This article is great fun to read and overall very informative. Yet I had a few gripes about it.
* Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols directly refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term.
The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".
* Writing system not phonetic: Any other European language than English would have formed a much better argument, since English is notorious for its haphazard mapping of mapping phonemes to the alphabet, partly caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch with bare knowledge of English.
One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent. Compare with, say, Greek grammar which has baffling complexity or Lithuanian that still has noun 9 cases! Some exotic native Indian languages have 10-15 noun classes (German has three, which we call gender). In pure writing complexity, some people rate Japanese to be even more complicated (with its three sub systems). Or for an older example, consider Mayan hieroglyphs.
Chinese major who later worked for years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator replying here.
Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial
He didn't say that, because Chinese is chock-full of difficult grammar. Take a look at the page count (847 pages) of the book A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. His book is thorough, but by no means exhaustive. Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (713 pages) is familiar to many English-speaking students of Chinese. It too is far from exhaustive. Many of the mistakes made in speaking standard Chinese by second-language speakers that impair understanding are GRAMMAR mistakes, and that is true even of native speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") who don't know Modern Standard Chinese as a first language. And almost half the population of Chinese, according to a survey by the Chinese government, self-rates as unable to converse in Modern Standard Chinese.
Moreover, despite what that article says, written Chinese characters are frequently a barrier to understanding among Chinese citizens from different regions too. There is first of all the problem of high rates of illiteracy in China, because of the old-fashioned writing system Moser mentions. Many literate Chinese persons tend to write in the regional vocabulary and grammar--there is that again--of their native Sinitic language when they write, and I have seen numerous occasions of Chinese people traveling out of region and not being able to read hand-written signs at markets or even printed official signs posted by the local government.
Suffice it to say that Chinese grammar is NOT "trivial" to anyone who digs into it deeply. No linguist would say so. Chinese grammar, being based in large part on word order and function words, rather than on inflection, is friendly to native speakers of English, and that is one of the reasons I preferred learning Chinese to learning Russian at university while I was taking courses in both. But there is plenty of grammar in Chinese, and plenty of misunderstanding of grammar among Chinese persons that impairs understanding among people who speak differing Sinitic languages.
OK< maybe "trivial" was a little too strong. All human languages need a certain grammatical complexity to function. What I was trying to say that, being isolating languages, the grammatical complexity of Chinese languages pale in comparison with those of Indo-European languages, which still carry most of their inflectional heritage.
English, due to its unique development history, has lost most of its inflectional forms, it used to be heavily inflected. So, in that sense its basic grammar is said to be simpler than, say, Ancient Greek or French.
Is not the "grammar" you refer the largely loose particles because of the lack of formal grammar, rather than the reverse? If so, I standby my original statement that the grammar (meaning formal grammar) is trivial.
Why not give an example of a grammar point that you think I am missing?
I've already cited books in this thread, and they list dozens of features of Modern Standard Chinese grammar that are confusing even to speakers of other Sinitic languages.
An example I often bring up to English speakers who are learning Chinese is that they have to learn that the Chinese verbal system is based on aspect
rather than on tense. Many native English speakers misspeak Chinese as a second language because they struggle to impose their sense of tense on a tenseless language, and meanwhile get Chinese aspect marking all wrong. That can lead to misunderstandings in either direction, as my extensive acquaintance with persons who speak both languages often shows.
Le isn't even pronounced in the same way in different regions, but does that mean that there are a wide range of acceptable pronunciations or that there is a large range of variation with respect to a standard pronunciation?
Likewise with grammar. I'd imagine many of the complexities related in said books are due to attempting to list distributed evolved usages rather than what legitimately constitutes formal grammar. But I'd also like to know if I'm wrong.
Kindly define that. As a student of linguistics, I observed some very broad approaches to researching formal grammars of natural languages. Grammar of natural human languages includes much more than just the features of word accidence you would learn about in a course in Latin or Greek.
I would have just downvoted for disagreement, but you wrote, "But I'd also like to know if I'm wrong," and I can only cheer that willingness to learn. Chinese grammar is expressed largely through different means (word order and function words) from those through which Indo-European grammar is expressed (inflection of word endings), but end result is still that the language has many fussy, arbitrary distinctions constrained by historical accident (or possibly by information theory) that allow for miscommunication among speakers of Chinese who are not all native speakers.
You get confused in the Chinese languages system. Spoken and written are very different beasts in Chinese language. The literacy relies on the meaning of characters. It is just like one can understands the meaning "1234" and "+, -" while reading them out loud in their own language. I write "1 + 2" and read it "yat ka yi" when you read "one plus two". It does not hinder the understand of mathematics.
Although there are numerous Chinese languages, the characters are basically the same. Although there are many variants in text, the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.
In the past, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages. But, you know, they are from different language families.
the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.
I already mentioned above that I have seen counterexamples--written Chinese that was incomprehensible to many of the people who might reasonably be expected to read it--in several daily life situations in various parts of China.
Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages.
No, strictly speaking they were reading Chinese text in Chinese (possibly with mind's-ear pronunciation of the Chinese characters reflecting influence from their native languages), which they acquired as a second language while learning literacy. The full details to respond to the point of view you have put forth can be found in
(P.S. I can read some current Japanese too, and of course current Japanese writing shows plainly that Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, as you correctly note. I had occasion recently to read a brush painting of bamboo with some Chinese characters on it hanging in the office of a physician, who is a man of Korean-Japanese heritage. We could both sight-translate the Chinese characters into English. I didn't ask him on that occasion how he would pronounce them.)
That's why I said "Spoken and written are very different beasts in Chinese languages". Yes, I can write some variants that only local people can read. It'd just like an Australian writes some English that other world cannot easily understand. But generally, the written form of English by and large is basically the same.
If one is illiterate and cannot recognise any written word, it is nothing to do with writing system. It is about education.
The news article (xinhaunet) you given is about spoken languages, nothing do with written language.
Yes, they read characters in their native languages, not in any modern Chinese languages. Characters are just symbol with meaning. It pronunciation varies from language to language. It does not matter you say "一" in /jat1/, /yi1/, /qit/, /ichi/, /itsu/, /hitotsu/, /hitotbai/, /hajime/, or /il/ and it basically means one.
Yes, they read characters in their native languages, not in any modern Chinese languages.
I think the parent was speaking historically about how Chinese characters were read (and written) by Koreans and Japanese before they were adapted for writing Korean and Japanese. In a sense you are both correct, since Japanese kanji have both a "Japanese" and "Chinese" reading, and I believe the same is (or was) true for Korean hanja. In both cases "literacy" was nearly synonymous with "literacy in Chinese" in Japan and Korea for quite a long time, during which those languages adopted thousands of Chinese words. (Part of the resistance against other writing systems, including simpler phonetic ones, in Japan and Korea came from the assumption that any serious person would aspire to Chinese literacy, and a simpler writing system that was not a door to Chinese would only be of use to "stupid people" and women -- people who did not aspire to full literacy.)
Even today the distinction between "Japanese" and "Chinese" readings is used when teaching Kanji, and Koreans are much more commonly aware of the distinction between words of Chinese and native Korean etymology than English speakers are aware, say, of the distinction between words of Romantic and Germanic origin.
> Even today the distinction between "Japanese" and "Chinese" readings is used when teaching Kanji, and Koreans are much more commonly aware of the distinction between words of Chinese and native Korean etymology than English speakers are aware, say, of the distinction between words of Romantic and Germanic origin.
North Korea in particular has gone to great lengths to de-Sino (and de-foreign) their version of Korean. So much so that they've introduced many, often cumbersome description words to replace more elegant Chinese (Korean pronounced) or other loan words like 전자 계산기 (Mechanical Calculating Device) instead of 컴퓨터 (Computer).
Most south Koreans can likewise tell you immediately if a word is of Chinese origin (usually because they know the Hanja for it) vs. of purely Korean origin. Like 공룡 (Dinosaur) which is pronounced almost the same as 恐龍 vs. 피 (Blood) instead of 血.
is very good for explaining the neurological reasons why NO writing system could possibly operate that way.
To say that Chinese characters unify a nation of high illiteracy whose citizens in many cases cannot converse with one another in person or on the telephone
is much like saying that writing in Latin unifies the continent of Europe by providing a common means of communication among scholars from Basque Country to Finland. Each statement is about equally true, and each is about equally irrelevant to current language policy.
I believe the difficulty you refer to is caused by the inadequacy of the script to address Chines vernaculars, like Cantonese. Written Cantonese has many characters that would be alien to a monolingual Mandarin speaker.
>No, strictly speaking they were reading Chinese text in Chinese.
That's only partially correct though. Often as not, before Hangul was introduced in Korea, or Latin alphabets were modified for Vietnam, many people wrote their venacular using Chinese logograms, with the meaning known, but the word order and pronunciation adapted for their own language. Korean in particular has a whole class of special characters to capture the particulars of Korean grammar and language when written with Chinese characters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
Most Koreans will likewise pronounce Hanja using Korean words not Chinese ones. Like 'Dae' (대) for 大, 'In' (인) or 'Salam' (사람) for 人, 'Sal' (쌀) or 'Bap' (밥) for 稻.
You are right that, in the old days, because of the nature of the political ties betweem 韓國 and 中國, it was expected that formal government documents were written, read and pronounced in Chinese. But in general, most Koreans today do not know how to read Chinese out loud in a way that a Chinese speaker would understand. Most of the time Hanja is just used to clarify homophones from Koreanized loan words from Chinese.
As a long-time speaker of Mandarin who is learning Taiwanese Hokkien, I can't really agree with that. There are many characters and even words that are written the same way in each language, but there are many, many more which are not. Aside from the characters used specifically for Hokkien, there are numerous phrases which mean one thing in one language and another in the other. For example, 失禮 would mean lacking in manners in Mandarin, but it means sorry in Hokkien. Hokkien text, even when rendered in characters, is largely incomprehensible to Mandarin speakers.
The world would be a much better place if China just moved on to Bopomofo (Zhuyin Fuhao) which most people know pretty well from elementary school. It captures Mandarin morphology pretty well (better than Latin captures English for sure) and is relatively easier to learn.
All of these make a delightful read, I especially like [2].
A number of factors combined to make English orthography as unique as it is. First, there was no central authority of the English language for about three centuries, after the Norman invasion. Then, as French usage receded and English words were becoming more frequent people adopted the spelling of one part of the country and the pronunciation of another, e.g. Western England spellings for "busy" and "bury", but London pronunciation of "bizzy" and Kentish pronunciation of "berry" [2, p, 124] On top of that, the Great Vowel Shift happened.
OK, back to the printers. The problem was that English spelling started to become fixated due to printing, around 1650s, just when the language was undergoing a huge change. William Caxton, who may be considered the first English editor, published the oldest English book in Bruges, in 1475. By 1640, it is estimated that there were more than 20,000 titles available in Britain.
The final touch came from prescriptive orthographers who fiddled with word spellings to make them "right" according to classical languages, in the seventeenth century. Thus we have the b in "debt", the s in "island", h in "anchor" etc.
"[Printing] introduced further inconsistencies, partly because of the use of typesetters trained abroad, particularly in the Low Countries. For example, the h in ghost was influenced by Dutch."
Anecdotally, the "nonexistence" of Chinese grammar is very refreshing. Speaking in Chinese makes you very aware of the grammatical infrastructure of English (especially polite English).
My sense as a native speaker of English is that "Give me an example of this" can be a perfectly polite request in English as well. In both languages, adding "please" to the sentence would make it more clearly a polite request.
IANALinguist, but I feel like this feeling of simplification is common experience for English speakers learning Chinese. I'd love to hear a professional opinion, or even just get comparative word counts for several translations.
A slight modification to wisty's example would be if you're at a restaurant and the vinegar is at someone else's table. "Give me the vinegar/给我醋(把)" is equally polite to something in English like "Please would you pass the vinegar" which you might be more likely to say to a complete stranger. It's definitely minor, but creates a feeling of convenience which builds over time: terseness as convenience instead of rudeness.
Another example might be getting a stranger's attention to ask a question (again, something common to my experience if not the most varied example). In English it's "Hi, would you mind helping me?" "Hi, could you answer a question of mine?" "Hi, I have a question..." In Chinese it's just "please (let me) ask/请问". The "let me" is parenthetical to make it sensible in English, but it's not required to enunciate it (请让我问你）.
There is zero conjugation, a noun, the action most closely associated with it, and the verb which generates that noun might all be the exact same word with the meaning derived by context or (if ambiguous) helping words -- especially when speaking. People strive to speak chronologically so that "He took the train to the city" makes sense but "He arrived in the city by train" is strained. The 了 particle is so overloaded as to have many different, non-overlapping contextual meanings.
You might say that Chinese is structured more by convention than boilerplate, but that's at best a weak metaphor with a lot of connotations which I don't think carry to human languages well.
I'm not sure about the most part as the "?" implies, but there is more fluff in english than in chinese, scandinavian languages and hebrew. This goes for daily speech of the I need to ask someone for the butter kind.(what's up with the downvote?)
I don't know, but I guess my follow-up question to your factual statement would be, "Do you have any examples attested by professional linguists who have carefully compared languages, or is this based on your personal experience?" The reason I would ask that way, which I hope doesn't sound impolite, is that my experience is to the contrary. I find English to be a rather informal language among the dozen or so languages I have studied most closely.
This is hearsay from some linguists studying and some native speakers of the mentioned languages. Looking at the comment again I realize that it's not really up to the rigorous hacker news standards.
The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".
That was the part I loved the most about learning Chinese, in school we were required to learn a certain amount of radicals, and once we learned those we learned what they looked like squished next to other characters at that point I knew there was a metal involved if I saw the character for metal, even if I didn't understand the rest of it. Gold being one exception :P
I see 'ideogram' used in Chinese (printed in Hong-Kong) tutorials dating from late 1980s. Maybe it's less widespread now, but it is by no means antiquated.
Some interesting facts about the Chinese writing system:
* The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no anagrams, and no Morse code! To get around the last problem, The Chinese have devised a system where each word was assigned a number, e.g. "Person" was 0086 [The Mother Tongue]
Massive statistical tests in the past two decades have repeatedly demonstrated that 1,000 characters cover approximately 90% of symbols in typical texts, 2400 cover 99%, 3,800 cover 99.9%. Based on the study of other logographic systems (Mayan writing, Egyptian hieroglyphs), it seems that there's an upper limit on the number of unique forms that can be tolerated in a script. For most people, this value seems to be in the range 2000-2500.
* A Chinese character is generally confused with a word, the assumption being that Sinitic language are exclusively monosyllabic. This is not true. In modern Mandarin the average length of a word is almost exactly two syllables.
* The Chinese writing system is very well suited to writing Classical Chinese but ill-equipped to record the vernaculars (local dialects/languages) of which there are many in China. Consequently, to write Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Shanghainese, it is necessary to invent characters or resort to romanization.
The source is The World's Writing Systems by Oxford University Press. I recommend this book to everyone who's interested in these matters.
[Edit] In case you're wondering, Chinese has palindromes, but not the letter-based ones like we're used to. Hofstadter in Le Ton beau de Marot relates an anecdote with a Chinese professor. Prof. Wu first shows them a famous Chinese palindrome: Ye luo tian luo ye (At leaves-fall season, fall the leaves). In turn, H shows him the quintessential Panama palindrome, but Prof. Wu has difficulty understanding it because he was reading it word by word (p. 143)
The consequences of not having an alphabetic script are large.
The probable social consequences are perhaps the most profound. It must distort an education system to have such a large part of the curriculum accessible only by rote learning.
This is an old article, because he says he's only been studying Chinese for six years and I remember Doug Hofstadter talking about him, as a Chinese expert, in the 90's.
In fact, Moser gained some renown as being good enough at Chinese (after writing this article, obviously - but not too long, as the date that appears on it is 1991 and I heard about this in about 1996 or so) that he appeared on a Chinese game show involving language mastery, apparently something along the lines of a linguistic Jeopardy.
So clearly, Chinese is in fact damned hard, but not impossible for an obsessed genius.
I wonder if anything has been done about the dictionary situation.
We have the internet, Unicode, and powerful computers now, so I suspect the dictionary situation is quite different from 1991. I don't know much about Chinese in particular -- my foreign language was Japanese -- but I have recently looked up kanji using a variety of search engines, including tools that allow you to draw characters. (For example: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html) If you have the kanji as text, it's not much more difficult to look up an unfamiliar word in Japanese than it is in English, although it may still be difficult to figure out the exact sense if the writing isn't literal.
For example, suppose you're trying to read something on the Japanese Wikipedia. I'm horribly out of practice, but I can still go and take something like "第六回執筆コンテストの入選記事が決定しました。結果発表をご覧下さい。" (found on the front page of ja.wikipedia.org) and reason that it means something along the lines of "The best articles of the sixth writing competition have been chosen. Please look at the results." just by copying the parts I'm unfamiliar with into a kanji search engine like Jlex (http://jlex.org/) a bit at a time until I get something reasonable back.
As a study abroad student in Japan I was encouraged to buy an electric dictionary that came with a stylus. You write the character you see and it gives the definition.
(unfortunately these are designed for Japanese people so it doesn't get the character if you write it with the wrong stroke order, and it brings you to a page of japanese text explaining all about the character and its uses in different contexts, but still, pretty useful)
2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet.
3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic.
4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.
5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.
6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.
8. Because tonal languages are weird.
9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.
An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.
A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question.
I used to think the writing system was ridiculous too, but think of how many different dialects of Chinese there are! I am Shanghainese and don't understand Mandarin, and I'm sure there's a lot of Cantonese people with similar issues. We can't talk to each other, because the phonemes of our respective dialects are still so different, but the beauty of these non-phonetic ideographs is that we can still read the same newspaper. And that's very important! If we had a phonetic alphabet, it would be nearly impossible to communicate in any kind of written medium.
Only if your schooling has exposed you consciously to the vocabulary and grammatical structures of written Chinese that differ from your regional dialect, as it surely has. Lessons in literacy in vernacular Chinese literature ( 白話文 ) are in part lessons in the spoken grammar and vocabulary of the language reflected in that literature, which these days is usually Modern Standard Chinese.
If we had a phonetic alphabet, it would be nearly impossible to communicate in any kind of written medium.
The experience of Western cognate languages suggests that people can always more readily communicate in writing in sound-indicating scripts than they can speak over the telephone. After edit: for example, I have read several Spanish-language letters that came randomly to business offices I worked in, without any formal course in Spanish, but I would certainly have great difficulty carrying on a conversation in Spanish.
Languages are constantly evolving. Sharing a written script encourages different dialects to borrow words from each other in their written form. Sharing a phonetic script would instead encourage them to also borrow words in their phonetic form. So dialects might drift closer over time.
Long term changes aside, a phonetic script would make learning standard Chinese and dialects faster, so children could learn both their local dialect and the government standard (Mandarin) as part of their schooling.
The main problem with a phonetic script would probably be the varying phonetic inventories of the different dialects/languages within China. I'm not sure if you could make a phonetic script that would work beyond the main dialects.
Criticisms 1-5 are basically identical and have no useful alternative for a linguistically diverse country like China until you finally get everyone speaking the same dialect.
Criticism 6--uhh, well, there's also Shakespeare for the English equivalent of incomprehensible classical language. The first time I heard idioms like "one fell swoop" I was totally all like wtf bro. And you don't need to know classical Chinese to be reasonably useful in day to day life.
7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names.
8/9--yeah, that's about the only reason Chinese is really that difficult to learn in my opinion. English speakers belong to one language family, and Chinese speakers belong to another. Tonal languages are weird to you. I assure you, Chinese people find pluralization, verbal conjugation (past, present, perfect, subjunctive...), spelling (threw, through, bought, bot), "r"s, and articles to be pretty fucking weird.
I don't think I'd call these criticisms so much as _reasons_ why Chinese is so damn hard (for a Western speaker). It’s not like there's anyone around who designed the language to complain to.
Anyway:
Reasons 1-5 aren't about the many languages used in China (if French & Spanish are different languages, then I consider Mandarin & Cantonese to be different languages). These difficulties are due to the lack of a concise phonetic alphabet (like the roman alphabet used in English, French, Spanish…, or the hiragana alphabet used in Japanese). If the Chineses languages all used a common (small!) phonetic alphabet of some sort, many of those difficulties would dissolve (and there is no particular reason why that could not be done, technically, except that it throws out a huge part of their culture). Even if only Mandarin existed, those first 5 difficulties would remain.
Edit: OK, so using a phonetic alphabet would mean that each language would be written differently... except that this is already true, essentially. You can actually write in Cantonese in a way that a Mandarin speaker could not understand (using the same characters), and there are those who do this. I think he says this in there (I read this a long time ago), that the Mandarin writing system is just that; Mandarin. The whole country knows how to read it (without necessarily knowing how to pronounce it), so it's more about the non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese people having 2 languages that they use: their own for speaking, and Mandarin for writing. Using a purely phonetic alphabet may make this bi-lingual usage more difficult... or not. The existing writing system is already pretty painful, whether you're a native or not (though natives have more time to get used to it before they're expected to be able to use it, I suppose).
Reason 6: this isn't like reading Shakespeare (Modern English, though an earlier version of it), as far as I understand. It seems more like trying to read The Canterbury Tales (Middle English) or Beowulf (Old English, more like German than English, really). You're completely correct about it not being relevant to practical usage of any of the Chinese languages, though.
Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) actually isn't that bad, it just looks that way. If you read it aloud, you can understand it pretty easily. Old English or Anglo-Saxon actually looks more like Danish than German and is a totally different language from modern English - modern Spanish has more cognates and other similarities.
As a Chinese and English speaker, I assure you that it is far easier to learn English than Chinese.
I grew up with Chinese and still consider myself a learner, despite being surrounded by the language for the first half of my life time. I spent only a few years with English before I considered myself fully fluent and 'native' at the language.
The 'families' of the language do not much matter. Chinese is just not designed/evolved to be learned by non-native people.
No, I think my point was misunderstood about the "families" of the languages. I know English, so picking up French is easier--they have cognates, and considerable overlap in the set of sounds, and they share a lot of grammatical similarity. This similarity is due to their both being Indo-European languages.
Now, I would have a much harder time learning, say, !Kung, because !Kung comes from a very different language family, Bantu. The first problem, and a very big problem, would be learning how to do glottal clicks. If English had a lot of those, it wouldn't be such an issue, but since English is descended from a very different set of languages, I'd find it extremely difficult to pick up !Kung.
Now, given my background in Shanghainese, I'm going to find it infinitely easier to pick up Mandarin or Cantonese than someone who speaks only English. It's not that any language is intrinsically more difficult, but if you start out knowing a language that's quite unrelated (English to Chinese), it will seem much harder than learning a language that is related (English to French).
So, you don't have to be a native speaker of Chinese. If you know a closely related language, you would pick up Chinese (spoken, at least) fairly easily, with whatever ease an Englishman has picking up French. Chinese isn't "made" only for native speakers. That's just a wrong statement--all babies are born not knowing anything, after all.
And that's why I hate this article whenever I see it pop up on reddit.com or HN. Most of the problems this guy has are because he was born speaking an Indo-European language. Of course he'll think anything from the Sinitic family is difficult.
And I am also a Chinese/English speaker. I can't read or write at all, but my verbal fluency is quite good, and it's damn good considering I can only talk to my parents and I hardly ever hear Shanghainese outside my home. Perhaps your issues are due to not being surrounded by enough Chinese people, and not because Chinese is magically harder.
Language family actually doesn't have that much to do with it because the differences within families are so coarse. One of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn is Bahasa Indonesia, and it definitely is not an Indo-European language. Most Indic languages, like Hindi, are much harder despite being Indo-European.
Additionally, 8 (and somewhat 9) are the only ones that apply to speaking/listening to Chinese. The rest are fully restricted to writing and reading.
I only spent 6 weeks studying Chinese so I'm sure I have some misconceptions, but speaking Chinese (and to a lesser extent hearing it) were actually pretty easy to pickup. Most of my classmates just threw up their hands and quit on intonation, but it's not THAT hard especially if you're just speaking slowly. This might have been a consequence of short study of the language, but grammatically I thought it was vastly simpler than Western languages particularly in respect to verb conjugation.
I'm not an expert at Chinese (so please point out the errors), but I think he missed a few:
10. Hanyu Pinyin (which is the one everyone uses) overloads every second letter, to make it more condensed.
r = r, or zhr, tchzr, or something like that (it's up to the speaker)
j = zh (kinda), as in Beijing
zh = j (WTF? Are they trying to make things hard?)
z = ts
c = ts ... but a different ts to z. (aspirated)
q = tch
x = tsh
none of which should be confused with ...
ch = ch (dark)
sh = sh (dark)
s = s
That's about it for consonants. Remember to carry a pack of tissues.
11. Then there's vowels. Don't get me started. There's lots of vowels, and getting them wrong will completely change what you said.
12. Idioms. Though this relates to number 9 - cultural differences, and I guess it's an issue in all languages.
13. Regional dialects. Every village has it's own language, which isn't really comprehensible to anyone else. You can speak Chinese, and still not be understood, simply because you are talking to somebody who doesn't know putonghua (standard).
Chinese has some advantages. It's rare to run into sesquipedalian loquaciousness, if only because few people can be bothered learning all the synonyms. There are synonyms (of course), but they just don't seem to get used as much as in English.
- I can only thing of one way to say "big" in Chinese. In English, there's "big, large, enormous, huge, gigantic, gargantuan, grand", and about a dozen others. In Chinese, if something is big, it's '大 (da)', or maybe 'very big'. Except the great wall, which is the "long wall" (not big).
- If something is "good", it's "好 (hao)", or "really good", or "very good", or "double good" or possibly "佳 (jia)". Not "good, excellent, splendid, magnificent, superb, superlative, wonderful, fantastic, marvelous", or anything else your third grade teacher said about the short story that even you knew was crap.
The best way I've found to learn a little Chinese is to get a idiom dictionary, and look up idioms. You learn interesting stuff about the culture (lots of food and trade analogies, mythology, nature, and some analogies to bodily functions that are so visceral Kevin Smith used one in Clerks), and it's a good way to practice common words.
Chinese is not lack of characters and words to describe things. There are lots of ways to do that.
- (big) the synonym of 大. 大, 巨, 宏, 偉, 碩, 巨大, 巨大無比, 碩大無朋, 無窮, 無盡, 無崖, 無窮無盡, 無止境, 堂煌, 海量, 寬敞, 不可尺量, 重大. It is overlapped with wide (寬, 闊), deep (深), heavy(重), large quantity (豐).
- (good) the synonym of 好. 好, 佳, 優, 正, 良, 妙, 善, 美. (best) 頂級, 極品, 完美, 完善, 盡善盡美, 美不勝收, 嘆爲觀止, 無宇倫比. You can combine them like 良好, 優良, 妙好. You can describe the extreme with 極, 絕, 最, 頂 like 極佳, 極好, 絕妙, 頂好. In spoken languages, 誇啦啦, 頂呱呱. If you describe a good song, it could be 天籟 or 天籟之音, or 絕唱.
Above are just a few of them. It is too numerous to exhaust the list.
At least Mandarin grammar is relatively simple, and it has only 4-5 tones compared to Cantonese or Minnanese. But don't get me started on the multitude of Chinese dialects.
The point about classical Chinese isn't fair, the language itself has evolved little in the past few thousand years. To achieve the same utility in English, you will have to learn Modern English, Middle English, Norman, Old Saxon, Latin etc.
Having an interesting conversation with a Korean the other day. She mentioned that in Korean there are various word and conjugation choices you have to make based on honorifics. What she didn't realize is that English has something similar but we don't recognize it for indicating formality -- often as a class or education signal, or to use differently depending on audience.
I was confused but she explained...
Most English words of German origin are vulgar or informal, while most of Latin, Greek or French origin are formal. Like "shit" vs. "feces", "fight" vs. "quarrel", "drink" vs. "imbibe", etc. In general, where we have synonyms, and those synonyms can be ranked on a scale of informal to formal, German words are towards the informal end, and romantic origin words are towards the formal end.
She said it's been one of the hardest things to learn when learning English (and she's quite fluent), is this concept of "formal" English vs. "informal" that is separate from "colloquial", mainly because nobody recognizes it and nobody teaches it.
So apparently this is also something one has to learn in English - word origin, in order to gauge proper usage.
Good point, though considering how old Classical Chinese (let along Old Chinese) is, you might want to throw in Hebrew and Greek. Or maybe Proto-Germanic and a little PIE.
It's definitely possible, but I don't think we can rule out the logical possibility that a language will typically only reference another language that came before it.
It makes sense, too- Considering a given language, another language that is much newer wouldn't have existed when the phrase was created, and a language of the same age or only a little newer, was probably not widespread enough to be referenced when the phrase was coined.
The notion of two existing languages as differing in age is problematic. They are ever changing. How do you compare the age of contemporary french to that of contemporary chinese? If you look at the list you see that it is always (except for the chinese) different language families meeting.
I thought about that for a whole when that post first came up, but came to the conclusion that there really isn't one. English would be the closest example of what people say they can't speak, but there's no "it's xx to me" that I'm aware of...
Except of course for the phrase "it's your mom to me"
It's interesting that almost all of the reasons apply to the written language. I took Mandarin in college and found the tricks I was taught to learn the characters were mostly useless. You simply had to memorize everything by brute force.
The spoken language has a simple grammar and aside from the tones you can probably get to a passable level within a year if you live in Beijing and actually interact with people in Chinese.
Setting aside literacy is costly, and I have seen a lot of learners of Chinese who go over to Chinese-speaking places do that. But I agree with the statement that Chinese people will probably be well able to intercommunicate with a dedicated Westerner who immerses himself in the standard language of China for a year--but largely because the speakers of the standard language in China are well used to nonstandard speech from the lips of their own compatriots who grew up in other regions. I can pass for a native of China over the telephone--not because my Chinese is so wonderful, but because China is so full of citizens who speak Mandarin poorly as a second language.
It depends what you consider costly. I switched to Japanese after college and moved to Japan for a year. Rather than learning anything about the writing system, I took a 6 week conversation crash course before leaving. When I got there I just mastered the accent and some of the cultural communication idosyncrasies like "active listening" rather than spending time reading and writing anything. I ended up going on far more dates with women than I ever have in my life prior (or after) and had two really cool girlfriends. In contrast my friend who was obsessed with mastering Japanese had no friends at all for about 3 years. Nobody wanted to talk to him because his accent was so grating. I feel like his approach was far more "costly" if you consider "social cost" a real factor.
In terms of real economic value I have come to the conclusion that a native english speaker mastering another language rarely pays off, in a financial sense. The main benefit is establishing relationships with people you wouldn't be able to meet, otherwise.
Accent seems to be way more important than vocabulary or grammar for social situations. It's easier to "fix" an imperfect sentence construction in your head and infer missing meanings from gestures and pictures than it is to decipher an extremely thick accent.
I used the Heisig method to learn about 2100 characters in 9 months (about an hour a day). I'm sure I would not have been able to do that by brute force.
I am on hiatus from learning Japanese while I do Heisig. I intend to start learning Japanese again after finishing book one of RTK. Do you think that's a good idea? I found that kanji frustration was a huge drag on my learning, to the point of making it really boring, so I figure once I've got Heisig down cold, I'll be able to pick up kanji quickly and learn Japanese at a more natural (and more fun) pace. I'd be very interested to hear what you think about that idea since you went through the entire Heisig program.
I can vouch for Heisig as an effective way to learn Kanji. It requires a lot of patience because it takes months (some people have done it in one month, but they must be totally obsessed) and at the end of it you still can't read a thing, and, let's face it, learning 2000+ kanji is a beast of a job regardless of what technique you use. But if you can handle delayed gratification, it'll do the job. I can't say how it compares to brute force, but I don't think I would have finished 2000 kanji the brute force way. I don't think kanji are really a big problem after Heisig book 1, especially if you're reading online with Rikaichan or something like that, but you'll still see quite a few unfamiliar ones.
If you do it, check out http://kanji.koohii.com/ and read the stories that other people have posted, if you haven't already. Heisig leaves it up to you to write the last 1500 or so stories, which can be difficult. Even for the first 500 kanji, some of the stories at that website fix mistakes in Heisig or point out primitives that aren't introduced till later (there are quite a few primitives introduced in book 3 that are used without noting that they are primitives in book 1). And definitely use an SRS like Anki.
It's really hard to get that kind of straight-talk from instructors or native speakers.
The best rationalization I can think of for someone learning this language, is that if you enjoyed the meditative focus of learning how to write cursive as a child, or you miss the wonder of constantly discovering new words as an adolescent, you can re-live that for the rest of your life with Chinese!
Fortunately for Chinese (Mandarin at least), it is a very beautiful language, and every dose of that beauty seems to make you want more.
I am from China, my advise for western Chinese learners is:don't learn it based on Pinyin which seems helpful at the beginning but leads you to nowhere at all. If you just want to be able to read CHinese books or novels you simply don't have to know how to speak it. Most of the European Chinese experts in the last century were like that. And if you just want to speak it fluently, find a Chinese gf/bf,in two years you can flirt with others in Chinese.
I read hundreds if not thousands of articles on a daily basis. Most of the time, I skim them. But this essay/article despite being so long, kept me interested the whole way, and made me laugh several times. Amazing writer.
There ain't too much Chinese characters as one perceives. A Chinese character is like a word in English. They are just using different vehicles to load meaning. For example, the Chinese character 早 is equivalent to "morning" or "early" in English. When you learn to write it, it is the combination of 日 and 十. When Chinese learner struggles for the combination of components, English learner struggles for that of letters(, or stem root). They are pretty the same. It is much easier to remember that 早 (morning) is associated with 日 (sun). Once you master the skill, it is as easy as spelling. You can complain too much characters when comparing the number of words in English.
I like classical Chinese. It is the minimalistic form of Chinese languages. Concise and Poetic.
Modern Chinese is heavily polluted by Western languages, both English and Russian. Modern Chinese text is crippled by Western grammar. This makes the text filled with empty words, and long sentences, and odd construction, mechanical, and confusion.
Writing Chinese never emphases grammar, but the sequence and context. It is dramatically different approach from Indo-European languages. For example, In English "When the rain falls, there are fewer and fewer people on the street." Alternative, you can write, "there are fewer and fewer people on the street when the rain falls." The order of words and phrases is not so important. In Chinese, it can be "天雨，街上人漸疏"(sky rain => on street people fewer), or more concisely, 雨下人疏(rain fall => people fewer), or 天雨人疏(sky rain => people fewer). You can't reverse the word order in Chinese. You can forget grammar completely but write the consequence of your thought and scene. It is what the idiomatic phrase from. For example, if you describe a person fails to break up a relationship, you can say 欲斷難斷 (want to break => (but) hard to break). This saves lots of words.
You are misleading. Koreans have their own languages. Only the written form is drastically changed. It is not a new language.
It is more than hard and easy. Remember there is politics and culture. The disuse of Chinese character is pretty recent, post-WWII.
Recently, some Koreans suggest to pick up Chinese character in Korean. In the past, Korean culture and history are written in these characters. After a few generation, only very few people can recognise them properly. Also, Characters differentiate homonym. With characters, it would cause much confusion with numerous homonyms.
"Since Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other nonstandard varieties differ from Mandarin not just in sound but also in vocabulary and grammar, the characters cannot bridge this gap by themselves, even with their relative neutrality toward sound.7 Much of the core vocabulary of non-Mandarin Chinese has no counterpart in Mandarin and no recognized character representation. Conversely, many Mandarin terms for which characters do exist are foreign to non-Mandarin speakers. The fact that nonstandard speakers can read a text in the standard language simply means that these speakers are bilingual. They have learned written Mandarin as a second language. They know enough vocabulary and grammar to make sense of Mandarin texts, much as I know enough French words and grammar to read that language (without being able to pronounce it convincingly, much less to speak it fluently). If Chinese characters have unified the Chinese languages, then the alphabet has unified French and English.
"The characters do allow nonstandard speakers to use their own pronunciations to read Mandarin texts. So instead of acclimating to the national standard, nonstandard speakers reinforce their own speech habits and add to the vitality of their "dialect" by introducing new vocabulary from Mandarin, which they pronounce their own way by analogy. Whether alphabetic scripts should be used to provide China's non-Mandarin speakers with the means to become literate in their own language is a political question outside the scope of the present inquiry. But one thing is certain: since non-Mandarin speakers are forced anyway to learn a second language, it would make more sense from the viewpoint of those promoting unity if this bilingualism were achieved through Mandarin written in the pinyin alphabet.8 The incentive to learn the national standard, including its pronunciation, would be higher than it is today if one's ability to read depended on it. As it is now, nonstandard speakers work their way through standard texts using whatever pronunciation comes naturally, not fully learning Mandarin and not reading their own languages either."
"Since Cantonese, Shanghainese, and other nonstandard varieties differ from Mandarin not just in sound but also in vocabulary and grammar, the characters cannot bridge this gap by themselves, even with their relative neutrality toward sound.7 Much of the core vocabulary of non-Mandarin Chinese has no counterpart in Mandarin and no recognized character representation. Conversely, many Mandarin terms for which characters do exist are foreign to non-Mandarin speakers."
Yes, the quoted statement is true. Observing examples of this phenomenon (in either direction, whether Mandarin speakers not being able to read other Sinitic languages in Chinese characters, or speakers of those languages not being able to read quite standard Mandarin in Chinese characters) was what motivated some of my earlier comments in this thread.
And then there's Dashan (Mark Roswell) who studied Chinese in Canada for four years and then went to China. Within a year he was appearing on Chinese television and now is a huge superstar performing xiansheng, which is an oral comedic tradition that even native speakers find pretty frickin difficult. I'd love to know how he managed to learn Chinese so well, so quickly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashan.
I studied Japanese for about 2 years in college. I estimated that to learn a single kanji, it took the time to learn 40 other vocabulary words.
I wished I had focused on speaking instead. Academic japanese seems to treat starting students like they're going to get a PhD in the language. That is absurd. Written Japanese beyond hiragana and katakana (the two phonetic alphabets), should only start in the 3rd or 4th year of undergraduate study.
I don't understand this sentiment. Kanji are an integral part of the japanese language, and much of it doesn't make sense without them.
You can and should start studying kanji as soon as you have a reasonable command of hiragana. Every time you learn a new word you should at least check the characters it's written with instead of pretending that it's okay to use hiragana for everything.
My experience has been that I sometimes actually understand words I've never heard before because I can connect the syllables with kanji whose meaning fits the context.
It's up to you to balance your time between learning the written language and learning the spoken language, but they are not independent of each other, and ignoring kanji in the beginning is a mistake.
David Moser (author of this article) appeared in the Sinica podcast this week along with Gady Epstein, Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Kuo. All familiar names for China watchers.
Unsurprisingly the article seems to focus a lot on the non-phonetic script.
I've been thinking about this — considering the difficulties even with the simplified characters and even for native users of the language if this article is to be believed, what are HN's thoughts on potential official shift by China from simplified to pinyin or a derivative of pinyin?
Pardon my cynicism, but, those who haven't learnt Chinese well tend to exaggerate its difficulty as a pretext to their failure, and those who have do the same to accentuate their achievement. If you are weighing whether to learn Chinese and deterred by its supposed difficulty, I hope you'd take that into account.
I took great pleasure reading aloud many sections of this humorous article to my Chinese wife. This article resonates closely with my experiences / frustrations - my dear wife had a good chuckle at my exasperated face.
English is phonetic. What A JOKE ?
The author forget the language which is difficult to what difficult can be BUT it depends on your effort.
The language is so phonetic that even a breath won't be missed out. And a person can write a book accurately as read by other people if pronounced correctly. And the language is Sanskrit. Hindi, Nepali, Marathi are it ruined form but they bring most phonetic features.
* Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols directly refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term.
The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".
* Writing system not phonetic: Any other European language than English would have formed a much better argument, since English is notorious for its haphazard mapping of mapping phonemes to the alphabet, partly caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch with bare knowledge of English.
One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent. Compare with, say, Greek grammar which has baffling complexity or Lithuanian that still has noun 9 cases! Some exotic native Indian languages have 10-15 noun classes (German has three, which we call gender). In pure writing complexity, some people rate Japanese to be even more complicated (with its three sub systems). Or for an older example, consider Mayan hieroglyphs.