, but, like in English, you can arrange the content words of a sentence in many different orders depending on what you want to make thematic or focus on.

Could you please be more polite? Thanks!

(And your native language was probably closer related to English than to Chinese. Was it?)

What exactly did I say that warranted a reprimanding like that?

> You lack some perspective and tact, you silly goose. It's not very surprising you and your friends think your native language is easier and that you prefer your own writing system. Way to navel-gaze, hello?

I agree that yuan's "I think you are full of shit." is even worse (although he addresses another `you'), and I even agree with your sentiment (if not your wording).

On the other hand, boyter said, the "Chinese realize" their language is hard to learn. And yuan disagreed. Navel-gazing was exactly what was called for.

So I agree with yuan and you. But your message was slightly out of context and does not address yuan's message.

Learn to read first before worrying about tact and perspective. Boyter said, "The Chinese realize their language is a pain in the butt to learn and that the writing system is terrible in comparison to any alphabet system." As a Chinese speaker living among many Chinese speakers and having some proficiency in certain alphabet system, I think I have a say on such thing. Perhaps my sampling size is insignificant, it's still better than a complete baseless lie.

> [Personal anecdotal narrative elided.]

Talking about the lack of perspective, why don't you tell us what is your native language? It won't be news to us if a speaker of a Indo-European language finds another Indo-European language easier to learn than a Sino-Tibetan language.

There has been too much hot air, lets introduce some substance and data: how hard is it to attain literacy in a language?

Take a look at India, a country of similar size, population and economic status to China. According to UN Developement Programme Report 2009(pg. 172-173)[1], India's literacy rate is estimated to be at 66%, while China is at 93.3%.

If GDP percapita is any indication to access to education, Brazil and Mexico have significantly higher GDP/capita than China, but China's literacy is actually slightly better.

You may attribute it to cultural difference or whatever, still, it'd be less of a complete lie to say Chinese is not harder to learn than these other languages than otherwise.

[1] http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2009_EN_Complete.pdf

To the rest: sorry for the language and this offtopic debate, but I would not stand by idly seeing people slandering the language I love. I said what I have to say and I will stop now.

> Learn to read first before worrying about tact and perspective.

You said "you're full of shit", which I thought lacked tactfulness. You're right, I didn't read the earlier comment carefully enough. I guess it needed to be quite forcefully pointed out that Chinese people don't realize how hard their language is to learn.

> Talking about the lack of perspective, why don't you tell us what is your native language? It won't be news to us if a speaker of a Indo-European language finds another Indo-European language easier to learn than a Sino-Tibetan language.

Well, let's go through what I said again:

Not having tones and no huge obstacle to becoming literate makes English a hell of a lot easier to learn.

I still think that's true. You seem to be saying that people find it easier to learn languages that are more related to their native language than some others, but how is that related to my point about Chinese being quite an undertaking to learn?

You quote some literacy statistics, but that's not really relevant to what I said either, is it? An intentional distraction, perhaps.

Chinese has got a huge alphabet, and most other languages don't. This means that it's much more difficult to attain literacy in Chinese. Whatever amount of characters you want to draw the line at, it'll still be much more than 26.

> I would not stand by idly seeing people slandering the language I love

Oh please. No one has slandered your beloved language. The fact remains though, that the tones and characters are a big burden on someone who wants to learn it.

Let me guess. Your native language is phonetic based and is alphabet based, just like English.

I could be wrong, but isn't that the case for most everyone on the planet?

Looking at this map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system

it seems that with the exception of China, Japan, and Korea (which has very limited use) the whole world uses some form of a phonetic writing system.

The korean writing system, hangul, is phonetic.

And lovely, by the way.

So are the hiragana and katakana components of Japanese writing.

Yeah, I know hangul is phonetic, but I've also heard they make use of a variant of chinese characters in some limited fashion (mostly give names, place names, and academic histories).

Tone is not that important. Each dialect of Mandarin has its own set of tones, but they can understand each other most of the time. Most non-natives don't follow tones altogether.

For the Chinese, getting the tones right usually means you are not a country bumpkin, which can sometimes affect your job prospect, but if you are a foreigner they don't care.

Chinese has fairly minimalistic and consistent grammar. If you don't take the tones too seriously, it should be one of the easier spoken languages to learn.

>wouldn't you rather become literate by learning 26-30 symbols than by learning thousands of symbols?

It's 214 radicals, here's the list:

http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php

Native speakers only memorize a few of the simple radicals, most of the rest come to you through osmosis. After learning some characters you begin to see the pattern. Each radical has a specific placement in a character, so you can usually "spell out" a character by listing the radicals.

One important difference between English and Chinese is that English is something everyone expects you to know. Knowing Chinese on the other hand will get you mad street cred if you are a non-native.

Chinese mandarin could get easily get back to its Lingua Franca status in its area of cultural dominance: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and it could spread from there. It is actually easy and fun to learn the basics, no grammar, just little cute Lego blocks you have to draw, while if you master it you get access to the richest literature and poetry.

I use 3 languages daily, some colleagues have 4, 5... Come on, valley' men, stop thinking languages are hard. It's hard only if you think all the others should talk English e basta.

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