…And I just realized I contradicted matt_mcl on a matter of linguistics. Since I have no cite other than Latin classes I took over a decade ago, I’ll just bow out as gracefully as I can on that question.
As a foreigner, I find it quite easy to type in Chinese, much easier than writing. Microsoft’s latest Chinese Input Method Editor is really, really good, and when writing normal, everyday sentences in, say, GChat, I can type as fast as in English. Many young Chinese (esp. in Taiwan) are so used to typing that this is the reason their writing ability is getting worse. Typing in Chinese depends on knowledge of pinyin (the romanized pronunciation system) or zhuyinfuhao (the Taiwan pronunciation system) and the ability to recognize characters; this is at odds with actually producing the strokes.
Where do you live, sven? In Yunnan, at least, they really seem to dig foreigners who speak Chinese fluently. A frequent compliment for the better foreign speakers is that we spoke better Mandarin than locals did, since locals often had really shitty, often incomprehensible local accents when they attempted Mandarin. True, there were occasional “Your Chinese is so good it’s scary” comments, but for the most part, praise came fast and frequently (for white people, not me). I did notice in Shanghai that people got ridiculously overexaggerated praise even for saying a simple “nihao”…
Do you speak Chinese? Or rather, do you read and write it? I don’t, at all, and would not presume to make any authoritative statements on whether or not it’s easier or harder to master written Chinese than it is any alphabetic language. But, according to this article (linked to earlier in the thread by Ají de Gallina), by one David Moser–apparently someone from the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies who does speak, read, and write Chinese–it is harder for even native speakers of the language to learn to read and write in Chinese than it is for native speakers of alphabetic languages. (The article is mainly focused on the struggles of non-native speakers, but at several points Moser points out that even native Chinese speakers struggle with their written language.)
I certainly see no reason why all writing systems should be equally easy to master, and can easily imagine that a system like that of Chinese, with very large numbers of characters, might very well be more difficult for ordinary people to learn (even if they start learning to read and write at the same age that people in most Western countries begin learning to read and write our alphabetic languages).
I live in small-town Sichuan, in a town with a few million people and exactly ten foreigners. My Chinese is just okay, but I can say what I need to say in both Mandarin and Sichuan dialect.
Still, sometimes when I hop into a taxi and say where I am going, the reply is “I don’t understand your language.” I have to tell them- sometimes several times- that I’m not speaking my language, I am speaking your language. Then they understand fine- the problem is not my Chinese, it’s that they can’t process that it could be coming out of my mouth. I continue to have one-sided conversations with people who refuse to talk to me and give me the whole deaf-and-dumb act even when I have demonstrated that I can understand and reply perfectly fine. And of course, everywhere I go, I hear that maddening chorus of “ta ting bu dong!!!” Now and then I get tired of hearing my linguistic incompetence discussed and politely mention that I do understand, and the response is usually a sort of fascinated horror- the kind of response you’d give to a monkey that could write.
Everyone seems very surprised that I would bother to study the language of the country I live in, and people are downright hostile to the idea of me learning the local dialect. I’ve been asked several times- in all honesty- "Why are you learning Chinese?
More evidence to me that mainlanders are wak. In Taiwan, people are generally pleased but not all that surprised if you speak Mandarin. If you speak Taiwanese (the local dialect), though, they’re surprised and thrilled and will probably offer to introduce you to their sister.
You talking to me? Because I never said that. And since I never said that I feel no need to defend it. Specially since I don’t believe that and I agree with the article.
I find this does not jibe with my perceptions in China and I think you are finding hostility where there is none. I think the explanation lies in your interpretation and not in any hostility by those who are probably just curious when they ask.
OK, I guess that explains our differing experiences. I was living near the university area in Kunming, and the locals there were probably so used to laowai speaking Chinese that they recognized and appreciated those who’d advanced enough to have real conversations with. BTW, I’m quite impressed that you have passable Sichuanese; I know some simple phrases in Yunnanhua, but I really couldn’t be arsed to bring it that far. Mandarin was the extent of my ambition.
Yeah, I noticed that a lot when I was with white (and other obviously non-Asian) friends. If they see that white face, some people just tune out the words, as their mind has been set to the mode of thinking where this face could not possibly be speaking their language. Upon repetition(s), though, they’ll usually catch on, though there have definitely been cases where they just wouldn’t accept it. However, if a white guy’s Chinese is good enough, it’s pretty hard to ignore for 99.9% of them, and they’ll lump him in as a Dashan-like fluent foreigner. As for me, since I’m half Chinese by blood, they always think I’m the translator/guide, which was funny when I’d first arrived and could barely speak. Some blonde guy would speak to the waiter several sentences in near-perfect Beijing dialect, while I gave a weak “women yao dian shenme shenme”, but the waiter would still look at me to be the leader. I’d point at the blonde guy, and he’d think I was joking.
Are you sure this is hostility and not just curiosity? Even with my Asian features, I still was frequently asked why I would come to China and learn Chinese (since my English was so good ;)). I had a few friends who learned decent to fluent Kunming/Yunnan Hua, and people were impressed way more often than anything else. I don’t recall any stories of people being freaked out by it. To be honest, people were much more freaked out by my having Chinese blood and saying that I considered myself American, and not at all Chinese.
Well, everybody gets confused reading their own language sometimes: perhaps you do, because that is not what I said.
I suggested that they might need to infer the right interpretation of a symbol from its context more often than readers of alphabetic scripts do, and that this might introduce an extra level of difficulty into learning the art of writing good, clear Chinese. If I am right about written Chinese having an awful lot of homographs, one would probably have to take more care (perhaps a lot more care, and a different sort of care) to avoid ambiguity in writing Chinese than one would in speaking it. I suppose lots of homographs might be a good thing from the point of view of certain types of poetic or humorous writers, but it might also mean that it would be harder to learn to write good, clear prose (because it would be less like how you would actually talk), harder to write in a “natural,” “conversational” style (not that that would matter much for scientific papers, I guess), and probably that you would often have to use more words in your writing than you naturally would in speaking. I dare say the Chinese themselves have got very good at dealing with this issue, but it seems quite possible that it could introduce an extra problem for foreigners trying to work in written Chinese, over and above the problem of learning to understand the language as spoken, or even that of learning all the many symbols.
I am aware, by the way, that the style of most written English does not much resemble that of most spoken English, but presumably that that is for reasons that apply to all languages that have a written form, including Chinese. The homograph issue is over and above that.
Incidentally, I would not be at all surprised if readers of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which also did not have nearly enough symbols to directly represent all the words of the spoken language, and which thus sometimes relied on rebuses to get its meaning across, quite often did get confused when reading their own language, and may sometimes have had to think quite hard to puzzle out the intended meaning. That’s why the scribes got the big bucks. It was hard to learn to read and write in those days. Chinese script may not be as bad as that (though I think I have heard that it uses rebuses for foreign names - does it use them otherwise?), but I would be quite surprised if it does not take a good deal more work for a fluent Chinese speaker to learn to read and write Chinese well than it does for a fluent English (or Russian, or Hebrew, or Hungarian) speaker to learn to read or write their own language well. (Of course, there are reasons for that over and above the homograph issue, but the homograph problem probably contributes.)
You’re right that it does take a lot longer for Chinese to be literate (they’re still learning characters into high school), but once you do learn, the written language is very clear. The problem of homographs is as insignificant as the problem of prefixes and suffixes of in English. I do not confuse the following:
homosapiens
homosexual
homograph
homogenous
And neither do Chinese people with words like:
老师 (lao3shi1)
老鼠 (lao3shu3)
老虎.(lao3hu3)
The first character is the same in all three words, but the second character is different, which means that each pair is read as a distinct word. I don’t get confused seeing 老 (lao3) in any of the words, despite this individual character having tons of possible meanings, depending on what other characters you put it with.
In my experience Chinese is not only difficult to learn, it is also inefficient and does not lend itself to logical and scientific use very well.
In the written Chinese language - even in Simplified (versus Traditional) Chinese - you must memorize several thousand of characters just to get by. When trying to explain a new concept you have to come up with a new character or combination of characters that best symbolizes that concept. That new term you just coined will not be immediately clear to anyone else until it has had time to become approved and accepted usage - a process that can take years, if it happens at all.
It is a lot easier for Chinese to learn an alphabet-based language than it is for anyone else to learn Chinese (or other pictographic languages). As a language for science it ranks extremely low in terms of usefulness. English, with its modular structure, simplicity, versatility, and popularity, is the language of science for the foreseeable future. English certainly lacks the precision of languages like Latin, German, or Italian, but it makes up for it in other ways. Chinese - not so much, to put it mildly.
Chinese writing is more difficult to learn than English writing and English writing is more difficult to learn than Spanish writing. We have already established that.
In what way? Can you explain?
I am going to need some proof of that
We have already established that.
How is that different from any other language?
We have already established that. But you seem to draw conclusions which I do not find obvious.
I disagree.
In the way I already mentioned. Could you maybe give the matter just a bit of thought before posting automatic rebuttals?
That’s nice, I am sure there are plenty of other things you need. I am going to oblige you here out of a sense of community, since I rather clearly prefaced my earlier post with “in my experience”.
First a disclaimer and explanation of “in my experience”. I am no linguist but have successfully learned a half dozen languages. I made an attempt to learn Chinese when I moved to Hong Kong but gave up because of what I perceived to be the needless difficulty involved in the Chinese language. Without wanting to offend anyone, I simply found Chinese and the ludicrous amounts of memorization it requires to be a waste of my time. In its spoken form the tones caused me endless confusion, and as far as the script goes I have never, ever encountered such an inefficient mode of communication. Statement of clarification and bias over.
Chinese language does not lend itself particularly well (or as well as latin/germanic languages) to logical and scientific use for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with the “efficiency” of the language.
Firstly the spoken tongue includes hundreds if not thousands of dialects that often makes it impossible for a person from place X to communicate verbally with someone from place Y. This is incredibly inefficient (a similar problem, though not so severe, exists in Arabic).
Even in the simplest form of Chinese you still have to use 4 tones that dramatically modify the meaning of any word you utter. Mastering the tones can be difficult even for native speakers, and misunderstandings are quite common. If I say “horse” in English you will not be under the impression that I am talking about your mother, or 2-8 other possible meanings. (Again, a somewhat similar problem exists in written Arabic, where the routine omission of “vowels” in Arabic script means that identically spelled words can have different meanings - like the names “Candy” and “Kennedy”).
There are no declensions, conjugations, genders, and plurals in Chinese. Perhaps you can imagine by yourself how this might impose limits on the efficiency of a mode of expression and the ability of that mode to carry meaning. On one hand it makes Chinese grammar ridiculously easy to learn, on the other hand this robs Chinese of a great deal of precision that we take for granted in the European languages (and particularly the latinate tongues).
The vast number of Chinese characters and proverbs pose a challenge even for Chinese in China. Memorizing characters and proverbs is an exercise that continues well into high school and university, and takes up effort, time, and memory that could otherwise be spent on other pursuits. Once again, compared to an alphabet system that is mastered in a matter of weeks or months during earliest childhood, Chinese script is very inefficient (and, some argue, puts disproportionate emphasis and resources on rote memorization, which results in students who develop correspondingly less creativity and independent thinking abilities).
Chinese proverbs are particularly problematic because, although they may consist of just a few characters, proverbs require the reader to have a good knowledge of their backgrounds in order to understand the sentence that they form. Having no background knowledge of a proverb often means you can extract no useful meaning from its sentence (whereas in European languages the meaning of a word you may not know can often be inferred from the rest of the sentence, or you might even skip the word and still extract highly useful meaning from the sentence).
Lastly, Chinese script is so difficult that it requires external aids just for everyday usage in the academic and professional world. The use of digital devices and pinyin script for example (roman lettering being infinitely more efficient than pictographs!) provides help to writers who are struggling to remember which one of tens of thousands of characters they are trying to write down. This is a common occurrence and is mentioned in this illuminating blog post from a teacher of Chinese language: Language Log
Yes, that’s really nice Sailor. I am ever so glad that it meets with your seal of approval. Now try follow the larger argument rather than engage in further telegraphic nitpicks.
In how many other languages do you define a new term by drawing a picture or sets of pictures that then have to be approved for public use and subsequent memorization, a process that can take years if it happens at all? Look, even the Chinese find that they have problems resulting from their language (one of the reasons why Chinese authorities feel it necessary to grossly inflate official literacy statistics). For example, the continued existence and use of Pinyin script is not for the benefit of the few foreigners who learn Chinese; it is popular because it offers valuable assistance to Chinese speakers in negotiating Chinese!
That is irrelevant.
Yup, that’s 'bout what I figured. You sound like a frustrated ex-student.
Dude, you couldn’t even get past the tones? I got that in my first semester. Once you get the hang of it, tones are easy – in fact, the tones one uses in Chinese can be found, easily, in the “tones” one uses in English – just used in a very different way.
Which leads me to my next observation: Chinese is a very different language, which has evolved to meet the needs of a very different population. That doesn’t make it bad or stupid – you really need to pull your thinking out of the XIXth century, there, bub.
There are a lot of things to be said about Chinese, both pro and con, but I don’t think someone who never actually learned the language – or worse, made a halfhearted attempt and then gave up – is in much position to make any of those statements.
Missed edit window:
And in my experience as a Westerner who taught myself to be literate in Chinese, the language is just as expressive and efficient as English – in some ways even more so. Too bad you’ll never know.
And you sound like someone whose best recourse is an ad hominem argumentum. Good work.
I am sure you are really smart and all, what with being able to learn four tones in a semester, but your assertion above is simply not true, particularly if (like me) you have difficulties with tones (in languages as well as music). That is neither here nor there, my decision to stop learning Chinese was made because I saw no benefit to the huge effort and memorization required.
Yeah, nice work. Now try address the arguments instead of putting forward this empty PC posturing.
It is perfectly acceptable to claim that a language is inefficient for specific purposes. I am not out to make asinine statements such as “chinese is bad or stupid” (words that you rather foolishly put in my mouth), I am simply describing on request what I found to be specific shortcomings of the language. Whether I finished learning the language or not doesn’t matter, I acquired a basic knowledge of it and made a call based on what I learned.
Actually as I already described I **do **know, and your statement really scrapes the bottom of the barrel in terms of evidentiary support. But good for you, enjoy your proficiency.
I think we might be missing a point here. The question whether Chinese is harder or not than English is not as relevant as we might think. Personally I do think that Chinese is significantly harder.
But anyway, IF China becomes the world’s superpower (IF!), and IF the 1.x billion Chinese and their researchers become so important that they basically can concentrate on themselves and not care about others (IF!), well then we simply just might or not might not agree - it could be necessary to learn Chinese.
It could just happen that the number one major journal in some domain be in Chinese and edited in Chinese, just because it gradually happened this way since most major researchers in these area were Chinese for some time.
There would be major peer pressure to publish in that journal. In Chinese. Even if the language is really really hard.
That depends. In terms of grammar, Chinese is one of the simplest and easiest languages. In fact it is THE simplest I can think of. In terms of vocabulary and script, it is THE hardest language I have ever been exposed to, and I have learned my fair share.
I understood your question to be asking about the suitability of Chinese for scientific purposes. I couched my responses in this thread based on that. Much like Arabic (which is a terrific language for literature) I don’t see Chinese as competing with English for dominance in the sciences. The difficulty of the language means there is a considerable barrier of entry and, as argued earlier, there are a number of elements in Chinese that render it a harder choice for disciplines that require scientific precision, simplicity, clarity, and accessibility.
If, however, you want to know whether we will be doing science in Chinese because there are so many Chinese speakers on the planet, I guess that is an entirely different question. But the fact that English has such a low barrier of entry (and Chinese does not) suggests to me that it will not be supplanted very easily.
I have no problem at all in pointing at you and laughing. If that makes me an ad hummina hummina hummina, what do I care? I know what I know, and you’re full of it.
Unless you’re Stephen Hawking, you do use tones in your native language all the time, including the very same four standard tones that are used in Mandarin. The problem is you gave up before you got the hang of how those tones are used to convey meaning in Chinese.
And those tones have nothing to do with musical “tones” at all, though some textbooks confuse the issue by actually trying to illustrate them by printing out some approximation of sheet music – which is utter balderdash. Chinese is not a “singsong” language.
And as for your assertion, I’ve never encountered a native speaker who confuses “mother” with “horse” with “hemp” or what have you. Once you get the ear for it, those words sound completely different.
No, you don’t. You gave up before you ever came within 10 miles of fluency. What you’re doing is picking and choosing things that other people have written about the language in order to rationalize your sour grapes.*
*Oh, oh! “Sour grapes!” If you’ve never read Aesop in the original Greek, how confusing that proverb must be!
I just had a good laugh over the phone with my (Chinese) girlfriend over Abe’s post. She said “I understand him perfectly; it is exactly how I felt during my first year in America”.
Yeah, I can just see them":
- “Why do you say we should feed the horse? We don’t have a horse. We live in an apartment.”
- “You idiot. Let me tell you in English. I said get dinner ready for mother. I don’t know why we insist on speaking Chinese which is so confusing when we could be speaking English which is so much clear and concise and anglosaxon and all.”
I really do not understand all this nonsense that Chinese is somehow confusing or inefficient. Every single word in every single language has uncler boundaries in its meanings and overlaps with others. Like we could discuss what is the difference between a moron and an idiot and a retard all day long. That is why scientific papaers have glossaries and explanations which define ther terms as used in that paper.
New words are more difficult in Chinese? How so? In English I invent a new term like “apenute”, and until it has common currency I just explain the meaning as needed. Exactly the same as they do in Chinese (I would think).
Now, when they need to translate a western name they just use characters which approximate the sound just like we do with them and that’s how we ended up having words like Hong Kong or Canton. Or why there are several different transliterations for Mao Tsetung, Mao Zedong, etc. I really cannot see the difference.
Sometimes I ask my girlfriend if she knows some famous person, actor, whatever and she invariably says “What is the Chinese name”? After I tell her a bit about the person she’ll say “oh, you mean 杰克 尼科尔森, ok, now I know”.
I remember I saw the name Letitia was rendered in Chinese as La-Ti-Xiao. It must have taken them all of five seconds to do that. Maybe someone else used a different combination. So what? How many ways do we spell Muamar Al-Qattafi? Does that mean we are hopelessly confused and unable to write scientific papers?
You know, most Americans do use that saying with the wrong meaning. They focus on the word “sour” and think it just means someone was sour about something. They do not know that the original meaning is that the fox could not have the grapes and so pretended he did not want them because they were sour.
So, a proper use of the phrase would be when someone is rejected for a job and then says “I didn’t want it anyway”. That’s a case of sour grapes. Pretending it was a job you did not want when in fact your actions show you did want it.
Which just goes to show Americans are also terribly confused by the language and are incapable of writing scientific papers. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go feed the horse. Or my mother. I’m not sure which.