Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Warning, controversial opinion: Chinese is too hard to be cost-effective to learn.

I took 3 years' worth of Mandarin in college.

But when I traveled to Brazil, I was able to communicate more easily in Portuguese in just a month, than I was in China after 2 full years of courses plus two and a half months of intensive courses in Beijing.

Chinese is hard because it has virtually zero cognates with English, you have to learn every word new. (Contrast with Portuguese, where I "knew" half the words already because I could easily guess that "television" is just "televisão". Same with French, Italian, etc.)

And Chinese is hard because you have to learn how to "spell" every word separately -- if you thought zero cognates was hard, this is 10x harder.

Quite frankly it's an insane time commitment, and unless you plan to live most of your life in China or Taiwan, it's just not worth it if your goal is communication. Chinese people are learning English so they can communicate with the world. It might seem unfair, but there's just zero practical reason for most English speakers to learn Chinese beyond some basic greetings, except as a fun hobby or some minimum vocabulary for travel.

For more info, read the very famous article "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard". [1] Anybody who wants to learn Chinese should read it first so they know what they're getting into.

[1] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

That's only true when you already speak English, or at least another Germanic or Romance language. Otherwise, all this applies to English exactly the same as it does to Chinese.

No, it's vastly easier for Chinese to learn English (or French or German) because they're generally phonetically-spelled languages.

There aren't any cognates, but you don't spend years memorizing thousands and thousands of characters to learn English.

And the payoff is much higher: learning Chinese only lets you communicate with Chinese/Taiwanese people. Learning English lets you communicate with a huge proportion of the world who also learns English as a second language, simply because it's the current lingua franca.

> No, it's vastly easier for Chinese to learn English (or French or German) because they're generally phonetically-spelled languages.

Interesting of you to make that claim as english spelling is usually a nightmare to learn (as is French spelling to a minor extent). Sometimes people really are learning it word by word. It seems easier for you because you're already familiar with it.

> And the payoff is much higher: learning Chinese only lets you communicate with Chinese/Taiwanese people. Learning English lets you communicate with a huge proportion of the world who also learns English as a second language, simply because it's the current lingua franca.

Well, seeing as there are well over a billion of chinese people I'd think twice about using the word "only". Also there are many who speak it as a second language as well.

> but you don't spend years memorizing thousands and thousands of characters to learn English

except you are memorizing thousands and thousands of spellings to learn English

This sounds like BS to me. There are rules and exceptions to those rules one must learn/memorise, but I highly doubt it's "thousands and thousands".

There's a lot of English comprehension you get "for free" by knowing some of these rules, e.g., "magic e" or [the actually incorrect] "i before e, except after c".

> There are rules and exceptions to those rules one must learn/memorise, but I highly doubt it's "thousands and thousands".

Exactly my point: This is true in Chinese (Hanzi) as well.

Edit: English-speaking individuals often overestimate the difficulty of learning Hanzi while underestimate the barrier of learning English spelling. For an example, see Ted Chiang's claim of "you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper" [0].

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/if-chinese-wer...

I learned English. The spelling is a nightmare, you essentially need to learn it twice. Chinese at least doesn't pretend to be phonetic.

You also need smaller vocabulary in Chinese - 3500 characters is all you need. English vocabulary is absolutely massive.

The grammar is pretty bizarre as well, as far as I am able to judge.

Tangential to the main topic, but relevant to some of your remarks about English grammar.

Have you ever read Politics and the English Language by George Orwell?

Since covering it in High School, it's been my go to for all writing. Writing the way he describes will have everyone understand you. It doesn't need to be more complex than that. It might be argued that it's superior in most cases. (Sadly we never covered this in our general English classes. We only covered it in Creative Writing)

Here are his six rules for writing, and a link to the essay for anyone interested:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79p/

---

Edited to add my favourite example of what the essay is largely about:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

"""I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth"""

Here it is in modern English:

"""Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."""

To this day, English is difficult for my parents, who have a hard time keeping gendered pronouns straight. But at least the irregularity of the numerical system isn't as weird as French.

Chinese is considerably easier and English considerably harder if your first language is an Asian language.

> “...have a hard time keeping gendered pronouns straight.”

ha, i see that in the english captioning sometimes when watching chinese dramas. at least gender is only in the pronouns, rather than (nearly) every word via gender suffixes (like the romance languages).

How can they write Chinese if they can't get gendered pronouns straight? (他 vs. 她)

Chinese numbers quite logical and straightforward, true, though French (and German etc.) numbers pose small hurdles only, I'd say.

> Chinese is considerably easier and English considerably harder if your first language is an Asian language.

That really depends which language you're talking about. I'd bet most Indonesians, for example, would disagree. However, granted, a language will be easier when you are familiar with a language that has many cognates.

他 vs. 她 was invented in order to maintain compatibility with Western languages, and using 他 in place of 她 is not considered grammatically incorrect, and you don't learn to write both of them until you start to read and write in school, not when you're a baby learning to talk.

For instance, when my birth certificate was translated into English, there are male pronouns littered everywhere because the inexperienced translator didn't give it a second thought, even though the gender field was clearly marked as female.

French, though is particularly brutal for Chinese native speakers, because not only do you have to consciously track each human speaker's gender and whether they are in groups of mixed males and females or all females, but also track the arbitrary genders of objects.

Ah, interesting!

Try German, with 3 genders. :-)

Having said that, learners of Chinese need to memorise which measure word goes with any given noun, and there are more than 3 of those!

> but also track the arbitrary genders of objects.

That's still better than having to keep track of measure words in Mandarin. : )

As a learner of both I have found French speakers to be far less forgiving of mistakes in gender, probably because it’s unavoidable. In mandarin you can use a catch all counting word and people still understand. In French it seems to really confuse speakers when you mess up gender.

But do you believe it's the same for young students who have tons of free time over the space of many years? I'm not sure your personal experience dictates an absolute about this situation. I was forced to learn an extremely niche language in school; even learning the basics of chinese would have been more useful.

I do. There's actually a very plausible theory that Chinese economic development is harmed by the sheer number of hours schoolchildren spend memorizing characters rather than conceptual learning -- that moving to a phonetic alphabet would be a huge boost in terms of overall learning. (This isn't a Western argument, it's a Chinese argument for phoneticization which is still mostly opposed by the population.)

Young students don't have "tons of free time" -- their school time is spent on something, and if they're memorizing Chinese characters, then there are necessarily other skills that will be less developed.

Most of those arguments were made when China was 3rd world, it’ll get harder to sell that each passing year. Also that’s a great argument to simplify English as well, but few seem thrilled about that idea.

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