‘Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard’ at The ChinesePod Blog with Ken Carroll

‘Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard’

Published by chinesepod August 29th, 2006 in Learning Chinese.

This article has been around for some time, but it seems to be doing the reounds at the moment. A number of people referred it to me today.

Ken Carroll

48 Responses to “'Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard'”

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1 马赛儿 Aug 29th, 2006 at 7:51 pm

That’s an interesting artcile, and I hadn’t come across it before. I don’t agree with the author’s statement in the beginning though. He says that unlike, say Spanish, which is more easily studied by, again say, the French, Chinese is difficult for everyone.

I have a friend who came to China at about the same time as I did. We both started learning Chinese from scratch but she was quite fluent in Cantonese. She’s frm Australia but at her family home they speak Cantonese; her parents immigrated from China to Australia. She had much less trouble picking up on Chinese, and after half a year was at a level where I am not even today, a year and a half into my China experience.

Any other people who have the same experience? Or maybe some Cantonese speakers who can subscribe to that, or rather tell me that what I say is rubbish
2 Lantian Aug 29th, 2006 at 8:14 pm

Darn Urban Myths

These things never die, all a load of poo-poo.
3 pandagator Aug 29th, 2006 at 8:25 pm

That’s so weird, I had printed out this paper a looong time ago, and had just pulled it out of my binder and read it again. Then I came to the blog, and bam, it was posted here!
Yes, it’s much easier for Cantonese speakers to learn Mandarin. First of all, because some of the words are very similar in pronounciation. Secondly, because their brain is already used to tones (and Mandarin is a step down from Cantonese in that respect). Third, because they have had some form of exposure to it over the course of their life. Fourth, they know the writing, are familiar with radicals and the way dictionaries are laid out, etc. I’m sure there are even more reasons for this. Chinese for English speakers is just a big linguistic shock to the brain. There’s just a seemingly overwhelming amount of things to study.
4 pandagator Aug 29th, 2006 at 8:31 pm

Lantian, please explain why you feel that way, because I have had very similar experiences to Moser.
5 Fu Da-Wei Aug 29th, 2006 at 9:14 pm

The ONLY thing that pains me about Mandarin are the endless parade of short, choppy, monosyllabic homophones. (Of course, that’s sorta like saying the only thing about chess that pains me are the white pieces). In Russian, you have those 32-syllables words — you can almost looke’m up in the dictionary before the speaker gets the entire word out. But Mandarin? You miss a key word, all you can do is smile, nod and say “Dui, dui!”
6 Bob Mrotek Aug 29th, 2006 at 9:22 pm

Two or three things come to mind. First of all in my (always humble) opinion you can’t compare languages without comparing things like culture, history, and even climate. For example, in places where there is snow the people have multiple words for snow depending upon what type it is. In the United States between Chicago and Buffalo, NY the people talk a lot about “lake effect snow”. Everybody in that region knows that lake effect snow is mostly light and fluffy and gets very deep. I read somewhere that the Eskimo people have dozens of words for snow and for obvious reasons. I imagine that the Arabic peoples have multiple words for sand. In taking a look at “Eastern” languages (Eastern to those in the West) I have noticed that the the graphics of the words tend to have much more importance than the Roman letters that we are used to. I have studied Arabic somewhat and it is incredible how much significance is contained in each letter of their alphabet. In Hebrew as well. They also use sounds that we don’t in English and don’t use sounds that we do. For instance…there is no sound for the letter “p” in Arabic. Pepsi Cola is therefore labeled “Bebsi Cola”. It sounds like somebody with a bad cold. Like many people in the United States, I took Spanish for a couple of years in High School because it was supposed to be easy. All you have to do is put the letter “o” on the end of every word and speak very loud (right Aric?). When I came to Mexico I found that my Gringo Spanish was utterly useless and that the verbs in Spanish have 14 tenses (seven simple and seven with “haber”) and that at least half of Mexican Spanish consists of double meanings, idiomatic expressions, and phrases that carried over from antiquity in Spain. In English we say that something very black is “pitch black” or “black as pitch” but in Spanish we say it is like “boca de lobo”, like the mouth of a wolf. I am of Polish Heritage. My Grandparents spoke Polish fluently. My parents could speak some Polish and I speak it only a little bit. I have taken courses in Polish also. Believe me, Chinese is easier. I really think that if people studied harder, longer, and really “drilled down” as Ken likes to say they would find that Chinese is more rewarding and interesting than it is difficult. They expect to be able to acquire the language in a fixed amount of time. I suggest that it is a lifelong endeavor.

Mexico Bob
7 Lantian Aug 29th, 2006 at 9:40 pm

Hi Pandagator,

I don’t disagree with the notion that a Cantonese speaker might find learning Mandarin easier than an English speaker. There are however plenty of Cantonese that have never found learning Mandarin easy. There are also English speakers that find Spanish easier but plenty who found it plenty tough tacos. There’s plenty to learn in any language. And any language can be fun to learn.

The theme of the article is that Mandarin is an especially hard language to learn and harder than other languages, I believe this to be poop.

Pandagator, I’m joking around a bit, but seriously if you are having some tough experiences with learning Mandarin, give some specifics as there are plenty of solutions and ideas out there, and I’ll certainly chip in.

Ken,
You’re just itching to ignite a blog bonfire aren’t ya!

Mexico Bob, I agree-o with mucho todos everything you said. I also wish for some fish tacos, chips and salsa. Ole’
8 Bob Mrotek Aug 29th, 2006 at 9:51 pm

Lantian, Come on down (or over) and we will have a pachanga (fiesta) in your honor. Just don’t forget to bring some Polish sausage, sauer kraut, and dill pickles!
9 Ed Aug 29th, 2006 at 9:57 pm

I read this article a few weeks back and for a while it tipped the balance in my love-hate relationship with the Chinese language - a very demotivating piece indeed. Makes me think/hope that all the Chinese will increasingly be more bi-lingual because the language that is easier to learn will win the battle in the end so why bother to clmib the mountain.
10 Bob Mrotek Aug 29th, 2006 at 10:06 pm

It seems to me that the current generation of Chinese are more motivated by money than they are by history and tradition and so that may be one of the reasons they become bilingual. However, if Chinese is supposedly so difficult for the Chinese people themselves as the article implies then why hasn’t the language evolved toward a simpler form long before now…like hundreds of years ago? For me the reason to learn Chinese is the reason that some people climb a mountain. Because it is there
11 Sharon in Seattle Aug 29th, 2006 at 11:47 pm

My parents speak Cantonese, but I grew up in the U.S. so I didn’t pick up reading or writing - just spoken Cantonese. My parents sent me to Saturday Chinese school when I was a kid and because it was in Mandarin I didn’t understand anything. I was the 10 year old in a class full of 5 year olds. I started studying Mandarin in college and yes, the tones are easier, but memorizing characters is incredibly challenging. My french is light years ahead of my Chinese, much like the author of the essay above. My Cantonese-speaking mom learned Mandarin from watching movies - her listening comprehension and vocabulary are excellent - but her pronunciation is awful to listen to! “Ce4 suo3″ is “ceee4 suo3″ and instead of “zhe4 li3″ she says “jie2 li3.” Hen3 nan2 ting1.
12 pandagator Aug 30th, 2006 at 12:57 am

I guess I have to clarify my view. I once knew a girl I worked with who spoke Cantonese. She once said to me, “Mandarin? That’s too hard!” I was totally surprised. I studied Cantonese for a while, and at least to me, Mandarin seemed easier (plus there are just so much more tools available for learning Mandarin than for Cantonese). *Spoken* Mandarin really isn’t that hard. It’s just the tones that drive me crazy sometimes. Context is SO much more important in Mandarin than in English.
*Written* Chinese, on the other hand, is near torture. After a year of study, trying to read the shortest sentences in Chinese is brain racking and depressing. I can guess from the context, but usually I am either wrong or missed out on a key point. Take this website for instance: http://www.worldjournal.com/
I cannot read a single sentence all the way through (pronounciation or meaning). Funny thing is, if I saw it in pinyin I usually know right away what it is about. Writing Chinese…well, don’t even get me started. Sometimes I forget how to write the simplest word. I’m pretty sure every other language in the world allows you to guess at the spelling and people might get it. I don’t even know how to guess at writing characters. Perhaps someone can help me with that. Then there is the grass script that Moser talks about. We do have cursive in English, but in Chinese I swear there are some parts missing in the calligraphic character. So when it comes to *written* Chinese, I have had to learn pinyin, traditional characters, simplified characters, and most recently bopomofo. But there are also oracle bone script, greater and lesser seal script, clerky script, running script, and as mentioned, grass script! I do consider character study fun and interesting, but also highly maddening…
13 Andrea Aug 30th, 2006 at 1:16 am

Put me down in the “I’ve come this far — can’t stop now” category. Lord above. There is no end to this language. None whatsoever. It’s like some nightmarish Matroishka doll that never ends, or one of those optical illusions of a mirror within a mirror. Or like Leslie Cheung in the movie Ashes of Time, when he says he wanted to see what was beyond the desolate mesas and desert, and found it was more mesas and more desert.

One method I’ve been using lately (for the past 6 months) has been to “read” newspaper articles on a wide variety of topics. A fellow language enthusiast at work who learned English as a second language advised me not to do this. She said it was better to read articles on the same topic until you have really mastered the vocabulary for that topic. I wouldn’t listen.

The result has been feeling like I’m spinning my wheels and making no progress. I’m exaggerating only slightly. Every article has new vocabulary that must be looked up. Then by the time I kaleidoscope my way back around to previous topics again, I’ve forgotten all the vocabulary for that topic because I really only looked the word up once or twice, wrote it down on the article, and never saw it again.

Now I’m willing to listen to this person’s advice. I’m sure part of her method must be the psychological feeling of accomplishment, as you master a set of vocabulary and don’t have to struggle anew each time you read articles from the selected topic.

Anyway, trust me folks, Moser knows what he’s talking about!
14 chris(mandarin_student) Aug 30th, 2006 at 3:56 am

I have a Chinese language partner who speaks pretty good English.

I have just been helping him with some of the trickier English aspects of his MBA dissertation. After you spend some time trying to explain the convoluted justification for something in business English (that you just ‘know’ is right or wrong but find hard to justify using grammar rules) you begin to feel for all those poor souls that attempt to learn English. We don’t even have nice little stories for many of our idiomatic expressions (we forgot the origins long ago).

A whole bunch of Asian people can speak pretty good English, I for one am not going to let the side down :).
15 Ma Ding Aug 30th, 2006 at 6:09 am

Say I’m a teacher. In Room A, I have 100 students, and I tell them that the subject matter is difficult but with some effort it’s not too hard to master, and I am confident they can do it. In room B I have another 100 students, and I tell them the subject matter is virtually impossible for them to master, and that I don’t think they can do it. I teach the exact same material in each room. When the course is over, and I test and measure the results, guess what ? Room A scores will be higher.

My point is if one wants to believe that learning chinese is incredibly hard, then it’s going to be incredibly hard. Belief systems matter, and it’s easy to create self-fulfilling prophesies. Quite obviously this way of looking at things has limits in it’s applications and validity, but it’s served me pretty well. One of the biggest and way understated benefits of the ChinesePod approach is that it sends a subtle message to the students that chinese IS easy. One step at a time. If the podcasts were say 45 minutes long each, and at the beginning, Ken or Jenny said “well this one’s a really, really hard lesson - maybe you can’t handle it” , then I’d predict a shrinking subcriber base. But that’s not the methodology; it’s small, incremental steps. It’s like that old adage that many of us have heard in business trainings: how do you climb to the top of Mount Everest ? one step at a time. Today there are 80 year old women who smoke who reach the summit, and there are blind people who also reach the summit. How do they reach the top ? step by step, by step.

I guess whining and moaning how hard something is, like this author is doing, is okay once in a while - sort of lets you vent some frustrations, and in a community setting helps increase community. And I am sure that is what some of the above posts that agree with the author are doing - just venting. But that kind of attitude needs to be the exception. I’ll have to go back and read more of his blog - I’d hope he has some encouraging posts in there as well. Based on the one post I read, he sounds like a nattering nabob of negatavism. At the end of the day I just think if one wants it bad enough, mastering Chinese is totally do-able. All kinds of things in life are hard; that doesn’t mean you don’t go for it.
16 Will Aug 30th, 2006 at 6:24 am

Anyone who says Chinese is the hardest language to learn should try Navaho, or Tlingit or Haida, or Tiwi, Warlpiri and Arrernte. They all have verb morphology or word order that could turn a Chinese speaker’s brain inside out. Chinese is just a high profile language that is harder to learn for most or the developed world than most of the other high profile languages. Try Arabic too. It’s heaps of fun. The plural of film is aflam.
17 John Aug 30th, 2006 at 6:26 am

Ma Ding,

Great comment. I wonder if perhaps the article has become so popular because people are realizing how important Chinese is becoming and they want an excuse to be lazy and not learn it.

That said, I agree with Pandagator: spoken Mandarin is not so hard. Spoken Mandarin + 汉字, however, is quite a challenge, and it certainly will take longer to learn than, say, Spanish.
18 pandagator Aug 30th, 2006 at 8:21 am

Thanks John. Really, I am just venting my frustration. I’m in it for the long haul, I have no inclination to stop learning Chinese. I hope I haven’t discouraged anyone, I’m just speaking my mind. 大家，加油！
19 Lantian Aug 30th, 2006 at 8:30 am

CURSIVE FUN ,

Hi Pandagator and others out there who like that ‘grass’ style script. Here’s something quite enjoyable that I’m trying. While there are many schools and styles of writing hanzi, I have for a long time just wanted to be able to handwrite and in cursive with a ball point pen. Most adult Chinese can. I’m an adult — hence I can too! But looking at how people typically learn in China I was a bit disenchanted, hours, weeks years copying hanzi, getting out the ink, paper, brush…well it just wasn’t looking like a do able thing.

But that’s wrong, just like Moser’s negative, vent-rant, pseudo-factual article! . Pandagator, I see from your blog that you may sometimes have a chance to meet Chinese people and you’re even in class now. Here’s what to do, don’t try anything like try to learn how to write ‘grass’ style. Just ask some people how they write some characters you already know. I’m talking 5-10 minutes, one or two characters. It’s fun!

For example 我，的，不，是。Have them write it in cursive, they may print block write it if you don’t ask. See how they write it. I have had to ask people to write it reeeeal slow to see where they go. I then re-write the character big, about an inch in block style and take a highlighter to re-write it cursive with the Chinese person watching me. There actually is an under-lying rationale for where to scribble but it’s almost impossible to decipher if you only look at a finished grass style/cursive character. Later on I practice a little, re-write some text messages that people have sent me. (Because they’re short, meaningful bits of Chinese)

This makes it memorable and I’ve been building my ‘handwriting’ on what I already know, going a little bit at time. The secret is that by going slow I am actually taking a short-cut around a typical Chinese teacher’s predication that I would need 8 years to learn this.

And John….

Spoken Mandarin + 汉字, however, is quite a challenge, and it certainly will take longer to learn than, say, Spanish.

Now why are you enabling the myth to continue. It took you what, 3-4 years to learn more than 10,000 hanzi and combinations. That seems similar to what one might expect in Spanish. Don’t you think that some of the Japanese kanji helped with the hanzi? So if you compare say Japanese person learning Chinese then trying to learn English, to an English person learning Spanish then Chinese, okay I can agree we’re talking similar levels of ‘toughness”, and for the Japanese person English is harder than Chinese, conversely Chinese is harder than Spanish for an English person.

But it is a myth that Spanish is easier than Chinese when said without qualification. And let me remind everyone of how many Japanese friends I have with extremely poor Chinese, bless them, and how many friends in the U.S. who cannot say enchilada por favor.

You’re in a responsible position now, be careful what you say!! You’re better than little Bush, smarter and taller.
20 Lantian Aug 30th, 2006 at 8:32 am

sorry about not ending that above blockquote properly. Opps…English is the toughest language to write ever, and I’m just gonna give up. Btw Ma Ding, I think you expressed things very well.
21 海宁 / Henning Aug 30th, 2006 at 9:33 am

There might be some slight flaws in the argumentation of Mr. Moser (like comparing 200 years old European literature with 2000 years old Confucius) but I think the article has some value for us here…send it to all your friends and reap some respect for tackling this “impossible task”. A tremendous boasting vehicle. 开玩笑
22 Jeff Aug 30th, 2006 at 9:56 am

I think that learning any language that doesn’t have a phonetic writing system is fundamentally going to be more difficult than one that does. When you are learning new words you have to remember how the word is said, it’s meaning, and it’s character(s). Therefore it takes more time to learn it and thus the language is harder to learn. Of course Chinese is not impossible. I think anyone can learn any language as long as they put enough time and effort into it. But when it comes down to it, if you’re learning to read, write, and speak Chinese you will have to invest more time than if you were learning Spanish.

But that’s what makes it fun.
23 Lantian Aug 30th, 2006 at 10:23 am

When I hear the word comprendo, I have to also learn if it is male or female, then I have to learn how conjugate it, I have to learn what it means, but yah I just have to write c-o-m-p-r-e-n-d-o which makes it easy. If I hear dui then I need to learn it means correct, I don’t have to conjugate it, there’s no male or female and it’s only 对 five strokes with two radicals I already know and one tone which I heard when I heard it. This makes it easier than knowing when to say tu compredemenos. 我也开玩笑！

Don’t forget Chinese does have a phonetic writing system, pinyin. Like John loves to remind us, it’s an exact representation of the sounds of Chinese.
24 reuben Aug 30th, 2006 at 11:30 am

Moser sounds a little bitter…must’ve been the incident where he lost face not being able to read the scroll in the restaurant.

Now, is he talking about Mandarin specifically or Chinese in general? Because to me Mandarin seems to be one of the easier dialects of Chinese to learn. Also, for a tonal language, having only 4 tones is pretty tame. And pronounciation? Sure, Mandarin has it’s difficulties, but it’s a walk in the park compared pronouncing Vietnamese or Korean, IMHO.
25 Art Kho 许冠俊 Aug 30th, 2006 at 11:33 am

Fu Da Wei,

Aside from 对对，we can also imitate Ken and say 真的吗？

Instead of saying Mandarin is so damn hard, we can play with semantics and just say Mandarin is challenging and all challenges can be conquered!

Seriously, I speak the Minnan (Hokkien) dialect. When I was in China, I found it challenging to speak Mandarin. I was translating English to Mandarin but my English-Mandarin mapping is very limited. After five days in China, it dawned on me to map my Minnan to Mandarin, which proved to be a little bit more effective. There are a number of Minnan words which sound very close to Mandarin. I was able to guess a few Mandarin words from my Minnan vocabulary. However, I still find Mandarin to be tough. There’s only so much pinyin can do for me. That’s why I make sure to read the Chinesepod lesson text so that I can see what Jenny and company said. I may be the only person in the world who requires text visualization in order to understand spoken Mandarin. This makes for an inefficient way of learning Mandarin vocabulary.

How do the rest of you learn and remember Chinese vocabulary?
26 AuntySue Aug 30th, 2006 at 11:41 am

We know that learning any language takes a long time. You have to enjoy the learning process (not just the outcome) because you’ll spend so long doing the learning. Liking the chosen language is more important than how much effort it takes.

Learning to knit really well takes a lifetime. Enlightenment takes several.

Comparisons are meaningless. You do it because you want to, and when you stop wanting to do it, you stop doing it for a while. Simple.
27 John Aug 30th, 2006 at 2:51 pm

Lantian,

Now why are you enabling the myth to continue. It took you what, 3-4 years to learn more than 10,000 hanzi and combinations. That seems similar to what one might expect in Spanish. Don’t you think that some of the Japanese kanji helped with the hanzi? So if you compare say Japanese person learning Chinese then trying to learn English, to an English person learning Spanish then Chinese, okay I can agree we’re talking similar levels of ‘toughness”, and for the Japanese person English is harder than Chinese, conversely Chinese is harder than Spanish for an English person.

But it is a myth that Spanish is easier than Chinese when said without qualification. And let me remind everyone of how many Japanese friends I have with extremely poor Chinese, bless them, and how many friends in the U.S. who cannot say enchilada por favor.

You’re in a responsible position now, be careful what you say!! You’re better than little Bush, smarter and taller.

Note that I said “Mandarin + 汉字”. For Japanese people, it would be “Mandarin + some 汉字”. I was referring to the case of someone starting from zero with 汉字.

Come on, do I have to qualify everything I say? You’re a smart guy, I’m just giving you some credit…

For us, learning 10,000 Spanish words is not at all comparable to learning 10,000 hanzi combinations because Spanish uses the Roman alphabet (which we already know, and need only adapt slightly), consisting of some 26 letters, plus their capitals, plus some diacritical marks, whereas Chinese would require the memorization of about 2,000 characters. Not only is the number 2,000 way higher then 52(ish), but most of those 2,000 Chinese characters far exceed the average Roman letter in complexity.

I don’t mean to rant; I’m beginning to sound like Moser. My point is just that the Chinese language itself is not really very difficult, but the Chinese writing system makes learning Chinese a lot more work than learning other languages. (I never said it’s not worthwhile, though!)
28 adina Aug 30th, 2006 at 3:29 pm

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to share this Chinese Paraphraser you might find useful.

Hope it helps!

Cheers,
Adina
29 Alaric Radosh Aug 30th, 2006 at 10:39 pm

The problem about the word “difficult” is that it conveys a subjective feeling, not objective fact.

What are the facts?

Well, the only facts are: learning Chinese takes regular, consistent effort over the course of several years.

As long as one does put in regular, consistent effort for several years, one learns Chinese.

And, if one is enjoying that effort, could it be called “difficult”?

Whether or not one enjoys learning Chinese has everything to do with the attitude and psychology of the student and nothing to do with the nature of the language itself.

A “Chinese is fun and easy” philosophy might be more helpful.

If one is struggling in their studies, a “Chinese is easy” perspective might prod one into rethinking their approach until one discovers a way to enjoy their studies more.

That is one of the things I like about Chinesepod. There seems to be a big drive behind Chinesepod to discover the most fun, motivating, thrilling and successful ways for one to learn Chinese. It isn’t sunk in the “school of hard knocks” philosophy as is so much CSL work.
30 Bob Mrotek Aug 30th, 2006 at 11:35 pm

hey John, it is funny that you should mention 10,000 words. I think that is just about right. When I started studying Spanish in earnest I decided to keep track of how many words I was adding to my vocabulary. Each time I learned a new word I would write it on a little card, one side English and the other side Spanish. The cards were made from 3 inch by 5 inch file cards that I cut into thirds. The cards generally come in packs of 100 cards each so one pack will make 300 little cards. I used the bottom section of corn flakes boxes to hold the cards and found that 900 cards fit neatly into a corn flakes box “tray”. I filled 10 such trays in a two year period (9000 words total) at the rate of anywhere from 10 to 15 words per day on average. The words were gleaned from billboards, newspapers, package labels, conversations, television, radio, and any place else where I could find words of common usage. By the time I filled 10 boxes I found that I didn’t need to do this anymore and could comfortably add new words to my vocabulary without much effort. Also, at the point approaching 10,000 words I felt very comfortable with the language and five or six years later I feel right at home. I imagine that it is the same with most other languages including Chinese. I still use this system with Chinese but I don’t eat corn flakes anymore (getting too fat) and rely more and more on computer technology. The problem that I had with Chinese is that I seemed to need a three sided flash card to accommodate the Characters, the Pinyin, and the English translation all on one card. The ChinesePod flashcards solved this problem…AND they have sound!!! One thing I learned is that when you can answer the phone and talk comfortably in another language by telephone you can call yourself bilingual. There is something about talking on the phone that is difficult and intimidating. Also, when you are not aware of what language you are speaking or reading or listening to you can also assume that you have arrived. Not long ago I visited a museum and I read the plaque describing the exhibit and then read another one directly below it that said the exact same thing. I was puzzled as to why they repeated the information below the first plaque on the second plaque until it dawned on me that I was reading one in Spanish and the other in English and I had not noticed the difference. I hope to be able to do the same thing in Mandarin in five to ten years. I will report back to you C-Podders when I do. I hope all of you are still around by then…and me too
31 Steve@ChinesePod Aug 31st, 2006 at 7:15 am

Brilliant comment Alaric. Three cheers for the “Chinese is fun and easy” philosophy.
32 Conrad Aug 31st, 2006 at 7:38 am

Alaric - your comments nailed it. That’s exactly why learning Mandarin is my hobby. However long it takes, I’m enjoying the journey.

As to whether it’s intrinsically difficult, doesn’t that depend on the material available? When I started, the best course I could find was at Inlingua, and it was miserable! A typewritten textbook with tones written in by hand, piss-poor audiotapes, and (in New Jersey) hard-to-find teachers. And it cost a fortune. So much has changed since then that I’ve dropped the “Jeez this is hard but cool” approach. I’ve found one that works. Three cheers for Web2.0.
33 Conrad Aug 31st, 2006 at 7:46 am

Hard to believe all those posts were inspired by an academic who thinks NYC is “the most unlivable city in America”.
Aunty Sue’s right - you have to enjoy learning to love things. Like Cities. Or languages.
34 pandagator Aug 31st, 2006 at 9:47 am

Haha, I like keeping the discussion going. Either that or I am annoying all of you. Sorry, I just like this topic. Once again, I will state what we all generally agree on:
*Spoken* Chinese is loads of fun and a bucketfull of easy. [Except tones and pronounciation…but it depends on your background]
*Witten* Chinese is interesting and possibly fun. Easy? Is there even a debate about this?
I was hoping to find some scholarly articles on complexity theory and the written language, but I have come up empty handed. In any event, Chinese has to rank up there in the top 5, along with Arabic and…well, I can only think of Arabic right now. We’ve all heard the numbers before. You have to know 2,000-3,000 characters to read a newspaper (most agree on this figure). In my estimation it would take over 5 years to learn to read and write that many characters. The average number of strokes per character is 9.8, although there do exist characters like these: 齉龘. From my interviews, Chinese people themselves find characters daunting (which possibly explains China’s literacy rate). The complexity of the written system is the very reason a “simplified” version has been adopted. It is also why Korea and Japan use simplified versions nowadays, and why Vietnam threw it out altogether in favor of a romanized script. There do exist variants such as grass script, and even regional variants such as Cantonese.

Does this give me a headache? Yes. Does this make me want to stop learning Chinese? Not at all. If Chinese people can learn them, then hopefully so can I. There are ways of making character study fun. Maybe someone will come up with a ChinesePod for Hanzi. Of course it wouldn’t be a podcast. Although it would be halarious if it was. Okay, now I’m just babbling on. Pandagator out.
35 Lantian Aug 31st, 2006 at 11:17 am

Hi Pandagator,

I think learning to write in any language takes some time. I always tend to argue when people start to say that writing hanzi is harder than other scripts.

To start the argument off right, do you agree that learning to write English is hard? I think it’s really hard to handwrite in cursive, many people can’t, and with all the spelling oddities, it must be the hardest script in the world to write! How can people learn to write English words when the spellings come from all different roots, like latin, French or German? Howw kan anywon xpect me to remembear faux paus, sowerkraut, or carpe diem?

Many more people in the world are able to write in hanzi than there are people able to write in English, so writing hanzi is easier. Right?

btw, Japanese, Korean are not simpler as they mix and match their phonetic scripts, of which Japanese has two, plus traditional hanzi. And let’s not even begin to mention Thai, beautiful but an enigma.

Is it me or has anyone else also noticed that looking at a page of Chinese hanzi seems amazingly ALL-CAPS like? I miss the up and down flow of English initial-caps and Capital letters for Names and Places. I want a movement to make CAPs for hanzi, it’ll be like Chinese 3.0

凯恩，最近忙吗？还没有看到你的汉字！
36 Mike in Jubei Aug 31st, 2006 at 11:57 am

But what I find amazing besides all that has been said is, no matter my present level of Chinese reading and writing, it doesn’t bother me to write or read right to left, top to bottom or left to right. Not sure I feel the same way about my native language American/English.

Mike in Jubei
37 Lantian Aug 31st, 2006 at 11:58 am

Hi John,

spoken Mandarin + 汉字

I did notice your use of 汉字 and thought it quite subtle and poetic, but my comment was running long and I made an editorial decision, which came back to haunt me! I guess to properly argue we’d have to start off by defining spelling and what a word and hanzi character really is because otherwise your stats are misleading.

To be quite honest and proud (for no real good reason) I can say I know many thousand English words. I really don’t think I rote memorized them or how to spell them. I’m assuming that my Chinese will also go this way. There must be some point where the hanzi, except for the most obscure or those unique few, the learning of a new ‘character’ is simply some kind of mix-and-match and context/use acquisition. Just like in English. For example, did I really learn 20 new hanzi just because at some point I realized putting kou in front of a word made it the ’sound’ as in 呵呵，哈哈，哦，? That to me seems easier than learning to add ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ … and I NEVER was able to put the correct diacritical mark in my ‘que’. To this day that stuff seems more mysterious to me than tone marks. Maybe my Spanish teacher Mr. Lopez wasn’t really that good!

I have a guess that this starts to really kick in after more rote like memorizing of about 1000-2000 characters. This is the same in English — have we all forgotten the spelling lists and constant spelling checks of our writing that we all had in elementary school? I still remember the agony of SAT words that I never ever will use again.

So to go down the road of misleading quantitative and statistical-like numbers, can I argue that 26 letters is much more and much harder than 9 basic strokes, and 52(ish) is more than a small subset of radicals of about 25 which makes up the majority of words in common spoken Chinese?

And about a Japanese learner learning Chinese, maybe my point is really that we should realize that the attrition rate is very high for learner’s of any second language. I cannot exaggerate the frustration one of my Japanase friends in the different associations of meaning to a particular hanzi versus kanji, and his inability to associate a Chinese sound with that hanzi. The Japanese or Korean students that seemingly blaze ahead of a English-speaking student in a Chinese class are also the exception in their group, they are good learners, they for whatever reasons have ‘clicked’ with the Chinese and are able to map back and forth nicely. I think you did the same thing with Spanish and English. I for one was never able to utilize my English to get past my second year of high-school Spanish, I just drew maps and pictures to get extra credit and pass the course.

Maybe it’s another way for me to say that traditional language teaching approaches and ‘truths’ create barriers to learning languages for the majority of learners and foster a kind of “intellectual, academic elitism” paradigm. Comparisons aren’t necessary in a Chinese for Dummies program, just encouragement and fun ways to access the language.

Well, well…if that wasn’t a rant, I don’t know what is. Time to hop off the Cpod wagon, remove the Internet intravenous drip, and take off for the afternoon! 我去休息一下，明天见！
38 AuntySue Aug 31st, 2006 at 4:02 pm

In the seventies I watched a lot of people wanting to learn to play the guitar in order to, hopefully, one day play House of the Rising Sun, but willing to settle for The Ballad of Hollis Brown (one 2-finger chord strummed for 3 minutes). Those who had the money would seek out a Good teacher, to their peril. They’d be taught as you would teach a child who might potentially make a career out of this activity, firm foundations, good practice habits, pushing and monitoring progress. It wasn’t right. They wanted to learn enough to have fun with their mates at the pub one night, then maybe a bit more, and take it as it comes after that. But they were surrounded with driven students and lofty role models, and succombed to peer pressure, wasting a few years on competitively ticking off a list of Segovia Studies before realising that their initial desires were valid but by now they’d lost the passion to enjoy it. The only worthwhile thing they learned was in their first lesson: It takes decades to fully master this instrument so don’t schedule your concert tours yet. Nobody tried to answer their question about time needed to learn a little bit of weekend Dylan.

Sometimes, here on the net in the noughties, I feel aspirationally inferior, grinning and playing Hollis Brown in a room full of Segovia. It passes quikly At the same time I feel very lucky that I still know what I want, and I get it daily, without constantly agonising over the timing of a projected future level of skill — if it happens it happens. Fun, reachable goals, no dazzling outcomes, but never stupid or lazy unless we permit it to be defined as such.

It is important to encourage people to enjoy playing at their weekend Chinese with dignity: it takes a thousand of us to produce each John.
39 pandagator Aug 31st, 2006 at 5:16 pm

Well said AuntySue. Lantian, I just don’t see it. Maybe it’s just me.
English characters: 26
Chinese characters: roughly 50,000, really unlimited
English stroke order: None
Chinese stroke order: Fairly important
Amount of strokes per character in English: about 3
In Chinese: 9.8
Radicals in English: None
Radicals in Chinese: 214

For each character these have to be memorized. There’s no way around it, Chinese *requires* more memorization than English. Plus, spoken to written transition is much easier with a romanized script. I bet after studying Russian for a few weeks and knowing how to say, “I have an emergency”, I could write it out. After studying all of the radicals and stroke order, after a year I couldn’t write “I have an emergency” in Chinese, despite knowing how to say it. There’s also information efficiency. If I spelled “complexion” as “kompleckshun”, you would probably still know what I mean, therefore information has been retained. If doubt the same retention rate exists in Chinese for miswritten Hanzi. I could go more in depth, but I have to go to work.
40 Fu Da-Wei Aug 31st, 2006 at 6:29 pm

Well, I’m afraid that if they tried another spelling reform (maybe one more akin to the Turkish, which was highly successful in rasing the literacy rate) — we’d probably end up having to cope with THREE writing systems: Traditional, Simplified & Reformed.

I’ve always been against state-sponsored Language Czars, like “L’Académie française” or the “Ha-Akademiyah la-Lashon ha-Ivrit” for Hebrew … but maybe that’s what China needs. Or, maybe they should just push pinyin. Heck, I dunno. It’s their language, their culture, their decision. If they make any changes, they’d better be well-planned and methodic, or they’ll really mess things up. On the other hand, hanzi is so much a part of the national character, it’s like imagining England without a Monarch.

I suspect going the pinyin route would be met with an immediate indignant anti-western backlash. What they MIGHT do is to develop a phonetic syllabry akin to what the Japanese use. Keep it very simple and easy to write and BASE IT ON Chinese root symbols. They could even borrow something like the Hebrew nikkud; a dot above the character for rising tone, below for falling tone, a dash for 3rd tone and nothing for 1st tones. Then, slip this into the language surreptitiously; first for foreign words and technical jargon. Before you know it, people will be spelling out everything with the syllabary.

Since I suggested it first, we’ll call it Fudaweiwen, or “Fuwen”. And I get a royalty.
41 KtCallista Sep 1st, 2006 at 12:21 am

I all myself a beginner of Mandarin because I am still at that level, but I have actually been picking up little bits of the language for a couple years. My husband and I both think Mandarin is the easiest language we have ever tried to learn. We both are native English speakers and between us we have had classes in Spanish, French, and Latin. Our first Mandarin “class” was given by a friend’s mom, she was visiting from Tiawan and was an elementary school teacher there. She taught us from a first grade book, and spoke no english (she didn’t know any). Her main focus was on tones. . . over and over she taught us to say Mama and Baba, until we had the tones perfect. We started by learning phonetic letters that she called ping-ying. but on the internet I have found listed as BoPoMoFo. I found this really helpful, and a large part of why I think Mandarin is an easy language to learn. I already know all the sounds! I also find romanized pinyin to be extremely difficult to use. Maybe it is becuase my teachers are Tiawanese? I wish more sites used BoPoMoFo, but if things are pronouced, like on Chinesepod I can figure it out myself.

As far as writting with Hanzi, I am just beginning. Since our teachers are largely college students our class schedule is erratic and we have had long periods of time without teachers. I still think Mandarin is a good language to learn, and not as difficult as some of the Western languages.

I think in all languages there is a feeling of “this is so hard”, but if your language has ever been spoken, there are alot of people out there that mastered it, and they probably weren’t all rocket scientists. . . so it is completely possible. After reading todays poll, I felt obligated to read a blog. Thanks for letting me put in my two cents, even if I didn’t really have alot to contribute.
42 Andrea Sep 1st, 2006 at 1:14 am

Fu Da Wei wrote:
“What they MIGHT do is to develop a phonetic syllabry akin to what the Japanese use. Keep it very simple and easy to write and BASE IT ON Chinese root symbols. They could even borrow something like the Hebrew nikkud; a dot above the character for rising tone, below for falling tone, a dash for 3rd tone and nothing for 1st tones. Then, slip this into the language surreptitiously; first for foreign words and technical jargon. Before you know it, people will be spelling out everything with the syllabary.”

Wouldn’t that be the same thing as Bo Po Mo Fo (Zhu yin Fu hao)? If you look in most Chinese dictionaries, even Mainland ones, they have a chart of this. I’m surprised they never actually use this system on the Mainland, only in Taiwan. It’s pretty handy, but they only seem to use it for children’s and young adult’s materials.

I believe Lu Xun was an advocate of abolishing the use of Chinese characters.

Somehow they abolished characters in Vietnamese. They use a Roman alphabet for all their words.

Back on the topic of how “easy” this language is. Imagine an inverted pyramid, which would represent the Chinese language, its vocabulary and usage, both written and spoken, both literary and colloquial. The easy part is getting to 95%. The hard part is getting from 95% to 100%.

I still find not that many words are completely “self explanatory” and no longer require looking up in a dictionary. I always have to double-check to be sure. You can sure get some real surprises.

I’m not saying getting to functional conversational ability is all that hard. I agree the grammar is blessedly simple. But if you check John Pasden’s Sinosplice website (his “Stages of Chinese” section), he states quite accurately that it is easy to be in the intemediate stage and delude yourself that you have achieved “mastery”. It’s getting to that advanced stage that requires an incredible amount of dedication. He’s right — every day exposure is not enough. It’s more a matter of quality than quantity.

That’s where all this “hard language” stuff comes in.

The fact that this language is sitting on top of 4,000 years of history, give or take a millenium, doesn’t make things any easier.

I guess it just has to be a labor of love.
43 Will Sep 1st, 2006 at 5:42 am

Korean also managed it with a delightful ‘alphabet’ type thing that is just different enoguh to make it their own. And if you feel like it, you can still put in the characters! Teeheehee! There have been so many writing systems proposed for Chinese, though. Everrything from alphabets, to kana systems. My favourites though are ones which use characters, but each character is a syllable regardless of meaning - just the sound. So you get the same ‘look’, but without the meaning. The drawback is that it still requires at least 450 characters and more likely over a thousand. And it assumes you’re speaking Mandarin. Ones which take dialects into account take 2000+.
44 Fu Da-Wei Sep 1st, 2006 at 2:29 pm

I have this recurring nightmare where I study Mandarin like a maniac for years so that I can secure my goal of reading an average Chinese newspaper article … and when I finally acheive it, the headline reads: BEIJING INTRODUCES NEW ORTHOGRAPHIC REFORMS.
45 Mike Sep 1st, 2006 at 4:06 pm

To me there is nothing more beautiful than sitting on an airplane with a page of printed Hanzi and reading it and knowing the person in the seat next to me who look slike me ( American/Western) finally ask “Can you read that” or my fellow co-workers when I am back in the States ask the same thing. As they say: the value of this moment “Priceless”

It isn’t hard when you are having fun and we all help each other onward.

Mike in Jubie
46 Bob Mrotek Sep 2nd, 2006 at 5:02 pm

Back to the 10,000 word thing. I noticed that the C-Pod Glossary contains 13,179 words so I figure that as you approach the 10,000 word vocabulary level you can feel like you are almost there. Nothing better than having a specific goal to aim at. Onward ever, backward…NEVER

Mexico Bob
47 Eosa Shang May 1st, 2007 at 10:50 pm

To learn a another language is always not easy. We Chinese regard English is not very easy to learn well. When I read English newspaper, it’s hard. But seems much better than foreigner to learn Chinese. Before, I don’t know so many people learn Chinese, why you want to learn it?