Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)
pinyin.info
pinyin.info
The first thing one should note is that Moser started studying Chinese in the late 80s. Things have changed. There is a wealth of accessible, well-written and free learning resources available online. People like Olle Linge have written much about how to study Chinese efficiently. There is a grammar wiki. There is the amazing Pleco dictionary (among others) with built-in OCR, flashcarding, recorded pronunciations. There are podcasts (check out Popup Chinese).
Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months. It was painful, but not impossible thanks to an intensive flashcarding regimen, immersion, and other studying.
Chinese grammar, while not trivial, is much simpler than I found French grammar to be. Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates. When you have built up an internal library of individual characters, the meaning of a word like 海军 (navy) will be obvious since 海=sea and 军=army.
Also, learning Chinese is incredibly rewarding. It opens up a country with 1.4bn+ inhabitants that is quickly gaining prominence in the world, and with one of the most fascinating scripts ever to be designed. Even though I no longer live in China, I still hear Mandarin all time. This makes learning the language exciting! The hardest part is sticking with it. If you want to learn, it will come so much easier to you.
Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.
Sort of.
The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write.
Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
Here is a specific example:
Traditional Chinese
車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident)
不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but)
Simplified Chinese
车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation)
不过 (same meaning/pronunciation)
In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively.
The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
I studied three and a half years of traditional characters, switched to simplified when I went to China, and then started studying Japanese, which uses a mix. I definitely am glad I studied traditional characters, but I feel at least for me, they are much much harder to learn, but that could be different for different people.
Out of curiosity, have you tried learning both simplified and traditional?
Having phonetic components makes it easier (if you like cryptic crosswords), but not easy.
> Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no.
I've seen people from all different countries complain about English spelling. But not China. No Chinese person has, in my experience, ever even considered the idea that there's anything to complain about. Rather, they rely on the spelling of English words as a crutch to get English speakers to understand them when their accent gets in the way, for example, by saying something like "Poss. <blank stare from the English speaker> Poss P-A-U-S-E Poss."
And to add to what everyone else is saying, here are some characters using the 丁 component, but not pronounced ding:
打 (da "generic verb", extremely common) 厅 (ting "hall", common) 宁 (ning, used in names, common) 灯 (deng "lamp", common)
I could say that in Russian the sound [о] can be spelled ол as in солнце, but that would be bullshit. Russian is a largely phonetic language, it's just that consonant clusters get simplified in pronunciation.
Funny how half of your list are also French words
Since you mention the /eɪ/ diphthong, in French it can be spelled é, ée, et, ed, er, ai, and many others. What is making the French spelling harder, I think, is that many letters are not pronounced, and some words have the same pronunciation with a different spelling (for example: cou - neck - and coup - hit). I can't think of anything in particular, but it all lies in the fact that many letters are not pronounced. I found this website - in French - where you can have fun testing your French spelling: http://timbresdelorthographe.com/
thought, though, through, tough, trough, plough, and, somewhat questionably, hiccough.
What are the others supposed to be?
I am well aware that Chinese radical phonetic components are not as powerful as a phonetic alphabet. I am impliying no such thing. There are however many characters which carry phonetic information, such as my apparently crude example above. I have found this to be very helpful in remembering pronunciations of characters, even if they are only approximations. HN is a tough crowd.
Further, your experiences with Chinese people are not necessarily the same as mine.
> I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters. [...] These are all pronounced "ding" [...] because they all have that T-like phonetic component.
(emphasis mine)
This is, quite clearly, saying that you can get the pronunciation of an unfamiliar character from its written form. But you can't; that's incredibly dangerous and is nearly guaranteed to backfire within 2-3 guesses. You use the particular example of characters with the phonophore 丁 ding1. Okay. What's the most common character incorporating that component? It's 打, which you seem to have conveniently glossed over, and which, despite using 丁 as the phonophore, is pronounced da3. You also give 顶, which really is pronounced ding(3), but which is backwards like 切, making it fairly problematic to guess which component is hinting at the sound. (For a nice summary of that problem, 致 and 到 are both characters in the same style, with a sound hint and a meaning hint side by side. But for 致 zhi4, the phonophore is the 至 (also zhi4) on the left, and for 到 dao4 the phonophore is the 刀 dao1 (in a special form) on the right; the 至 component is telling you the meaning. It's much more common to have the phonophore on the right.)
I agree that the structure of the characters, such as it is, can be very helpful in remembering how to pronounce them. But that doesn't speak to reading unfamiliar characters in any way. Some components are quite prolific as phonophores: 交 jiao, 方 fang, and 青 qing come to mind. You're not advised to assume that a character incorporating them is pronounced jiao （校，效，咬）, fang (旁), or qing (精，猜 [cai1!]), though.
Spelling of French is based on the pronunciation of Old French (from ~900 years ago!) and sometimes mixed with spelling based on the original Latin word from which the modern French word derives (from ~2000 years ago).
AFAIK modern Greek orthography is not that bad, if you disregard the madness that polytonic script (which is solely based on how Greek was spoken/written in Antiquity) was used until the 80s.
I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like).
But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun!
So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier.
Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word.
"Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar".
I felt like the king of the world. :-)
I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/...
And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed.
The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
So my advice as a native speaker is: speak slowly and clearly. Speak as it is written. And good luck.
Heh, I have the opposite problem: I tend to mumble when speaking English (I'm a native Russian speaker). Wanna trade?
Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced? Not to mention the phonological rules that must be memorised, like how the ending of words are always devoiced (giving us fun conflicting transliterations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonoff%27s_theorem ).
To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness. I've found Hungarian spelling to be more regular, for example.
You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.
> To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness.
It does, but again you can pronounce all words letter for letter, and although it may sound a bit strange it'll be valid Russian.
Well technically English has no rules mandating anything, since there is no central institute or authority for the language. Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.
Practically, rules that people 50 years ago would never break are routinely ignored now, there are a bunch of things that are grammatically correct but you wouldn't ever say, etc... If something is done one way practically all the time, it might as well be a "rule", whether it officially is or not. Makes no difference to the person who has to learn it.
One implicit rule of Russian is that if you pronounce each word phonetically, it is never wrong (unless you put the stress wrong).
And indeed, when publicly speaking or announcing via speakers in e.g. airport, words are pronounced almost phonetically.
Compare that to English where pronouncing phonetically is impossible and also rather undesirable.
But that doesn't mean that the rules for English orthography aren't insane. There are very few English sentences that can be read by sounding out letter after letter individually (no matter what sound you choose as the basis for each letter.)
The first step in trying to pronounce an English word is to subconsciously guess its language of origin.
I'm quite glad that the Chinese of the late 19th/early 20th century often took the Japanese approach of coining semantically meaningful neologisms, rather than trying to transliterate everything.
电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television
电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie
电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer
Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be:
火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train
Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.
Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words.
Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me.
Edit: typo.
For example, in the US military, there are a lot of concepts that are clumsy to say - for example, it's pretty silly to refer to the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization Program seventy times when you're talking about why you need to change a safety protocol, so you just refer to it as the NATOPS. All of these concepts get abbreviated - Physical Fitness Test becomes PFT, Non-Judicial Punishment becomes NJP, Then people turn these into verbs, (Bill got NJP'd yesterday) and those get abbreviated as well, and pretty soon you end up with a totally new language that no one else can understand. I told this story to my girlfriend without even knowing that I was doing it:
"[Name] got caught pencil-whipping a PM on the radar. Top wanted to fix him with "EMI," but the OIC wanted him to burn, so it went to the CO for NJP. The CO is a pilot, so he maxed him out - took his pay, 45/45, reduction to PFC. Then, the SMaj told him he looked fat, so he got sent over to the S3 to weigh in. He's over, and he didn't tape out, so now he's on BCP, too! He's gonna get adsep'd if he keeps going the way he is."
My girlfriend started laughing at me, told me to repeat it, and laughed again. I realized that I was basically speaking another language, and then quickly realized that a bunch of the things I was talking about were alien to her anyway! This 90-second story became a thirty-minute discussion of what exactly "taping out" is, why Extra Military Instruction is a sarcastic term for "told to weed the desert for twelve hours," and what's so bad about the Body Composition Program. All of these concepts have been put into my brain from years of living with them, and describing them to someone else is often really difficult.
The tech world does the exact same thing. So does medicine, laboratory science, theater, band... We all have our own languages, created by common experiences and a need to communicate them to other people.
Compound words in Chinese is something like that. But the good news is: each character in Chinese has its own meaning. So you can sort of guess what's the meaning of words if you know the meaning(s) of the characters.
However, except those compound words, there are lot of common expressions, which we call them 成语, which uses historical stories, poetries and you may never know what people are talking about if they use such expressions (people use them a lot and it is considered as a sign of higher education if they can use those expressions correctly and frequently.)
"Television" to borrow from the list above is a literal word in English ... if you happen to know Latin, as it's comprised of the words for "far" or "distant" and "seeing". The German (one of those pesky literal languages I had in mind) is "Ferhnsehen", combining the words for "distant" and "seeing". I remember hearing the word "Mehrheit" in a German broadcast, not knowing it, but thinking "Hrm.... 'moreness' -- that probably means "majority" or something like that. It does.
"Movie" is a shortening of "moving picture". Earlier in the technology development path were shadow lanterns and similar slide or silhouette projectors.
"Computers" (a term transferred from those who computed to the machines they used" are also know as "electronic brains" or "thinking machines".
Trains were often called "iron horses", a term sometimes applied to motorcycles (motor + bicycle -> two wheels) today.
The literalness of English is obscured by the many different language roots and influences from which its words are derived: Old German, Celtic, Norse, French, Latin, Greek....
Another example which I found fascinating was the contribution of Arabic to Spanish. The Alhambra comes from the Arabic "Al Hambra", or "the red", for the read clay of the region. From a time when the Arabic Moors controlled much of present-day Spain.
Another fascinating bit of linguistic lore I only learned recently: the Basque language, unrelated to any others in Europe, may be a relic of the Cro-Magnon people. This was an earlier race of humans who occupied parts of Europe and North Africa ~40,000 years ago. Further linguistic analysis (and genetics) have shown relationships with language fragments in North Africa:
http://www.atlantisquest.com/Linguistics.html
Generally, modern Cro-Magnon people can be found in certain parts of Western Europe, North Africa and some of the Atlantic Islands today. Physical anthropologists agree that Cro-Magnon is represented in modern times by the Berber and Tuareg peoples of North Africa, the all but extinct Guanches of the Canary Isles, the Basques of northern Spain, the Aquitanians living in the Dordogne Valley and the Bretons of Brittany; and until lately, those living on the Isle d'Oleron. (Howells, 1967; Lundman, 1977; Hiernaux, 1975, et al.)—this indicated by obviously Cro-Magnoid skulls.
There are other cases of language showing the dispersal and/or subjugation of tribes elsewhere: Jared Diamond includes linguistic evidence showing the sweep of tribes through Africa, and later of words introduced via colonization. Pre-Han populations in China and Taiwan leave traces through language, as do the Roma people, who migrated from present-day India to southeaster Europe.
And while the structure of an airport terminal isn't quite the same as a set of finger quays for a port, there's a certain similarity between the two structures. Both are interfaces, designed for craft to approach closely and transfer cargos to/from the port. They're characterized by a highly crenelated boundary to allow for maximal surface area and transfer region.
It could as well have been proculvision or teleopsis, or why not, proculopsis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Words_...
Incidentally, my tiptoe-around-this-when-in-Japan-because-it-incenses-nationalists opinion as a linguist is that modern Japanese incorporates by reference large portions of English. "Happy" is, for example, a word in modern Japanese. Not the transliteration -- though that is a word, too -- but "happy", itself, written exactly like that. "Happy" is comprehensible to substantially all speakers of the language and appears in many document corpora so frequently that it cannot be excluded from the Japanese language by any rational criterion. There's another few thousand words which superficially resemble English in modern Japanese. (There are also, of course, minimally a few dozen Japanese loanwords in English.)
Historically, the Japanese people have been very willing to borrow words from other languages.
And yes, you can write "pure" yamatokotoba if you try hard enough (see eg. Shinto prayers), but the end result is as contrived as trying to write English without Latin, Greek or French loans.
"If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) "
Ha, German people told me the same thing about German when I was in Germany. Guess it depends who you ask. Grammatically, I think Mandarin is pretty simple. Pronouncing it and writing it is another story. Grammatically, I think Japanese is tougher than Chinese, writing is just as hard when using Chinese characters (maybe harder, because many kanji have different, dissimilar readings), but easier when using the kana, and the pronunciation is easy as can be. On another tangent, having sampled various metropolises, I think NY is actually very livable.
English, my native language, has plenty of bonkers exceptions.
I think many people forget that when talking about how the newest generation mistreat their language, or whether foreigner's mistakes can be understood.
heck, sometimes it's funny when a native speaker tells me that I speak X very well (I don't), just because I use some prescriptive form correctly.
Sure, there are radicals. Don't count on them to tell you anything remotely useful. Sure, some characters do tell a proper story with their radicals, but it's laughable to count on them to tell you anything.
In particular, it hits on the two biggest barriers to learning Chinese that I've noticed in my recent experience—the writing system, and the linguistic and cultural distance between the East and West. What it doesn't talk about is how, these days, things are much easier, especially with today's technology.
At about the same time I started learning Chinese, I finally bought myself a modern smartphone, and I've been thoroughly impressed at the features it has for Chinese. Using the phone's built-in pinyin keyboard, I don't have to remember how to draw out a character—I just need to know how to write the pinyin (which is a phonetic romanization of the character), and how to recognize it well enough to pick it out of a list. No more problems with writing notes. Using the drawing input mode, where I actually draw out the character on the touchscreen, renders his complaints about dictionary lookup moot, since I can just sketch the character and feed it into an online dictionary. Hell, recently I discovered the iPhone actually has voice recognition for Mandarin—if I know how to say a word but not write it, I can look up the written character by just saying it in a sentence into the microphone. And if I have the opposite problem, where I know the character but not the pronunciation, I just feed it into MDBG [3] or even Google Translate—Google's translations are not very accurate, but it'll give me the phonetic pinyin and let me listen to the Chinese text-to-speech as well.
And the issues with linguistic and cultural distance? That's harder to get around—you still have to make an effort to pick that stuff up. But these days, you have the internet. You might not know what something means, but you have at your fingertips a repository of all human knowledge and culture, from all around the world. For example: the audiobooks I've been learning from had a note about how you should never give a Chinese man a green hat, since that may imply you're sleeping with his wife. It didn't elaborate on that at all, but a quick Google search later and I found a blog post that explains (in English, no less) how that saying has its origins in an old folk tale.[0]
It's definitely harder than learning practically any other language. Tones can be tricky to get used to, learning the writing system at the same time is like learning two languages at once, one spoken, one written, and an unfamiliar character can be a showstopper for comprehension if you don't have a smartphone or dictionary handy. But it's doable, and some things in the language are actually easier than in Western languages—the grammar, for example, is much simpler, and you don't have to worry about conjugations, or even verb tense as much. Through a combination of Pimsleur audiobooks [1] that I checked out of the library for spoken Mandarin, Memrise [2] spaced repetition software for learning vocabulary and characters, MDBG [3] for looking up translations, and Google Translate for other, random stuff, I've been able to learn pretty well even with the limited time I spare to it. I'm not quite at the level where I can be conversational yet, but I can understand and speak enough that I feel I'd be able to stumble my way around adequately were I to travel to Shanghai tomorrow.
[0] If you're curious: http://an-american-family.blogspot.ca/2010/04/dont-wear-gree...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Mandarin-Pimsleur-Language-Pro... — They're expensive to buy, but definitely worth it if you can get it from your local library. Highly recommended.
I'm from Peking University and I don't really know "how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 'to sneeze'" either. I think it's a general problem in the era of computer and internet, as people input Chinese with pinyin, not with pen and ink. It's going to be interesting to see how Chinese evolve with modern technology.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#B...
Said differently: why do we keep writing English like this, instead of using a phonetic alphabet? Same reason.
In fact, typing this on a pinyin keyboard, I can see why this is the case
Literally, "神" doesn't mean "God", "God" in Chinese is "上帝".
I'm a native Chinese.
On the other hand, IMHO, just IMHO, "God" being translated into Chinese(Cantonese) as "神" is not thoughtful as it introduces confusion.
That is impressive. I took two years of Chinese in college and did not get anywhere close to that ability. How many hours a day did you practice Chinese during that 10 months?
This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473
Brendan O'Kane, a translator, said it pretty well: learning Chinese use to be a vocation, something you'd do for your entire life. That's no longer true, which is a good thing.
It's easier to learn a language that uses a latin alphabet of course, but chinese has almost no grammar, it's so easy to build sentences in the language!
I don't think it's fair to say that chinese is a difficult language to learn when compared to other languages.
But yeah now we have pleco, nciku, sergemelnyks, mgdb...
I do like the simplicity of the grammar, no conjugating, no adj/verb agreement, just naked words. But the simplicity it is compensated for with a variety of grammatical constructions: 要...了, 是...的, 挺...的, etc. (Simple grammar is summarized in the above-mentioned dictionary :)
There are definitely huge differences between learning now and before the advent of smart phones (OCR, handwriting input, pop-up dictionaries). The number of free resources available online is also incredible! I try to contribute and write articles about learning Chinese (thanks for the mention) on http://www.hackingchinese.com
I've also started working on a book. I'll give anyone from HN 10% off once the book is released, just mention HN in the comment when you sign up: http://www.hackingchinese.com/about/hacking-chinese-book-pro...
I think learning Chinese has been interesting at all levels, but for completely different reasons. In the beginning, I thought it was exotic and a bit cool, on the intermediate level, I found it fascinating to be able to start actually communicating with people and on the advanced level I've found that mastering Chinese really is a lifetime project. Naturally, I spend more and more time teaching and writing about Chinese, but I have a lot to learn myself and keep studying as much as I can.
English has the massively unfair advantage of being culturally dominant in the western world. As a Frenchman, once I became good at English, it was dead easy to maintain it. All I had to do was to keep doing what I had been doing since I was five: watching Hollywood movies (but not dubbed anymore), reading sci-fi books (but not translated anymore), and so on. The maintenance gets taken care of naturally.
Now, take German: at the end of high school, I was completely fluent in German. But now, I couldn't say two words to save my life. That's because after high school, I didn't maintain it, and it rot away.
With Chinese, in addition to learning new characters, I had to spend an ever increasing amount of time every day just to avoid forgetting the ones I had already learnt. Unlike American culture, I have no particular interest in Chinese culture, so the upkeep had to be paid entirely through sheer, conscious effort.
Living in China alleviates part of this effort, but after watching all the issues China is plagued with get worse rather than better over the past 5 years, I don't want to live there long-term anymore. So I decided to just drop Chinese. Thinking back on this decision makes me extremely sad, but the truth is there are many things I'd rather do with my time rather than keep paying the Chinese upkeep.
I could just drop the characters and focus on speaking and listening instead, but ugh, just the idea of being illiterate grosses me out, even in a foreign language. It's irrational, but I can't help it. After traveling to Taiwan - which is awesome btw - I even started learning the traditional writing of every character I knew. To be fair, traditional isn't that difficult, but that wasn't making things easier either. Oh well...
I periodically put in effort to slog through classical Chinese texts and always have to look things up. That's OK.
Yes, the mainland issues are becoming bad. I have been moving to smaller / more natural places to compensate, and have been spending time elsewhere as well: it's still pretty comfy here in Yunnan though. Dawn now... sound of birds, tasty breakfast, electric scooters, clean air, mountains to climb, lakes to swim.
A few times I've tried to study German, Esperanto, Polish and while I like some aspects of those languages I never had the incentive to keep it up.
just the idea of being illiterate grosses me out
Nowadays, there are times when I'm reading a chinese passage and I have no idea how to pronounce half the words, yet I understand perfectly what they all mean.
I don't know what you'd call that.
It probably could have been resolved with superscript numbers and a strictly controlled dictionary that mapped each number to a specific dictionary definition for a homophone. But that's not what happened and instead we ended up with Simplified Chinese which is still among the most complex written languages ever created.
I believe it's still used in some dictionaries as a pronunciation guide however.
I can't speak for Chinese, but for Korean there's a large number of Chinese loan words, except spoken Korean doesn't have tones and it does introduce a number of comprehension issues when context is ambiguous and the different words are written with the same Hangul. This wasn't really an issue in the past as Korean used the Chinese system until Hangul started becoming more commonplace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/zhuyin.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters
http://hunjang.blogspot.com/2005/04/koreans-reading-comprehe...
Now though Pinyin is the international standard, and is how mainland schools teach pronunciation.
Taiwanese still uses Zhuyin, but in recent years the government has adopted Pinyin for street and city naming. (I'm not sure if schools are still teaching zhuyin, but friends in their 20s don't know pinyin).
Zhuyin has the nice aspect of properly representing the spoken language and isn't hard to learn, probably a couple weeks of an hour or two a day and you'll be able to pronounce most things.
I've recently switched to using Pinyin for computer input because Zhuyin has a larger alphabet compared to Pinyin, and the Zhuyin keyboard on iOS has smaller keys to fit more characters in the same space, making it much harder to type with. The Pinyin keyboard is essentially an English keyboard that spits out Chinese.
It's not known if Hangul influenced the dropping of tones from the spoken language or not, but around the 1500s and into the 1600s tones started being omitted in written Hangul (probably to make it faster to write, like dropping vowel diacritics from Arabic). Hangul also lost some letters and there's been some vowel shift with two different vowels (애 and 에) nearly merging today.
Like in Japanese, it appears the Korean tone system was replaced with a length system to help identify homophones, which lasted until very recently. My understanding is it's still formerly part of the language (and is taught in grade school with this rule), but most Koreans don't really use it anymore.
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2014/01/tonal-vestige-in-kore...
I think today you still hear vestiges of tone in Spoken Korean but it's more used as part of the phrasing and is distinct from statement/question tone changes like in English. You can hear it in longer conversational Korean like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMnp3efz6s4
FWIW, I've never bothered to learn Japanese pitch accent properly. I'm sure that gives me a foreign accent, but in 10 years I can't recall a single instance of being misunderstood due to pitch accent. Context takes precedence over pitch accent.
A better way to think about it in English are homonyms, in Korean there's pretty much a 1:1 mapping between pronunciation and spelling so all homophones are pretty much homonyms. In English we can get clever and use different spellings to determine the difference.
So let's assume we can't do that in English and spelling is entirely unambiguous (like in Korean) -- both the words 'Aisle' and 'Isle' are spelled 'Ile'.
So the sentence "she walked down the ile" is now ambiguous. I don't know if she was walking down an island or down the aisle of the bus or what. Now magnify this to 20 or 30% of you language so that sentences like "I bought a car" get confused with "I bought a tea" (both are 차 'cha').
Or "can you walk on the leg?" vs. "can you walk on the bridge?" 다리 'da-li'
or "I have a bag of grass." vs. "I have a bag of glue." 풀 'pul'
It's one of the reasons Korean<->English Machine Translation is so dreadful.
Well, there's some degree of such a problem, but in general they aren't such a big deal.
Think of it this way: if a sentence can have two different meanings based on different Hanja (Chinese characters), then they will be ambiguous when spoken. Obviously, a language cannot function if a lot of sentences are ambiguous. Therefore, when ambiguities arise, native speakers invariably figure out some way of suppressing the ambiguity. (A commonly confused word may lose its position to another similar word with distinct sound. An additional word (say, an auxiliary verb) may be used to disambiguate the context, and given enough time, may even become a grammatical suffix. Or people may just decide "what the hell" and just borrow an English word.)
For example, your example of "I bought a cha" might normally be expressed like this in modern colloquial Korean:
나 차 좀 샀어. na cha jom sasseo. I bought a little cha. (This clearly implies "tea": how would you buy a little "car"?)
나 새 차 샀어. na sae cha sasseo. I bought a new cha (= car). (This is somewhat hard to explain, but it implies that the speaker bought something brand new. It would be a rather odd expression to use on teabags.)
Or even more idiomatically: 나 새 차 뽑았어. na sae cha ppobasseo. I "picked up" a new car. (The verb "ppop-da", literally "to pick up", is a colloquial expression for buying something expensive or worth bragging about.)
In fact, English itself is quite prone to ambiguity (although at a different level): famously, "time flies like an arrow" can be parsed in at least five different ways. Although this is a made-up example, I've seen many English learners struggle to understand complex sentences in, say, New York Times, because pretty much every English word can be a verb or a noun at the same time. Of course, all these sentences are perfectly clear to a native English speaker.
Ambiguity can be great as well, lots of poetry, clever puns and jokes rely on ambiguity of specific words to add multiple layers of meaning.
http://api.ning.com/files/iINqnIBAPQtK2AiQcRXTrRTfMH51FKVu6Y...
(I do think some amount of Hanja education helps learning more Korean words, but using them in everyday documents is another matter.)
Some newspapers banished Hanja entirely in 1988, when many old-generation scholars decried the sorry state of Hanja education and the impending downfall of the Korean culture.
That didn't happen, and one by one, those newspapers that ran the op-eds of worried scholars followed suit, a process hastened by the introduction of the internet. (Writing Chinese characters with a keyboard isn't really an easy process. Especially when you're speaking Korean: you type Korean first and then have to convert each word to Chinese, so why bother?)
Nowadays, Korean culture is just as strong as before, Korean dramas are popular in China, and many official documents are arguably much easier to understand than in the 80s, partly thanks to the efforts to banish esoteric jargons that nobody could understand without writing in Hanja (and only poorly understood even when written in Hanja: think about it, you can't understand what a telephone is even if you know the Ancient Greek words for "far" and "voice". You could only have a vague guess.)
On top of that, many of these "esoteric jargons" were direct import from written Japanese words during the colonization period, so they were never a proper Korean word outside a small group of people.
I remember back even in the mid to late 90s seeing Hanja in the local Korean newspapers, but these days they seem pretty much absent. My wife (who has a pretty good memory for Hanja) laments the inability to figure out homophones sometimes though.
In the North, my understanding is that Hanja has effectively been eliminated for quite a while and things written in the North are pretty much 100% Hangul (as well as some Korean original neologisms to get rid of Japanese and English loan words).
I'd maybe argue that the use of Chinese characters in Japanese allows me to read much faster than if all writing were in Hiragana, particularly since people tend to identify words more by their shape, but Hangul does this quite well on its own, so I think maybe there's not as strong of a need for it in Korean.
On the other hand, Korean has a relatively large number of syllables (so less ambiguity), and modern Korean spelling system is highly morphophonemic (which is a fancy way of saying "words that sound the same in a form may still be written differently, depending on how they sound in other forms"), which also helps a bit.
For example, the words 낫 (scythe) 낮 (day) 낯 (face) all sound the same when in isolation (or when followed by a consonant), but sound different when followed by a vowel.
Pinyin never took root in local schools and the preexisting romanization systems (Yale, Wade-Giles, etc.) are confusing and contradictory and inconsistently used. Look up the history of "Peking" or "T'aipei" to get some insights into this.
You still see Bopomofo on computer keyboards in Taiwan, and it is a popular input system on mobile phones. I learned how to read it 20 years ago, but pinyin is so much easier, even without the tone marks.
When it comes to the writing system, a Chinese character can have one pronunciation (two in very rare exceptions.) A Japanese character can have ten takes on how to pronounce the Chinese reading (onyomi), and be hammered into another ten Japanese-native words and verbs (kunyomi), and six ways they can be pronounced in names that your IME will refuse to ever recognize (nanori). The problem of not knowing how to pronounce what you are reading is made far worse in Japanese. With the one nice exception that material designed for young children sometimes have the syllables written above the characters for reference (furigana.)
Next up you have the SOV writing style instead of SVO. So unless you enjoy thinking and speaking like Yoda, you get to flip entire sentences in your head. In real-time.
And then you have particles that can mean a hundred different things based on context. Even some native speakers tend to have no idea when to use 'wa' or 'ga', it just becomes instinctual after a lifetime of language use.
Next, there's the verb conjugations. "They're simple, there's only one polite form, a handful of plain forms, and the two irregular verb forms!" ... and then they add on about a thousand possible verb endings that imply different meanings (-tai = to want, -takereba = to not want, -zu ni = another negative form like -nai but slightly more polite, etc.) And then you get the fun of stacking them! -saserareru (to be forced to do something) + -zu ni -> -saserarezu. And then you can extend that to be in the passive form, or to have it occur in the past ... and then you can just outright fuse two verbs together to form new ones! Tsuku + Nukeru -> Tsukinukeru + all your verb endings above = aneurysm to decipher in real-time conversation.
Then you have the polite language system (keigo, or alternate ways to say just about everything based on who you are talking to) where you have to practice for years before you won't either sound like a school girl or offend someone.
There are other hard parts (regional dialects, classical forms, synonyms, etc), but since Chinese shares them, I omit them here.
The big red herring is the two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Those are very easy. But they do become a nightmare from hell when you are faced with a script that has no kanji at all (like older video games.) The synonym problem, on a scale of 1 to 10, goes from a 12 to a 50.
When I look at Chinese ... the biggest negative it has over Japanese, is that it's intensely more difficult in spoken form than Japanese. It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words. And with so many similar sounds, you end up with poems like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...
Despite a lot of differences between how the Chinese and Japanese use the same characters, and in fact characters that only exist in one or the other ... horrifyingly, I find that I understand more when playing a Chinese game than a Japanese game, despite having studied Chinese for less than 1/20th as much as I have studied Japanese.
I am tending to learn Korean and not Chinese because the Chinese logographs are pointlessly making the whole learning process unrewardingly slow.
I like tonal languages but I also like phonetic scripts like Thai or Korean. Why did the PDRC abandon Bopomofo :( It would make it so much more fun to learn Mandarin or other Chinese languages!
Or let's use IPA for every language. Semantics would be lost, and a mandarin text couldn't be understand by a cantonese speaker, but I don't care. (Just kidding)
There are exceptions though...
The only major downside I see to Korean is that it joins only Japanese and Mongolian in being an SOV language. "As for the store, father regarding, milk buy to went." >_<
But learning to hear and speak the various tones has been a real struggle. Even now I still have a hard time picking them out and carefully enunciating them. It doesn't help that there's a huge amount of regional variation in pronunciation and vocabulary. I've had to work hard to unlearn some habits from English, particularly raising my tone slightly at the end of sentences.
Fun times.
- Akai. Red.
- Akakatta. [It was] red.
- Akakakunakattara. [If it had not been] red.
- How was your lunch? (Hirugohan dou deshita?)
- It is delicioused! (Oishikatta desu!)
Glad you said this, so I can stop pounding my head over it. Just today I was thinking "doko wa kami desu ka? wait, no, doko ga kami desu ka... doko wa... doko ga... whatever."
Which kami I was thinking about is for me to know and you to guess incorrectly.
> Which kami I was thinking about is for me to know and you to guess incorrectly.
Well, if you used the kanji then we wouldn't have to guess ;)
It was a trick: kami was used as a portmanteau of KAeru (frog) and MIso, so in this case, kami = frog-flavored miso soup :P
And this is why I won't even say a single word of Japanese when I go the local Japanese restaurant (and yes, they definitely speak it as I can hear them talking to each other and their Japanese patrons.)
That isn't all that exceptional, if you measure by frequency of encountering multiple pronunciations; 的 de/di, 地 de/di, 长 zhang/chang, 重 zhong/chong, and 行 xing/hang are all quite common in both pronunciations. However, as obnoxious as chinese script is, it's still a syllabary -- you can read it (as in, know what sounds the characters make) perfectly well for the most part without knowing what anything means. I have essentially no knowledge or experience of Japanese, but I am given to understand that it's roughly the norm for the sound of a character to be determined by context rather than by which character it is.
> The big red herring is the two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Those are very easy. But they do become a nightmare from hell when you are faced with a script that has no kanji at all (like older video games.) The synonym problem, on a scale of 1 to 10, goes from a 12 to a 50.
People use this as an objection to spelling reform for Chinese too. How do you handle the synonym problem in speech? No matter how much trouble synonyms give you, kanji will never repay the time you had to invest in learning them (given a hypothetical world where you can choose to read anything in kana).
> When I look at Chinese ... the biggest negative it has over Japanese, is that it's intensely more difficult in spoken form than Japanese. It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words.
Can, but if you have a decent grasp of the language and butcher the tones, nobody will misunderstand, for the same reason that they often don't bother to mark tones in pinyin.
> And with so many similar sounds, you end up with poems like this
That poem was written specifically for a political battle, to make the argument that characters shouldn't be reformed. There are no actual poems like that; notably, that poem, when read aloud, is not intelligible Chinese. So all it's really doing is showing that Chinese characters can indicate a superset of the language.
Ah, see I only know around 30 readings for Chinese characters (since I don't trust any Japanese onyomi at all.) Those are indeed some common ones to have two.
But let me show you how horrifying Japanese can be: 生 can be read as セイ, ショウ, い.きる, い.かす, い.ける, う.まれる, う.まれ, うまれ, う.む, お.う, は.える, は.やす, き, なま, なま-, な.る, な.す, む.す, -う, いき, いく, いけ, うぶ, うまい, え, おい, ぎゅう, くるみ, ごせ, さ, じょう, すぎ, そ, そう, ちる, なば, にう, にゅう, ふ, み, もう, よい, りゅう -- and there's more, if you count nanori. 生糸 is kii-to (silk thread), 生絹 is su(tsu)-shi -> suzushi (silk product), 生理 is sei-ri (physiology), 生温い is nama-nuru-i (lukewarm), 生き方 is i-ki-kata (way of life), 生得 is shou-toku (inherit), on and on. So now try and guess how to read 芝生 (lawn) ... give up? shiba-fu, of course.
> How do you handle the synonym problem in speech? No matter how much trouble synonyms give you, kanji will never repay the time you had to invest in learning them
I definitely get what you're saying here. I'm not defending hanzi/kanji, but I think it helps a lot that speech is usually in person. And in modern times. On a Game Boy game, it's on a 160x144 screen with four colors, and the king is asking you to "Go find <XYZ>", where XYZ can mean 20 different things, and could be any of those in this fantasy world. If your boss at work asked you to find XYZ, you could immediately rule out the fishing net, the broadsword, and the carburetor as being unlikely items your boss would ask you for. It's probably either the pen or the sign. Worst case if you can't guess, you can ask him which one he means, "the writing XYZ (pen) or the shop XYZ (sign)?" I definitely enjoy when the kanji in written form rules out synonyms for me, even if I can't see kanji in speech.
The usual pro-kanji argument, which I do believe holds up a bit, is that it makes reading a lot faster, and allows you to condense a lot more text into the same visual area. Great for old video games and comics, at least. The downside to me as a learner is that I find myself saying the kanji in their English meaning because I don't remember the proper pronunciation, but know what that kanji by itself means.
But yeah, it would certainly be a lot more approachable to have the languages written in pinyin or hiragana+katakana, so long as they used spaces between words (and sadly, written Japanese without kanji do not.) And technically, with digital works, you can certainly transform text like that. There are some nice Firefox plugins where you can hover over Chinese characters to see their readings.
> That poem was written specifically for a political battle
Oh, that's unfortunate. I thought they were just being silly, like English alliterations where every first letter in a sentence starts with 'A' or whatever.
I went looking for the place I originally learned about it, and didn't find it. Wikipedia has some things to say about it, but I'm not sure how trustworthy it is. :/
Specifically, WP states that the poem was written to make the political point that ancient Chinese shouldn't be transcribed but should be written in characters forever. It makes the extremely reasonable argument that the poem's author was in fact backing a scheme to romanize modern Mandarin. However, it also says that the poem is written in ancient Chinese, which doesn't seem right to me. In written form, this poem is perfectly intelligible to modern Chinese people, whereas actual classical poems are just as intelligible as a passage from Beowulf would be to you (I'm assuming you're not trained in Old English). Then again, the only thing I know about ancient Chinese (that 是 is a demonstrative meaning "this") does appear to be true within the poem.
Regardless of the author's motivations, it's still a cool piece of text. It's been quite popular with the Chinese people I've shown it to; they especially like to try to read it aloud (although I've never heard anyone actually get through the whole thing).
I must say that I find Chinese to be refreshingly "easy". There is so little grammar and rules that I have fallen in love with the language from day 1. Just learn your words and draw your characters and you'll be fine.
Maybe it is because I'm Dutch and Dutch is known for being one of the hardest languages to learn? I don't really like Dutch actually. Also, I've spend a lot of time learning German, which isn't fun at all.
Or maybe I've just found the right teacher.
The other, other part is speaking idiomatically. There are a ton of idioms.
Don't forget about measure words, either. :)
I think you can make yourself understood easily enough, as I could chat a bit with Chinese coworkers or waitresses. But I suspect to truly master it, it's a lot harder than a language (e.g.) with an alphabet.
What are the difficulties in the Dutch language? I can read a fair bit of Dutch knowing German and English and it seems reasonably straightforward to me, but I am definitely not super familiar with it (which is why I ask).
When I was learning German I found it ridiculously hard - but it only took me about 5 months to become reasonably fluent. In the end I realized it was just that things were _different_, not especially more difficult - and that certain things were actually much easier (e.g. verb conjugations, spelling, pronunciation, more consistent grammar rules).
True that. I believe it's because you study your native language at much greater detail / more advanced less common issues. While for foreign languages, you usually just study common issues, the every day kind of things. That gives an impression that it's extremely hard because of all the edge cases and etc.
My understanding is that Dutch is actually one of the easiest languages for native English speakers to learn.
Truth be told, I've found learning Chinese to be incredibly fun and exciting. My plan is to take some one-on-one Internet-based tutorials starting in the coming months; the fact that I'll be in China on business three times in the coming eight months just boosts my interest. I've been there twice before, and knowing some Mandarin was VERY useful.
I've been amazed by how simple the basic grammar is; on that part, Chinese seems easier than the other languages I've learned. (I'm a native English speaker, and have fluent Hebrew and took Spanish for a number of years in school.)
The tones do seem to be a problem; I understand the ideas behind them, but the sounds do see fairly subtle to me. I'll keep pushing ahead, though, and hope to improve the sounds I make and those I can understand.
For me, this article seemed spot-on in only one area, namely the lack of cognates. In both Hebrew and Spanish, there are enough words that overlap, particularly for modern terms, that you can sorta kinda figure some things out. I've been amazed by how completely, bafflingly, absurdly different everything is in Chinese. Then again, that's part of the fun for me; every word or phrase I learn, I feel I'm cracking a secret code.
I'm also going to agree with those who say that English is not particularly easy, at least when it comes the grammar and pronunciation. Yes, having an alphabet certainly helps, but my children took quite a while to learn all of the complex rules for English reading, and I'm convinced that in some cases, the only solution is to read the whole word, rather than sound it out.
I'd definitely recommend learning Mandarin, both for the fun and the utility. And people in China are completely amazed and impressed that you're trying to learn their language, which is good for scoring some political points, as well!
i find this difficult to believe. how can you tell when someone is asking you a question when speaking to you in casual conversation?
EDIT: I should also point out that asking a question does not require the shift in tone for it to be understood as a question, e.g., saying 'What are we doing next?' without any change in tone is perfectly fine.
má http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/2.mp3
vs.
"Bring me the mǎ"
mǎ http://mandarin.about.com/library/audio/tones/3.mp3
One will get you some hemp, the other a horse.
If the word was from a language written in Latin script it often kept its original spelling even when that was contrary to what passes for English orthography. It's a big mess, but (usually) it works out.
That word itself is a mongrel of a Latin root, a Latin numeric prefix, and an English adjective-forming suffix. You still knew what I meant by it. I have also tried reading news articles in different languages, or understanding what is going on in a Univision or Telemundo Spanish-language program. It is much easier than one might think.
I have been able to decipher Italian genealogically-relevant municipal records, written in the most self-indulgent cursive script I have ever seen, because English and Italian have a lot of cognates, and bureaucratic record-keeping is about the same everywhere you go.
Chinese, on the other hand, simply has no entry point. I'm with it right up until the number symbols go from 3 to 4, and then it just goes into alienese and never returns.
It's a messy language.
I'm a native speaker of English and I was unaware there was any difference in pronunciation between these two words. Unless you mean the difference is between those two and 'pick'?
now try piece,peace and piss :)
Piece and peace are also homophones and pronounced identically \ˈpēs\ while piss is pronounced \'pis\.
Apparently you have trouble distinguishing between ē and i sounds but there are only two different sounds in those word triplets, not three.
Each little area of England used to have its own spellings. Heck Shakespeare didn't even spell his own surname consistently! Eventually (1700's IIRC) things started to go national such as dictionaries and newspapers which did start leading to consistency, as well as simplification over a period of about 30 years. However sometimes the consistency came before the simplification. Consequently English has some words from before simplification and most from after. We just see these as exceptions and quirks. Bryson covers this stuff well, and is a very amusing and informative writer. (And there are those who quibble with his content.)
I actually put together an MP3 with sounds from Swedish pop songs and told her "look it all sounds like German 'sch', not like 'ch'".
She disagreed. There's no question, it is definitely more 'ch'...
Chinese uses little words like 呢 to indicate a question. Or you can just use correct Chinese grammar for questions - "He said what" or "Who said that" or "This is how much". Tones are used for emphasis (emphasising the tone emphasises the word), but not for questions.
Edit: Grammar
Just like when the Chinese invented printing back around 1000 AD, but didn't use it much. Only when Europeans invented printing with movable types around 1500 AD did printing start to get used.
But there's "space" between the slots, and the further a pronunciation is from that slot the more recognizable it is as a unique sound that person without that slot can hear.
The problem of course comes when speakers of a language use phonology that sounds close to what you use, but is subtly different and that difference has a crucial meaning, the tones in Chinese for example. Another great one is the vowel length. In English two vowels of the same pronunciation, but different lengths are the same. But in Japanese they can be different. This also happens with consonants, Korean has a "stressed" consonant system that non-Korean speakers literally can't hear because a "k" and a "k" with a stress end up int the same phonological slot. Or an "s" made with your tongue behind you back teeth is a different "s" than one made with your tongue between your teeth.
This also works its way into pronunciation, we train certain muscle groups, from our chest and neck to our face and mouth to pronounce certain sounds certain ways. And learning to use different sounds (even if you can recognize them as different) sometimes is not enough to try mimicking the sound, but to actually retrain your muscle groups to use them like a native speaker would.
You can develop these additional slots and recognize differences with lots and lots of careful practice. But it's painfully and frustratingly hard.
Also note that OP stated that he or she couldn't distinguish between Mandarin tones, not tonal differences in general. This is not difficult to believe, as your ear becomes trained to recognize differences in your native language and ignore slight differences in pronunciation that don't affect the meaning.
It's like the trouble that English speakers have with noun genders in Romance languages, but taken to an extreme.
I can't think of a better equivalent, though. Fiancé and fiancée come close, but most English speakers don't even know that there are different ways to write that for male and female.
As for answering questions with a presumed answer, one of the best things to do is to restate the verb when you answer. "Didn't you agree with him?" "Yes, I agreed with him." This way, it is clear to everyone.
Native English speakers often get confused by this one too. You can respond either yes or no in those situations as long as you specify the one you wanted afterwards.
e.g. "Don't you agree?"
"Yes, I agree" and "No, I agree" would both be acceptable.I've met people with much larger vocabularies than myself, and with better grammar, but whose pronunciation was almost insurmountably poor. Someone like me, who has generally good pronunciation, will get praised by Chinese people as having "amazing" pronunciation (and yes, a certain amount of this is just Chinese people being polite but over the years one learns where one stands on this issue) but my comprehension and vocabulary is far and away from fluent yet I will be viewed as having "better" spoken Chinese... never mind that I can only read at an elementary school level.
No matter how much vocabulary you amass and no matter how perfect your grammar not mastering the tones can completely kill any hope you have of Chinese people understanding you. There's nothing worse than the confused look on someone's face after you say something that you think is perfectly comprehensible, only to discover you (ever so slightly, to your ear) screwed up a key tone... it's like suddenly discovering the brakes on your car don't work.
I took Chinese for a couple years, and while the tones can be annoying for the first few weeks, there's only 4 (or 5) of them. It ain't rocket science. If you can recognize the melodies of songs, then your brain has the necessary parts to recognize tones too. Nobody in any of our beginner Chinese sections ever found the tones "just not doable". Some people would take a few days to get the hang of them, and other people a couple of months, but if more than a billion people in China can do it, you almost certainly can do it too.
(And if you're really having trouble you can always hire a private tutor. Honestly, most people with pronunciation problems in any language, just need some individualized help. A group classroom might not do it, but one-on-one tutoring almost certainly will.)
On the other hand, most people simply don't have the time to memorize the characters and pronunciation. The fact that there are virtually no cognates makes the hurdle to amassing vocabulary simply gigantic, let alone the characters. You say that "anyone, with some work, can memorize the characters", but "some work" in this case is a truly gigantic amount of work.
Re: figuring out whether your tones or speech is correct, try talking to Siri or Google voice search. I tried my French on the French Siri and it was humbling.
I think you understate the difficulty of recognizing and reproducing tones. Quite a few people can't carry a tune to save their life. Even among the majority who passably can, doing so extremely well - aka having "perfect pitch" - is recognized as a rarity.
But secondly, if the entire population of China can do it, then statistically, you're almost guaranteed to be able to do it too. And the tones in Chinese are really very, very simple. They're no different from the way you end a question with your voice moving upwards, or the recognizable "valley girl" pattern. It's the same idea, just applied to single words instead of whole sentences.
The implication here seems to be that the Chinese written word gives hints as to meaning, right? How can that be so, if 10 years of studying isn't enough to read a newspaper? Your claim would imply that reading in Chinese would be easier to pick up (compared to non-character languages), while speaking would be more difficult - one seemingly immediately shown to be false.
Not to mention that a language can both give hints to meaning and have a link between writing and speaking. At the very least, English does - the example closest to hand is that I've never heard the word ethnocentrism before, but I immediately understood it.
That said - great point about possibly overemphasizing the link between spoken and written words. From an English background, that seems like something so obviously important that it hardly bears thinking about, but clearly there could be other important considerations (even if I don't know what they might be).
Edit: To your point regarding English having both connection to meaning and pronunciation - that's definitely true, it's just not as immediately clear/visually identifiable, and not as dense. One could certainly argue that, if native speakers are having serious issues learning pronunciation in a language, then the language makes a poor tradeoff with density there.
At the college I went to, which had a good Chinese department, as far as I could tell, classes were taught entirely by native Chinese professors. I would expect them to teach in a way that works for the language, but as pretty much everyone there had previously learned a Romance language to some degree (very typical of the high schools in the area), I wonder if they brought preconceptions from that experience.
I knew many of the students in the department, and their experience lines up pretty well with what the author explains (they studied intensively for 4 years and could still only read at any reasonable pace from textbook passages/speak passably on certain predefined topics).
My children have been learning Mandarin since age 4-5 (they're now 6-7) at a Chinese school (taught in English other than Mandarin lessons). They also have one-on-one lessons after school.
My wife and I are native English speakers, so we can't help them. There's a big push in our city (spoiler...Chicago) with learning Mandarin, but I see a bunch of high schools introducing the language, like it's Spanish. Nothing against Spanish, per se, but observing the Mandarin language makes me laugh at learning the romantic languages--there are no similarities.
Watching my kids write pinyin and asking me questions about things just blows my mind. So, are any of you non-"Chinese" speaking (Mandarin/Cantonese) people trying to guide your children down this path?
I'm glad it made sure to state that difficulty is relative in language - the Chinese learn their languages just fine afterall.
I don't think tone is as big of a problem as it's made out to be. As a foreiger who studies Mandarin I've found that with enough listening I began to pick out the tones well (although I still can't reproduce them as acurately!).
Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation surrounding Chinese. A good book mentioned in the bibliography is The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.
I don't understand why we don't make people learn foreign languages the same way that children learn native languages. Children spend years learning to speak before they start to learn to read and write. It seems to work well. Perhaps older people need to learn differently, but I'm not convinced.
I have to imagine that learning Chinese would be a lot easier if you learned to speak it reasonably well first, and then started learning the writing system only after attaining some mastery of the spoken language. Instead, you're trying to learn new phonetics and tones and grammar and trying to learn stroke order and radicals and a bunch of other stuff all at the same time.
TL;DR: The author tries to write "Chinese characters are damn weird" in five different ways (items 1,2,3,5,7). OK, I got the point, but a bit less repetition might have been better.
Also, if you want to objectively assess just how difficult the Chinese language is, I guess native Chinese speakers are exactly those people you don't want to ask. After all, Chinese is the native language for them: how can they reliably compare it to any other language which are foreign to them?
Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both. I had memorized roughly a thousand Chinese characters in high school. Sure, it would be nothing compared to what's actually needed to read Chinese, but learning each character isn't much more difficult than learning how to pronounce catastrophe, cooperate, thesaurus, and the likes.
You seem to be implying that you've provided evidence that Chinese is not, in fact, more difficult than English. Or at least that you have reason to believe that. What is that reason? Is it so hard to believe that maybe Chinese is objectively more difficult to learn?
I am ready to be persuaded if there's a convincing argument that Chinese is objectively more difficult. What I was trying to say is that asking Chinese people how hard it is proves nothing. And (I presume) a native English speaker comparing Chinese and European languages doesn't instill a lot of confidence, either. Of course Chinese is harder than French... to an average English speaker.
To be fair I've done a few things wrong (up-front design, no feedback process). However, I still found the general response less then I had hoped for.
I hope there are still a bunch of hackers around that like to solve similar problems. One is certainly https://github.com/nieldlr/Hanzi and that would be something I hacked on if I was coming back to the world.
Almost everything is valid for Japanese of course, sans there are less Chinese characters in contemporary Japanese. However, to complete the picture, you just have to add myriad ways of reading a single Chinese character in Japanese.
Being a foreigner lived in Japan for years, let me sum it up: Chinese writing system, Chinese-style construction of Chinese characters (have fun explaining how not, moon and sun adds up to mean bowel to me as in 腸, or tree + mouth = to be in trouble 困) and words (I haven’t met a person that will think of a log when say them “round and fat” 丸太, I also don’t know how “bad heart” can mean nausea 悪心). As a whole, it’s not beautiful at all, and it is unnecessarily complex.
The complexity also goes for wrong Japanization of the English load-words (it both meaning and spelling: no it’s not shinapsu, it is synapse, and no gurasu and garasu are both the wrong spellings of the same word glass, used to mean different objects). Nihon-shiki romanization is also deeply flawed (I don’t know any language with Roman-based script that would spell shatyou as shachou in English), yet Japanese people are thought Nihon-shiki romanization instead of something that makes more sense such as Hepburn romanization. But these are best to be saved for another discussion.
On a related tangent.
I would very much appreciate if Japanese people could write my name using Romaji instead of some katakana non-sense that doesn’t even sound true. That non-sense became my name in Japan for years, and I was really sick of it. Tell me about being respectful to people then jackass.
And believe it or not, in one rare instance where my name is written in the actual script (my graduation certificate), they wrote it wrong.
It's the same in many other languages. In French, having "mal au cœur" — pain in the heart — can mean that you're nauseous. In Estonian, to "have the heart bad" (using that word order) means the same thing.
However, if you forget about reading/writing and focus on the language itself, it's a delight to learn. Mandarin is highly analytic, parsimonious and systematic.
To indicate that something happened in the past, add "le" to the sentence. Compare that to any Indo-european language. There, you can literally write books about how to express past tense.
It's a mix of common frustrations for Chinese learners and a lot of self-aggrandizement (on the part of both native speakers and successful learners.) It does correctly illustrate differences between (learning) Chinese and Romance languages, though some of the points are out of date.
e.g., I believe that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin has become the only romanisation scheme for teaching Chinese in English
Thankfully, speaking Chinese is slowly becoming "boring." By itself it's no longer enough to make you interesting, and non-"heritage" speakers demonstrating conversational fluency in Chinese has become somewhat normalised. Hopefully within my lifetime, a non-heritage learner will get the same reaction from speaking Chinese as they'll get from speaking Spanish in Texas. Frankly, I find unbearably tedious the folks who still try to parade basic conversational fluency as though it were something magical.
(I currently live in NYC. If I happen by Canal St, I'll run into waiters who can effectively converse in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, English, and some additional family dialect. No one seems very impressed by their skills at language-acquisition, despite being the result of much less formal schooling than we might enjoy...)
Learning Chinese from English is obviously harder than learning Spanish from Italian, but it's easily within what one can accomplish with a little focus and effort.
I did a bachelor's degree in Chinese at a state school with a good programme and good professors but at a school that just isn't particularly well-known for East Asian studies. My classmates were mixed between "heritage students" and students who had no background in any East Asian culture or language. Over the course of four years, many of them were able to achieve very high degrees of professional fluency. It just wasn't a big deal.
Chinese who can speak any one of those languages (Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkein) or some others (like Hunanese, Gan) can easily pick up one of the others by living in one of the places where they're spoken.
(As the joke goes, for some dialects, you just "modulate [the tones] down.")
The Rules (e.g., grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc.)
If you have 0 background you are a blank slate, and like a blank slate, you can absorb whatever the teacher throws at you. Provided you work hard, have natural language ability, etc. etc., this means you'll likely be better at me than grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc. Why? Because my frame of reference is that of a 6 year old speaking elementary Chinese. Whenever I'm uncertain, or whenever my parents are uncertain (i.e., they're not sure I'll understand what they're saying), the default is to regress to this very elementary way of speaking.
The Feelings
On the other hand, if you have 0 background, it will be very difficult to master the tonality to perfection and the nuances of what "sounds right." For example, if you were really pedantic, you'd know that the appropriate pronunciation for the Eight Trigrams is not ba1 gua4 (as is commonly spoken) but ba2 gua4. But... no one uses the rigorously correct way anymore, and it's this sense of what's right that almost seems to be absorbed via osmosis that the person with a background will have a better control of.
The eye can easily, quickly identify a word made of 10 latin letters, so it's easy to make a sentence, although its length will quickly increase, but the amount of possible word is still very high, and very flexible, and very straightforward to pronounce.
Ideogram languages are different because it uses "word element" objects, and then use them together to describe things and create new words. I still wonder if the eye can quickly read a sequence of 2 or more ideograms, but since you need a fairly high number of those ideograms to effectively describe concepts, it's becoming inevitably hard to read something, whereas the latin alphabet is simple enough to already associate letters to form words !
Ideograms are still fascinating because it seems to quickly increase the amount of things you can write with less space, but only if you're really able to read it and memorize it. The important difference is that ideogram languages are much harder to memorize pronunciation.
Overall, I still think ideograms happened to be a form of closed communication, like an obscure way to communicate with peers without your enemy understanding you. I guess that makes sense since Asia's history for war is quite bleaker than the west's.
Diderot and Voltaire wrote Modern French, which is incredibly similar to the French that is spoken nowadays. I doubt a 4th-year French student would breeze as easily through, say, Rabelais' Gargantua, a 16th century text written in ancien français, before the modernization of French. It's so difficult to read even for natives (I've done the experience myself) that there are usually bilingual "Old French" — Modern French editions available for students.
And that's not even speaking about earlier medieval French which wasn't a single language, but a collection of langues d'oïl.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Gargantua/%C3%89dition_Juste,_...
The study of classical texts in general is difficult in any language when we're talking about timespans of centuries or even millenia.
I have for the first few days found some difficulty, but reading has since became relatively easy. Chinese is a contextual language, and contextual cues gives rise to understanding of the word that you don't really know. Sure I have to look up some words/phrases (especially adult ones because they all seem to be slang terms), but it is quite easy to read.
I agree with his other points up to too many romanization processes. There is one: Hanyu Pinyin. Others are old, and should be discarded.
The bit about tonal language has led to some rather hilarious situations where I accidentally sexually propositioned to someone else. However, upon arriving in Luoyang, I realize that Chinese being a tonal language doesn't really matter. Accents exist, and they change the tone of the language. And yet I still could, after a bit of adjusting, get used to them
"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?
"No, he doesn't."
他會說普通話嗎？
他不會。
in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write
"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?
"No, he doesn't."
佢識唔識講廣東話？
佢唔識。
in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
On the whole, I find Chinese grammar fits my preferences (I like languages in which word order is the main element of grammar, and dislike languages like most Indo-European languages with a lot of inflection shown by changes in word endings), I can deal with Chinese pronunciation (but my children find it much more "natural" than I do to use phonological tone to distinguish differing words, a common feature of many languages but not my native language, English), and I just have to suck it up and exert a lot of effort to be literate in Chinese, even with today's computer aids. The Chinese writing system is HARD even for native speakers of Modern Standard Chinese.
English: I go first
Mandarin: 我先走
Cantonese: 我走先
This is the same how spelling contests look ridiculous to me as a Croatian.
see http://lingualbee.blogspot.com.au/2006/08/why-chinese-is-so-... and http://pocketcultures.com/2009/03/23/how-difficult-is-chines...
(First, background: my wife is Chinese, I took a year of formal classes in college, and have subsequently learned by exposure. I can speak and understand a fair amount, enough to survive on my own in Beijing if need be, but I wouldn't consider myself fluent by any means. In particular, I can't read or write worth a damn.)
I think this article would be better if it were titled, "Why written Chinese is so damn hard." Spoken Chinese is actually pretty easy. To the extent that it is hard, it's hard only because it's different. It's hard for the same reason that Japanese or Arabic or Sanskrit are hard. The comparison with French is a bit off, because languages like French where an English speaker can take advantage of vast quantities of shared vocabulary and history are rare. Most languages are hard in this way. So that stuff is really just, "Why learning almost any language is so damn hard." And while that can be interesting, there's no reason to focus on Chinese there.
And in fact, spoken Chinese is relatively easy. The grammar is extremely simple. There are effectively no tenses, and there is no conjugation. Learning French, I spent weeks, possibly months, learning the proper ways to state that an event happened in the past. And while I do consider myself fluent in French, I'm far from perfect here. While I think I get it right most of the time, I really couldn't explain why one case demands the passé composé and another case demands the imparfait. Even knowing which to use, completely learning the conjugation rules for them took quite a bit of effort. By contrast, it takes about five seconds to learn how to say that something occurred in the past in Chinese, assuming you already know 1) how to say that it happened in the present and 2) how to state the time in question. You just stick the time in the right part of the sentence, and bam, it's now in the past. You go from "I eat" to "I yesterday eat". Couldn't be simpler. My Chinese vocabulary still stinks after years of exposure because there are almost no cognates to build on, but the grammar is one of the easiest around.
Written Chinese, on the other hand, is practically a different language. There is little link between the characters on the page and the sound you make to indicate the same words. It's common for people who speak completely mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects to still be able to communicate through writing. Chinese TV is almost universally subtitled for this reason. Lots of people can't understand what the people on TV say, but they can read the subtitles.
Written Chinese is hard. It's the vocabulary problem turned up to 11. It effectively doubles the work needed to learn a word. Worse if you're not good at the sort of visual learning and recognition needed to distinguish between thousands of characters. Unlike the spoken version, where it's only hard for reasons that any language is hard, written Chinese is just inherently hard. Native speakers take longer and require more study to become literate, too.
Because of this, I think you need to treat spoken and written Chinese completely differently when it comes to learning them and the question of the difficulty of learning them. And the fact that this article freely mixes the two is unfortunate because of that, especially since it gives the impression that spoken Chinese is hard to learn, and it really is not.
As a side note, technology is starting to really help out here. You can get apps that are able to do live character recognition using a smartphone's camera, and offer basic translations on the fly. I used one called Waygo during a recent visit to China and it was really helpful. Even if the translation sucks, it'll give you the pronunciation of the characters so you can look them up more easily, or ask somebody what they mean, or whatever.
(My background: 6 months exposure + 2 months of self-taught reading + 6 months of formal studies + 12 further years exposure, 8 in country. Also recently married)
Over the last near decade and a half I have met hundreds of foreign learners of Chinese across the mainland and Taiwan, and the most obvious thing is that it is pointless to learn to read before speaking. Just as children first learn to speak by imitating their parents and guardians, so too must language learners learn to recognize and reproduce the sounds of a new language.
Once that's done and some rarified stem of grammar has been acquired by environment, the absolute joy of making sense of characters in their written form will propel the learner forward with far more speed and ease than a rote-learning non-speaker.
The article whinges about romanzation but Pinyin is great. It's only the stubborn Taiwanese who refuse to use it, as the product of the Communist enemy! For a truly scary alternative, look at what the French did to the Vietnamese language.
Though this point has pretty much been raised, English is hard too - it doesn't follow it's own rules and borrows from so many languages.
The arguments in this article (excepting the ones about the writing system) can be applied to so many languages.
For bonus points, why isn't "gauge" pronounced the same as "gouge"?
Anyone have experience with or know of any good studies on kids learning language in this way? How valuable is it for an American to speak Chinese vs something like Spanish or French?
I suspect that, using this model with Chinese, a child can become conversationally proficient and gain some basic reading comprehension. Whereas, with a more simple language, they may be able to read, write, and speak on the same level as a native-speaker. Looking for evidence to prove me wrong.
Why? I don't really see much use in this unless the sole aim is for your children to become fluent in Chinese. Having an understanding of math, history, and science will be more useful to them in the future than being fluent in Chinese. I don't think Chinese fluency is worth making it more difficult for them to learn the other subjects by having it taught in a language they aren't as familiar with.
For math and science especially, this doesn't really make much sense, as English is the lingua franca of the technical world. My father is a native Chinese speaker and a biologist. I majored in computer engineering and now work as a software engineer. Many of my classmates and coworkers are native Chinese speakers. Even when they speak in Chinese, the technical vocabulary is all English because that is the language they learned the material in.
I think the whole article can be summarized down to just one point: unless you live in China or Taiwan or HK or Macau, you are not going to be fluent in Chinese.
There is no magic in learning Chinese. As I said, I was raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. My teachers taught us single words and compound words. I learned to construct simple sentences like Hello World.
It may be true that you need over three thousands Chinese words (remind you a word is a single word like 海, which means sea, or ocean) to be truly fluent, but honestly I don't think I need more than two hundreds words to understand Chinese. As @msvan has shown, 海军 (navy) is composed of two words sea and army. If you see anything beings with 海, you can quickly assume there is something about sea. You can assume it may even have something to do with color blue.
Sometimes it is funny to see things like this:
海闊天空. Individually, you may read it as SEA, WIDE, SKY, EMPTY. 海闊 describes something wide and broad like the ocean. 天 by itself is sky or divine but you can make it even more explicit or redundant by saying 天空 to point to the sky.
Those four words are often used in this famous quote: "忍一時，風平浪靜。退一步，則海闊天空". Basically "hold on to your emotions and worries to keep the peace; take a step back and you will see the bigger picture." Yes. This kind of old quotes are hard to intrepert even for a native, but this is the art of language. You have to read each word, think of the author's origin, bring in any historical and environment context, and figure out the best interpretation. We do that every day even in America.
Of course, sometimes you can't get away with single word interpretation easily. Take a newspaper headline: 華人當選 (Chinese, person/people, ? , elect/choose). Note how I skip the 3rd one?
當 by itself is ambiguous. In theory it has a "when" and "where" context
當你 means when you
當下 means right now at this moment
當中 means inside or within this
當心 means be careful
當然 means of course
當選 means elected
So you have to know compound words.
Even funnier if you write 當心上人對你徵笑 (when your crush smiles at you). Look at 當心 and 心上人. Where is the "be careful"? It's not there because 心上人 (crush) takes over the compound.
You need to know the compound words. You need to read and talk to people. So you can get away with 200 words, but you need 1000 compound words to be fluent. But this is not something I learn overnight. I pick up Chinese as I grow up.
You forgot Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...
In Mandarin Chinese, there are 4 tones, as the article said, each tone can mean differently. In Cantonese Chinese, there are 9 tones.
Cheers, I'm using that right now. The real teaching power is in apps.
Though if I were to return for more classes, I might try a different city, perhaps Xian. The air quality in Beijing is nasty.
Having said that, below are some resources worth investigating:
Audio courses:
- Pimsleur Mandarin (3 sets of 30 half-hour lessons. Available on CD.)
- ChinesePod.com (short audio lessons based around different topics/tasks. Generous free trial last time I checked.)
- http://popupchinese.com/ (similar to ChinesePod. Worth trying both.)
- Clavis Sinica’s collection of short audio samples: http://clavisinica.com/voices.html
Pronunciation/Pinyin:
You really need to get your pinyin and tone pronunciation down. Just search google for 'learning pinyin' and you will find lots of free resources. There are three things worth trying to master here:
- Pronunciation of each of the four tones (actually five, as there is also a neutral tone)
- Pronunciation of each of the 21 initials (b, p, m, f etc., most of which are the same as English, but some, like x, z, c, zh are very different) and each of the 35 ‘finals’ (like -ong, -uang, -in etc.)
- (later) Some words consist of more than one syllable, and there are some rules for when tones change based on the tone of the following syllable.
Dictionary:
- Pleco for iphone or Android: the free version is a must-have. There are bundles for additional functionality. The two additional functions I use(d) are the full-screen handwriting input (paid on iphone) and the spaced-repetition flashcard functionality (paid). This app is the reason I bought my first iOS device.
- Nciku (online dictionary; search by pinyin or by writing the character)
Reading/writing characters (probably work on some basic oral Chinese before doing this):
- Skritter.com (subscription-based service best used with a mouse or Wacom tablet; doesn’t work well with a laptop touchpad)
- Book: http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Simplified-Cha...
That's a legitimate sentence, and there's only the slightest intonation difference between the different words.
This to me is why Mandarin is hard. Not the writing, not the history of the language and not the 'construction of words'.
It's the extremely subtle differences in tonality which makes it madness for a westerner (Swedish born here) to try and comprehend, and even worse to try and speak.