Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
by David Moser
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies
The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title
of this essay is, “Hard for whom?” A reasonable question. After all,
Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go
through the “terrible twos”, it’s Chinese they use to drive their parents
crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly
complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists
. So what do I mean by “hard”? Since I know at the outset that the whole
tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining
, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard
for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult,
going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation
partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me—and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of
their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.
From Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John
DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday (Sino-Platonic Papers No. 27, August
1991), edited by Victor H. Mair
If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty empty one
. Of course Chinese is hard for me. After all, any foreign language is
hard for a non-native, right? Well, sort of. Not all foreign languages
are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language you
‘re coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than
an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot
faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I’m contending
is that Chinese is hard compared to … well, compared to almost any
other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is
not only hard for us (English speakers), but it’s also hard in absolute
terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people
.1
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.)
Maybe all Chinese people deserve a medal just for being born Chinese.
At any rate, they generally become aware at some point of the Everest-
like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage
point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing
up the steep slopes.
Everyone’s heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom
“It’s Greek to me” and search for equivalent idioms in all the world’s
languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest
, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins
as the canonical incomprehensible language. (For example, the French have
the expression “C’est du chinois”, “It’s Chinese”, i.e., “It’s incomprehensible
“. Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question arises:
What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an impossibly hard language
? You then look for the corresponding phrase in Chinese, and you find
Ge��n tia��nshu�� yíya��ng 跟天书一样 meaning “It’s like heavenly
script.”
There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve its reputation
for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language
for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated
by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted
to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty
will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single
person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves
“Why in the world am I doing this?” Those who can still remember their
original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since
nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say
“I’ve come this far—I can’t stop now” will have some chance of succeeding
, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible
overall perspective that it takes.
Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I return to my
original question: Why is Chinese so damn hard?
1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.
Beautiful, complex, mysterious—but ridiculous. I, like many students
of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system
, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The
more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting
they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession
, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating
them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt
to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.
The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the Chinese people
began to realize the importance of universal literacy, it became clear
that these ideograms were sort of like bound feet—some fetishists
may have liked the way they looked, but they weren’t too practical for
daily use.
For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough characters
to become functionally literate. Again, someone may ask “Hard in comparison
to what?” And the answer is easy: Hard in comparison to Spanish, Greek
, Russian, Hindi, or any other sane, “normal” language that requires at
most a few dozen symbols to write anything in the language. John DeFrancis
, in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, reports that his
Chinese colleagues estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin
speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters, whereas
his French and Spanish colleagues estimate that students in their respective
countries achieve comparable levels in half that time.2 Naturally, this
estimate is rather crude and impressionistic (it’s unclear what “comparable
levels” means here), but the overall implications are obvious: the Chinese
writing system is harder to learn, in absolute terms, than an alphabetic
writing system.3 Even Chinese kids, whose minds are at their peak absorptive
power, have more trouble with Chinese characters than their little counterparts
in other countries have with their respective scripts. Just imagine the
difficulties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent foreign
learners such as myself.
Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of
characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a
lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying
things like “Despite the fact that Chinese has [10,000, 25,000, 50,000
, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so
to read a newspaper”. Poppycock. I couldn’t comfortably read a newspaper
when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several
characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning
out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by “read
” in this context is “read and basically comprehend the text without having
to look up dozens of characters”; otherwise the claim is rather empty
.)
This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look
at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper
are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.4 But what such accounts
don’t tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words
made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note
that in English, knowing the words “up” and “tight” doesn’t mean you
know the word “uptight”.) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language
knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and
still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not
simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for
how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different
contexts.5 In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you
may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are
often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main
point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article
with the headline “JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS” is
not going to get very far if they don’t know the words “jacuzzi” or “phlebitis
“.
The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field
. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues
and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes
or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting
cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends
that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing
through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally
to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese
dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the
difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone
who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me “My research
is really hampered by the fact that I still just can’t read Chinese.
It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can’t skim
to save my life.” This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year
student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the
time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has
had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly
work on the thesis is coming).
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
. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient
to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must
subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully
edited appetizers for the first few years.
The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking.
After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went
through the usual kinds of novels—La nausée by Sartre, Voltaire’s
Candide, L’étranger by Camus—plus countless newspapers, magazines
, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really
needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got
at a garage sale.
This kind of “sink or swim” approach just doesn’t work in Chinese. At
the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn’t yet read a single
complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding
. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn’t read an article
without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon
for me to scan the front page of the People’s Daily and not be able to
completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested
I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition
. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha
, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions
and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying
Chinese, I’m still not at a level where I can actually read it without
an English translation to consult. (By “read it”, I mean, of course,
“read it for pleasure”. I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and
a dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into the
vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even
be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, “The difficulty of memorizing
a Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new
word in a European language, is such that a rigid economy of mental effort
is imperative.”6 This is, if anything, an understatement. With the risk
of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time
in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese
writing system is that there are two (mercifully overlapping) sets of
characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong
Kong, and the simplified characters adopted by the People’s Republic of
China in the late 1950’s and early 60’s. Any foreign student of Chinese
is more or less forced to become familiar with both sets, since they
are routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas. This
linguistic camel’s-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already
absurdly burdened student of Chinese, who at this point would gladly
trade places with Sisyphus. But since Chinese people themselves are never
equally proficient in both simplified and complex characters, there is
absolutely no shame whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set
to the partial exclusion the other. In fact, there is absolutely no shame
in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.
2. Because the language doesn’t have the common sense to use an alphabet
.
To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in this respect
, it might be a good idea to spell out (no pun intended) why that of English
is so easy. Imagine the kind of task faced by the average Chinese adult
who decides to study English. What skills are needed to master the writing
system? That’s easy: 26 letters. (In upper and lower case, of course,
plus script and a few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes
, dashes, parentheses, etc.—all things the Chinese use in their own
writing system.) And how are these letters written? From left to right
, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries
. Forgetting for a moment the problem of spelling and actually making
words out of these letters, how long does it take this Chinese learner
of English to master the various components of the English writing system
? Maybe a day or two.
Now consider the American undergraduate who decides to study Chinese.
What does it take for this person to master the Chinese writing system
? There is nothing that corresponds to an alphabet, though there are recurring
components that make up the characters. How many such components are
there? Don’t ask. As with all such questions about Chinese, the answer
is very messy and unsatisfying. It depends on how you define “component
” (strokes? radicals?), plus a lot of other tedious details. Suffice it
to say, the number is quite large, vastly more than the 26 letters of
the Roman alphabet. And how are these components combined to form characters
? Well, you name it—components to the left of other components, to
the right of other components, on top of other components, surrounding
other components, inside of other components—almost anything is possible
. And in the process of making these spatial accommodations, these components
get flattened, stretched, squashed, shortened, and distorted in order
to fit in the uniform square space that all characters are supposed to
fit into. In other words, the components of Chinese characters are arrayed
in two dimensions, rather than in the neat one-dimensional rows of alphabetic
writing.
Okay, so ignoring for the moment the question of elegance, how long does
it take a Westerner to learn the Chinese writing system so that when
confronted with any new character they at least know how to move the pen
around in order to produce a reasonable facsimile of that character?
Again, hard to say, but I would estimate that it takes the average learner
several months of hard work to get the basics down. Maybe a year or more
if they’re a klutz who was never very good in art class. Meanwhile, their
Chinese counterpart learning English has zoomed ahead to learn cursive
script, with time left over to read Moby Dick, or at least Strunk & White
.
This is not exactly big news, I know; the alphabet really is a breeze
to learn. Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years
can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable
from that of the average American. Very few Americans, on the other hand
, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles
anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing
else hard about Chinese, the task of learning to write characters alone
would put it in the rogues’ gallery of hard-to-learn languages.
3. Because the writing system just ain’t very phonetic.
So much for the physical process of writing the characters themselves.
What about the sheer task of memorizing so many characters? Again, a
comparison of English and Chinese is instructive. Suppose a Chinese person
has just the previous day learned the English word “president”, and now
wants to write it from memory. How to start? Anyone with a year or two
of English experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling rules
ofthumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along. The word really
couldn’t start with anything but “pr”, and after that a little guesswork
aided by visual memory (“Could a ‘z’ be in there? That’s an unusual letter
, I would have noticed it, I think. Must be an ’s’…”) should produce
something close to the target. Not every foreigner (or native speaker
for that matter) has noted or internalized the various flawed spelling
heuristics of English, of course, but they are at least there to be utilized
.
Now imagine that you, a learner of Chinese, have just the previous day
encountered the Chinese word for “president” (总统 zo��ngto��ng )
and want to write it. What processes do you go through in retrieving
the word? Well, very often you just totally forget, with a forgetting
that is both absolute and perfect in a way few things in this life are
. You can repeat the word as often as you like; the sound won’t give you
a clue as to how the character is to be written. After you learn a few
more characters and get hip to a few more phonetic components, you can
do a bit better. (“Zo��ng 总 is a phonetic component in some other
character, right?…Song? Zeng? Oh yeah, cong 总 as in co��ngmíng 聪
明.”) Of course, the phonetic aspect of some characters is more obvious
than that of others, but many characters, including some of the most
high-frequency ones, give no clue at all as to their pronunciation.
All of this is to say that Chinese is just not very phonetic when compared
to English. (English, in turn, is less phonetic than a language like
German or Spanish, but Chinese isn’t even in the same ballpark.) It is
not true, as some people outside the field tend to think, that Chinese
is not phonetic at all, though a perfectly intelligent beginning student
could go several months without noticing this fact. Just how phonetic
the language is a very complex issue. Educated opinions range from 25
% (Zhao Yuanren)7 to around 66% (DeFrancis),8 though the latter estimate
assumes more knowledge of phonetic components than most learners are
likely to have. One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that
sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient
thing about it. Furthermore, this phonetic aspect of the language doesn
‘t really become very useful until you’ve learned a few hundred characters
, and even when you’ve learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of
Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the
phonetic quality of English does.
Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character
. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no
helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you’re just sunk
. And you’re sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary
to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize
arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences
a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come
up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some
relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and
relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you
experience every day.
This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept
a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to
write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate
Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words
like “tin can”, “knee”, “screwdriver”, “snap” (as in “to snap one’s fingers
“), “elbow”, “ginger”, “cushion”, “firecracker”, and so on. And when I
say “forget”, I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke
down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker
totally forgetting how to write a word like “knee” or “tin can”? Or even
a rarely-seen word like “scabbard” or “ragamuffin”? I was once at a luncheon
with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University
, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that
day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment
that day. I found that I couldn’t remember how to write the character
嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 “to sneeze”. I asked my three friends how to
write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged
in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the
character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard
of China”. Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard
forgetting how to write the English word “sneeze”?? Yet this state of
affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of
magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the
word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always
come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence
between sound and spelling. One might forget whether “abracadabra” is
hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on “rhinoceros”,
but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost
anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have
no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room
how to write some particularly elusive character.
As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing system,
here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered constantly while
I was in France. (Again I use French as my canonical example of an “easy
” foreign language.) I wake up one morning in Paris and turn on the radio
. An ad comes on, and I hear the word “amortisseur” several times. “What
’s an amortisseur?” I think to myself, but as I am in a hurry to make
an appointment, I forget to look the word up in my haste to leave the
apartment. A few hours later I’m walking down the street, and I read,
on a sign, the word “AMORTISSEUR”—the word I heard earlier this morning
. Beneath the word on the sign is a picture of a shock absorber. Aha!
So “amortisseur” means “shock absorber”. And voila! I’ve learned a new
word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when
reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this
morning—one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the
word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by
simply reading the word phonetically—“a-mor-tis-seur”. Before long
I can retrieve the word easily, use it in conversation, or write it in
a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign language
begins to seem less daunting.
When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite
different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting
but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up
unfamiliar characters in, but it’s almost impossible to look up a character
in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street (more on
dictionary look-up later), and so I didn’t get nearly as much phonetic
reinforcement as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with
a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any
of the characters unless I first look them up. And even then, the next
time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up again. And
again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily
.
4. Because you can’t cheat by using cognates.
I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three
years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish
-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of
curiosity. “Hmm,” I thought to myself. “I’ve never studied Spanish in
my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand.” At random I picked
a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found
I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information
from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were
killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after
take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical
situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had
just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been
found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging
realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish
newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than
three years of studying Chinese.
What was going on here? Why was this “foreign” language so transparent
? The reason was obvious: cognates—those helpful words that are just
English words with a little foreign make-up.9 I could read the article
because most of the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto
, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing
these words as just English words in disguise is about as difficult as
noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his glasses. That
these quasi-English words are easier to learn than Chinese characters
(which might as well be quasi-Martian) goes without saying.
Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go
into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor’s office, and, with a
minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork (“diabetes” is
just “diabetes” and “insulin” is “insulina”, it turns out), you’re saved
. In China you’d be a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary
with you, and even then you would probably pass out while frantically
looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which brings
me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.
5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.
One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is
that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about
the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was
in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests
in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a
word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball
! Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language,
but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.
Figuring out all the radicals and their variants, plus dealing with the
ambiguous characters with no obvious radical at all is a stupid, time
-consuming chore that slows the learning process down by a factor of ten
as compared to other languages with a sensible alphabet or the equivalent
. I’d say it took me a good year before I could reliably find in the dictionary
any character I might encounter. And to this day, I will very occasionally
stumble onto a character that I simply can’t find at all, even after
ten minutes of searching. At such times I raise my hands to the sky, Job
-like, and consider going into telemarketing.
Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on
earth. I currently have more than twenty Chinese dictionaries of various
kinds on my desk, and they all have a specific and distinct use. There
are dictionaries with simplified characters used on the mainland, dictionaries
with the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and dictionaries
with both. There are dictionaries that use the Wade-Giles romanization
, dictionaries that use pinyin, and dictionaries that use other more surrealistic
romanization methods. There are dictionaries of classical Chinese particles
, dictionaries of Beijing dialect, dictionaries of chéngyu�� (four-
character idioms), dictionaries of xie��ho��uyu�� (special allegorical
two-part sayings), dictionaries of ya��nyu�� (proverbs), dictionaries
of Chinese communist terms, dictionaries of Buddhist terms, reverse dictionaries
… on and on. An exhaustive hunt for some elusive or problematic lexical
item can leave one’s desk “strewn with dictionaries as numerous as dead
soldiers on a battlefield.”10
For looking up unfamiliar characters there is another method called the
four-corner system. This method is very fast—rumored to be, in principle
, about as fast as alphabetic look-up (though I haven’t met anyone yet
who can hit the winning number each time on the first try). Unfortunately
, learning this method takes about as much time and practice as learning
the Dewey decimal system. Plus you are then at the mercy of the few dictionaries
that are arranged according to the numbering scheme of the four-corner
system. Those who have mastered this system usually swear by it. The
rest of us just swear.
Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with
the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it’s pretty obvious
where the word boundaries lie—there are spaces between the words. If
you don’t know the word in question, it’s usually fairly clear what you
should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue
, of course, but for my purposes here, what I’m saying is basically correct
.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite
a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work
to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it’s often trial and error to
look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD
ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE STALE MATE
BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR ‘S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF
HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW
CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. “THE
FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE” HE PRO CLAIM ED. “FOR A CENS OR OR AN
EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST
TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A
DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE.”
Imagine how this difference would compound the dictionary look-up difficulties
of a non-native speaker of English. The passage is pretty trivial for
us to understand, but then we already know English. For them it would
often be hard to tell where the word boundaries were supposed to be.
So it is, too, with someone trying to learn Chinese.
6. Then there’s classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years
of study you’ll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way
third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and
Voltaire, you’re sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably
read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at
least tenure.
Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially in Chinese
paintings and character scrolls, and most people will assume anyone literate
in Chinese can read it. It’s truly embarrassing to be out at a Chinese
restaurant, and someone asks you to translate some characters on a wall
hanging.
“Hey, you speak Chinese. What does this scroll say?” You look up and see
that the characters are written in wenyan, and in incomprehensible “grass
-style” calligraphy to boot. It might as well be an EKG readout of a dying
heart patient.
“Uh, I can make out one or two of the characters, but I couldn’t tell
you what it says,” you stammer. “I think it’s about a phoenix or something
.”
“Oh, I thought you knew Chinese,” says your friend, returning to their
menu. Never mind that an honest-to-goodness Chinese person would also
just scratch their head and shrug; the face that is lost is yours.
Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is
deliberately impossible. Here’s a secret that sinologists won’t tell
you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already
know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical
Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and
in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among
a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew
the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner
can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself
, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the ”
personal” section of the classified ads that say things like: “Hndsm.
SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr.,
twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans
. mach., no weirdos please.”
In fairness, it should be said that classical Chinese gets easier the
more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in one, or swimming
the English channel in a straitjacket.
7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.
Well, perhaps that’s too harsh. But it is true that there are too many
of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists
, or—even worse—by a committee of linguists. It is, of course, a
very tricky task to devise a romanization method; some are better than
others, but all involve plenty of counterintuitive spellings.11 And if
you’re serious about a career in Chinese, you’ll have to grapple with
at least four or five of them, not including the bopomofu phonetic symbols
used in Taiwan. There are probably a dozen or more romanization schemes
out there somewhere, most of them mercifully obscure and rightfully ignored
. There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs
of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new
romanization method.
- Because tonal languages are weird.
Okay, that’s very Anglo-centric, I know it. But I have to mention this
problem because it’s one of the most common complaints about learning
Chinese, and it’s one of the aspects of the language that westerners
are notoriously bad at. Every person who tackles Chinese at first has
a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible
that shu��xué means “mathematics” while shu��xue�� means “blood
transfusion”, or that guo��jia��ng means “you flatter me” while guo
��jia��ng means “fruit paste”?
By itself, this property of Chinese would be hard enough; it means that
, for us non-native speakers, there is this extra, seemingly irrelevant
aspect of the sound of a word that you must memorize along with the vowels
and consonants. But where the real difficulty comes in is when you start
to really use Chinese to express yourself. You suddenly find yourself
straitjacketed—when you say the sentence with the intonation that
feels natural, the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish
say something like “Hey, that’s my water glass you’re drinking out of!
“, and you follow your intonational instincts—that is, to put a distinct
falling tone on the first character of the word for “my”—you will
have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.
Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature
. With non-tonal languages you can basically import, mutatis mutandis,
your habitual ways of emphasizing, negating, stressing, and questioning
. The results may be somewhat non-native but usually understandable. Not
so with Chinese, where your intonational contours must always obey the
tonal constraints of the specific words you’ve chosen. Chinese speakers
, of course, can express all of the intonational subtleties available
in non-tonal languages—it’s just that they do it in a way that is somewhat
alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you first begin using
your Chinese to talk about subjects that actually matter to you, you
find that it feels somewhat like trying to have a passionate argument
with your hands tied behind your back—you are suddenly robbed of some
vital expressive tools you hadn’t even been aware of having. -
Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently
met.
Language and culture cannot be separated, of course, and one of the main
reasons Chinese is so difficult for Americans is that our two cultures
have been isolated for so long. The reason reading French sentences like
“Le président Bush assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement am
éricain va continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace irakienne
,” is about as hard as deciphering pig Latin is not just because of the
deep Indo-European family resemblance, but also because the core concepts
and cultural assumptions in such utterances stem from the same source
. We share the same art history, the same music history, the same history
history—which means that in the head of a French person there is basically
the same set of archetypes and the same cultural cast of characters that
’s in an American’s head. We are as familiar with Rimbaud as they are
with Rambo. In fact, compared to the difference between China and the
U.S., American culture and and French culture seem about as different
as Peter Pan and Skippy peanut butter.
Speaking with a Chinese person is usually a different matter. You just
can’t drop Dickens, Tarzan, Jack the Ripper, Goethe, or the Beatles into
a conversation and always expect to be understood. I once had a Chinese
friend who had read the first translations of Kafka into Chinese, yet
didn’t know who Santa Claus was. China has had extensive contact with
the West in the last few decades, but there is still a vast sea of knowledge
and ideas that is not shared by both cultures.
Similarly, how many Americans other than sinophiles have even a rough
idea of the chronology of China’s dynasties? Has the average history major
here ever heard of Qin Shi Huangdi and his contribution to Chinese culture
? How many American music majors have ever heard a note of Peking Opera
, or would recognize a pipa if they tripped over one? How many otherwise
literate Americans have heard of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, or even Mozi?
What this means is that when Americans and Chinese get together, there
is often not just a language barrier, but an immense cultural barrier
as well. Of course, this is one of the reasons the study of Chinese is
so interesting. It is also one of the reasons it is so damn hard.
Conclusion
I could go on and on, but I figure if the reader has bothered to read
this far, I’m preaching to the converted, anyway. Those who have tackled
other difficult languages have their own litany of horror stories, I’
m sure. But I still feel reasonably confident in asserting that, for an
average American, Chinese is significantly harder to learn than any of
the other thirty or so major world languages that are usually studied
formally at the university level (though Japanese in many ways comes
close). Not too interesting for linguists, maybe, but something to consider
if you’ve decided to better yourself by learning a foreign language,
and you’re thinking “Gee, Chinese looks kinda neat.”
It’s pretty hard to quantify a process as complex and multi-faceted as
language-learning, but one simple metric is to simply estimate the time
it takes to master the requisite language-learning skills. When you consider
all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire—ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization
methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified
and traditional)—it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one
is “learning to learn” Chinese.
How much harder is Chinese? Again, I’ll use French as my canonical “easy
language”. This is a very rough and intuitive estimate, but I would say
that it takes about three times as long to reach a level of comfortable
fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Chinese as it takes to reach
a comparable level in French. 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.
One could perhaps view learning languages as being similar to learning
musical instruments. Despite the esoteric glories of the harmonica literature
, it’s probably safe to say that the piano is a lot harder and more time
-consuming to learn. To extend the analogy, there is also the fact that
we are all virtuosos on at least one “instrument” (namely, our native
language), and learning instruments from the same family is easier than
embarking on a completely different instrument. A Spanish person learning
Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas
an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn
to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.
Someone once said that learning Chinese is “a five-year lesson in humility
“. I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have
mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having
studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the
phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal
, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.
There is still the awe-inspiring fact that Chinese people manage to learn
their own language very well. Perhaps they are like the gradeschool kids
that Baroque performance groups recruit to sing Bach cantatas. The story
goes that someone in the audience, amazed at hearing such youthful cherubs
flawlessly singing Bach’s uncompromisingly difficult vocal music, asks
the choir director, “But how are they able to perform such difficult
music?”
“Shh—not so loud!” says the director, “If you don’t tell them it’s
difficult, they never know.”
Bibliography
(A longer version of this paper is available through CRCC, Indiana University
, 510 N. Fess, Bloomington, IN, 47408.)
Chen, Heqin, (1928)”Yutiwen yingyong zihui” [Characters used in vernacular
literature], Shanghai.
DeFrancis, John (1966) “Why Johnny Can’t Read Chinese”, Journal of the
Chinese Language Teachers Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb. 1966, pp.
1-20.
DeFrancis, John (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu
: University of Hawaii Press.
DeFrancis, John (1989) Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing
Systems, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Kennedy, George (1964) “A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese”, in Selected
Works of George Kennedy, Tien-yi Li (ed.), New Haven: Far Eastern Publications
.Mair, Victor (1986) “The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage
Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries
and Current Lexicographical Projects”, Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 1, February
, 1986 (Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania).
Zhao, Yuanren, (1972) Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Anwar S. Dil
(ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Notes- I am speaking of the writing system here, but the difficulty of
the writing system has such a pervasive effect on literacy and general
language mastery that I think the statement as a whole is still valid
. back - John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu
: University of Hawaii Press, 1984, p.153. Most of the issues in this
paper are dealt with at length and with great clarity in both this book
and in his Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, Honolulu
: University of Hawaii Press, 1989. back - Incidentally, I’m aware that much of what I’ve said above applies
to Japanese as well, but it seems clear that the burden placed on a learner
of Japanese is much lighter because (a) the number of Chinese characters
used in Japanese is “only” about 2,000—fewer by a factor of two or
three compared to the number needed by the average literate Chinese reader
; and (b) the Japanese have phonetic syllabaries (the hiragana and katakana
characters), which are nearly 100% phonetically reliable and are in many
ways easier to master than chaotic English orthography is. back - See, for ex., Chen Heqin, “Yutiwen yingyong zihui” [Characters used
in vernacular literature], Shanghai, 1928. back - John DeFrancis deals with this issue, among other places, in “Why
Johnny Can’t Read Chinese”, Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers
Association, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb. 1966, pp. 1-20. back -
George Kennedy, “A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese”, in Selected
Works of George Kennedy, Tien-yi Li (ed.), New Haven, 1964, p. 8. back -
Zhao Yuanren, Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics, Anwar S. Dil
(ed.), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 92. back - John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, p. 109.
back - Charles Hockett reminds me that many of my examples are really instances
of loan words, not cognates, but rather than take up space dealing with
the issue, I will blur the distinction a bit here. There are phonetic
loan words from English into Chinese, of course, but they are scarce
curiosities rather than plentiful semantic moorings. back - A phrase taken from an article by Victor Mair with the deceptively
boring title ” The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage
Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries
and Current Lexicographical Projects” (Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 1, February
, 1986, Dept. of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania). Mair includes
a rather hilarious but realistic account of the tortuous steeplechase
of looking up a low-frequency lexical item in his arsenal of Chinese
dictionaries. back - I have noticed from time to time that the romanization method first
used tends to influence one’s accent in Chinese. It seems to me a Chinese
person with a very keen ear could distinguish Americans speaking, say
, Wade-Giles-accented Chinese from pinyin-accented Chinese. back
- I am speaking of the writing system here, but the difficulty of
