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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

A side topic, for those who have acquired Mandarin, do you think Chinese is a really easy-to-learn language in the long run? Yes, learning all the characters has a steep learning curve, but once one passes that stage, it's all about combination of the characters. That Chinese's grammar is heavily influenced by modern English also helped. I feel that the grammatical similarity between English and Chinese is closer than that between English and Spanish.

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It's the second time now I see someone saying Chinese grammar is heavily influenced by modern English. I've never heard of that, where comes that from?

I definitely wouldn't say Chinese is a really easy language to learn. The absence of word conjugation is a godsense after learning French, but the tones and characters stay hard for me.

I've always been pretty bad in French but I can open a book in French and read a sentence aloud without too much trouble. I frequently think and dream in Chinese but that task is still daunting to me.

I don't have references at hand, but I can recall some of the discussions I used to read. The "Europeanization", or 欧化，came in many different flavors (even though most of the influence came from English), for better or for worse. There was a "new culture movement" more than 100 years, and the Chinese elites tried to translate western works into Chinese that ordinary people could understand, and that movement fundamentally changed modern Chinese.

- polysyllabic words (复音词）。Modern Chinese has many such coined words that either came from Japanese or from European languages. For instance, 台灯 == table lamp. Traditional Chinese wouldn't create words like that.

- Introduction of linking verb. Traditional Chinese, even 白话文，don't use linking verbs like "be", "get", and etc. For instance, in English one may say "his dream is to be a scientist", but in Chinese one would only say "他梦想成为科学家“， while it is now perfectly find to say "他的梦想是成为一名科学家“，due to the influence of English.

- Introduction of long sentences. Traditional Chinese does not use long sentences, let alone clauses. For instance, in the modern Chinese, people are used to "if .. then" type of sentences, yet it was not used in traditional Chinese.

- Punctuations. Traditional Chinese uses only period, if it uses punctuation at all. Yet now modern Chinese uses all kinds of English punctuations.

- New syntactical structures, even though they are eye sores to me. For instance, in English one can say "they made great contribution to the society", and in modern Chinese one can say "他们对社会做出的贡献很大“, even though a more traditional way is "他们对社会贡献很大“。BTW，even the latter is westernized, as in traditional Chinese we don't use propositions like "对“。

- New grammar. For instance, traditional Chinese does not have passive speech, but modern Chinese does.

- The modernization of Chinese syntax and semantics. Check this book: https://www.amazon.com/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%8E%B0%E4%BB%A3%.... The entire framework of studying Chinese comes from the English/European world.

Yes, traditional Chinese is very different from Modern Chinese, that doesn't mean the differences come from English. Traditional Chinese hasn't been spoken by the common people for hundreds of years. What people spoke was vernacular Chinese and the Beijing dialect is what Modern Standard Chinese is based on.

What I can find is they actually tried to make the standard some mix of Southern and Northern dialects but that never really worked out. Probably not in the least because there's a fundamental problem, how are you going to teach a language to a whole country when nobody speaks that language yet?

I really don't see how they could have gone then with English grammar instead since it has the same problem, nor can I find any reference about it.

>Punctuations. Traditional Chinese uses only period, if it uses punctuation at all. Yet now modern Chinese uses all kinds of English punctuation

Punctuation is just convenient, it doesn't change the language.

>The entire framework of studying Chinese comes from the English/European world.

So?

    Yes, learning all the characters has a steep 
    learning curve, but once one passes that stage, ...

One never passes that stage, though? Even once you know the 6,000 characters that people often cite as being needed to read a novel, you'll still run into characters that you don't know (especially in proper names, but also in less common, especially literary or chengyu, vocabulary).

I also disagree about the "grammatical similarity", but at the point of fluency we're talking about here (day-to-day fluency in idiomatic Chinese), that doesn't matter anyway, not even a bit.

An elementary student in China probably won't learn more than 3000 characters, yet they can read advanced novels. I suspect the difference is that a native speaker feels more comfortable skipping or guess unknown words. I certainly felt more discomfort when encountering new words when reading even a popular fiction in English, while having no problem guessing the meaning of a new word in my native language.

Chinese grammar only really seems like English in the beginning. It diverges fairly aggressively from intermediate onwards.

The idea that Mandarin grammar is easy only really applies at a surface level. Yeah for the most part it's SVO word order and there aren't any verb conjugations, but the deeper you get, the more you run into constructions that are completely alien from an English-speaker's perspective. I like how this image represents it: https://imgur.com/neBFnxc

In my experience- yes. As you mentioned, there is a steep learning curve before you get to that point. Characters instead of letters, sounds you're unaccustomed to hearing and making, and multiple tones make learning basic phrases much more work than many languages. However, once you get some time with those difficult pieces, the grammar is actually much easier than one would expect. I would much rather learn another language like Chinese than a conjugation-heavy one such as Finnish.

Reading and listening to Mandarin was much less difficult than I expected. Good pronunciation was more challenging, but after working with a speech-language pathologist, my speech production is good enough that I'm rarely asked to repeat myself.

Is it similar to English? The one thing I remember is there's no tenses or gender.

That's the simplified part. Otherwise, the basic structure of the two languages is subject + verb + object. A lot of semantics are constructed with the help of adverbs and particles without verb conjugations. For example, in English we say I have done that, and in Chinese we say 我做了(Or in Taiwan style，我有做了，which is even closer to English, though I'm not sure if that's from Japanese's やったことがありません). In contrast, in Spanish we'd say Lo he hecho - different sentence order, and tons of verb conjugation.

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