Tones are easy enough to learn, but to a non-native speaker- specially in an area where there people speak local dialects- it can lead to some difficulty in learning new words from conversation. In most languages you can listen for keywords and follow a conversation. This is light years harder in Chinese because there are so many homonyms and compound words. I mean, the whole damn language is pretty much compound words, which can make it difficult for a learner to know if you are talking about computers (“Diannau”- electric brain) or if these you are really talking about electricity and brains. Or if you are talking about one of the other words that sound pretty much the same.
Compound words also make writing difficult, because there are no spaces between words, and every bit of a multi-syllable word has it’s own independent meaning. You need to have a well-developed vocabulary before you can read even basic texts, because you have to have a good feeling for when one word ends and another one starts.
There are some big problems when it comes to transliterating names.
Each of those characters in La-Ti-Xiao has is a full-blown word with it’s own unique meaning. So a transliterated name with have a whole new sense of meaning that it doesn’t have in it’s original language. It’d be kind of like if we translated everyone’s name into pre-existing words. Like if we called Muamar Al-Qattafi “Mom More Alm Qualm Taffy.” Except it’s even more confusing because Chinese has few grammar structures so a collection of random words is more likely to have a real meaning. I believe at some point they changed the “official” transliteration of Kennedy’s name, because the old one had some less flattering connotations.
In the end, I really believe you can’t really translate names, which is why any Chinese form for foreigners will have a section for your foreign name and your Chinese name. FWIW, it works the other way around. A Chinese name rendered in Pinyin loses a great deal of it’s richness and meaning and is not really the same thing.
Try to put together a valid argument instead of making facile assumptions. You’ve already demonstrated the deficiency of your position by resorting to a classic ad hominem, see if you can avoid making it worse. I understand perfectly well how tones convey meaning. What you refuse to understand is that some people have difficulties with tones, even after a lot of practice. It takes an afternoon to learn tones, but some people (like me) have a hard time with tones even after they learn them. It’s almost as if you asked a colour blind person to see the whole range of the visible spectrum by effort alone.
Nonetheless, my own difficulty with tones has nothing to do with the discussion. I put forward several reasons supporting my position earlier: try to address them and you will note they have nothing to do with my woes concerning tonal sounds.
By the way, it might surprise you to know that Chinese is often taught in a “singsong” fashion, as you call it. The tones most certainly are considered musical - being changes in pitch on a scale of four and a half units, it is rather hard to see how they would not be.
This is increasingly silly. A simple cracking of the voice or the need to clear your throat can change tone and meaning even for the most accomplished speaker, or a source of noise can confuse your hearing and make you misunderstand. In Mandarin the same word can have four or five meanings, and these meanings change from dialect to dialect. This is part of what I mean by efficiency. And it is not a slur, in case your sensibilities have been injured.
The “horse” and “mother” confusion is one of the textbook examples of confused words in Chinese - which is why I brought it up. Whether you have ever encountered it is irrelevant to the discussion, though it certainly raises questions about the credibility of your statements.
Not at all. What I am doing is listing a number of points from personal experience and accepted knowledge where I argue about Chinese language shortcomings - all languages have some (and my ability to point them out is not limited to Chinese). What **you **are doing is demonstrating your inability to provide anything of substance to the conversation. You can only resort to attacks to the man, posturing, and forced diagnosis of a situation about which you have exactly zero knowledge. Nice show.
You do know that in some period the leading scientists where Arabs? That Algebra is actually an Arabic word since it was invented there? It can’t be so bad.
Apart from “Nihao” I do not know a single word in Chinese, but I do not buy into your arguments. I do not think that there is a single language which is unsuitable for logical or scientific thinking, let alone Chinese. The Chinese had there heydays as well, they were pretty much advanced when we in Europe where still throwing stones at each other. And it seems they are not doing so bad, they are currently launching more GPS-like satellites than Europe. And hey, they were the first nation to put satellites into the orbit without Nazi-technology …
Their may be differences in languages which make some languages slightly more less easy to use in certain contexts. The fact that there is no present progressive tense (“I am writing”) in French means that it is circumscribed with something like “Je suis en train de d’écrire” - “I am in the process of writing”. Present progressive might be easier, but you can still do the same thing in French.
I think, that as species were (and are) evolving with evolution, languages were evolving as well. Most languages actually become simpler, not more complex. English lost most of its conjugations, declinations etc. Language evolved to fulfill its task, period. If it weren’t possible to do science in Chinese, either China would have stayed an uncivilized nation, which is not true, or they would have naturally adapted their language in a slowly evolving manner.
I am sorry but this is so out of tune with everything I have experienced in the last twelve years of trying to learn Chinese, I find it hard to believe you are being sincere.
Tones are easy for some people. My brother and I are Americans of Indian descent who are both married to Chinese women who are native Mandarin (Beijing dialect to be more correct) speakers. My brother is a talented amauer singer and musician. I am what is described as tone-deaf and tone-dumb. I tried for years to learn the basics of music, and I can understand all the written notation, but I can’t hear the difference between notes to save my life. I don’t know if the differences in our capabilities are congenital or deficiencies in learning. But I am not afraid of learning things that I find difficult. I learned to swim when I was 33 after a lifetime of being terrified of water, because I watched two people drown as a child.
The funny thing is that my brother has no interest in learning Chinese, and his wife has no interest in teaching him. My wife and I are desperate for me to learn Chinese. I have a written vocabulary of probably over a thousand characters, and on a good day I can follow a conversation between my wife and my in-laws. My brother know probably fewer than 50 words, but he can hear and reproduce the tones perfectly. I cannot reproduce the tones at all. I know you are going to say that it is because I haven’t tried hard enough, but I am hardly alone in finding the tonal quality of Chinese to be difficult to master. I have taken numerous Chinese classes, and I have seen Americans (and the odd European) make clowns of themselves in the effort.
It is not like I have no affinity for languages. I am a native English speaker, but I can speak two other languages, one of which I acquired purely in an academic context. I am probably not fluent in speaking either one after twenty years, but I have not trouble watching movies or reading a newspaper. I can also hack along with travellers Spanish and Persian, both of which I learned from the good old book and tape thingies.
Tonal languages are hard for people who a) do not speak other tonal languages and b) aren’t somehow “naturally” good with controlling thier voice production.
If you are denying this, you and I are not living on the same planet. And the Chinese don’t make it easier. They positively delight in mocking “bad” Chinese. No one has ever made fun of my awful Spanish grammar, for example. But Chinese shopkeepers, taxi drivers, work colleagues, etc. have absolutely no problem laughing at me, and in fact calling over others to witness my discomfiture. I used to laugh with them, but I stopped being amused a long time ago. And I noticed that they don’t do this to white people trying to speak Chinese. At least not nearly as much. But a brown monkey trying to speak Chinese? It’s carnival time.
I got a reverse case of this recently. My three-year old daughter started speaking to me in Chinese out of the blue. It took me three of four repetitions before I realized that it wasn’t her English I should be trying to parse but her Chinese. When I tried to reply to her in Chinese, she burst out laughing. Wonder where she learned that it was okay to do that? She certainly isn’t the kind of kid who would laugh at another who fell down or spilled something.
I agree and that is a very good point. The guy is actually transcribed Gadaffi in German and “Mouammar Kadafi” in French. I guess the Russians and the Greek have their own transcriptions in their languages.
Transcriptions happen all the time between languages with different scripts, and they are often done by journalists when I guy from a foreign country becomes famous and they need to write about him. Vladimir Putin is transcribed Wladimir Putin in German and Vladimir Poutine in French. To his advantage since the word “Putin” means “prostitute” in French.
I think many people here are getting carried away with their personal experience (i.e. anecdotes). Different people find different things easier or difficulter. When learning English or when learning Chinese. So what? The point here is whether Chinese is suited for science and technology as much as any other language which, of course, it is.
Well, China’s language evolved from a thousands-of-years-old top down bureaucratic tradition that has kept tight control of knowledge. The Chinese written language is difficult on purpose- for centuries it has played a role in keeping the bureaucratic tradition alive and restricting knowledge to the elites. There have been some attempts to change this (simplified characters, for example) but at this point the language is too tied up in tradition and national pride to move to something easier (and everyone admits that pinyin is easier- which is why children’s storybooks will usually have pinyin above the characters.)
However, every transliteration system is internally consistent. There is a sound that will always be rendered “Ze” in pinyin and “Tse” in Wades-Giles.
There is no possibility for an internally consistent system for transliterating in hanzi, because each sound can be rendered by dozens of characters, each of which has it’s own independence meaning. A lucky translator will be able to find characters that relate somewhat to the topic at hand. An unlucky translator will end up with a string of random words.
It would be nice if you and a couple others could support the above claim using actual arguments rather than repeated and unsupported insistence. The problem is that you can’t, because there is a dearth of evidence to support your position.
The fact alone that the Chinese script is so difficult creates several acknowledged problems in expression, comprehension, and entry, so let’s look a bit more closely at this specific problem with the language. Chinese literacy rate is an excellent example of the problems faced by speakers and students of Chinese.
A well educated person will know about 5,000 characters or more, though you can get by with between 3,000 and 4,000 characters and still be considered literate.
(My emphasis). It is thought there are at least 60,000 characters in total, though admittedly, several thousand of those would be rare and seldom used.
Literacy in China is defined as the ability to read and write a set number of characters: 1,500 (for a farmer) and 2,000 (for an urban dweller) [cite]. The problem should be obvious: official literacy statistics count as “literate” those people who have only partial literacy. And this is after considerable central-led efforts in education and language reform.
In alphabetical languages, which are immensely more efficient, you either learn to read or you do not. The majority of the population will not get stuck at 5% or 20% knowledge of the alphabet - they acquire real literacy, which is the ability to write and read anything in that language/script. The advantages of this simple and fast system over the multi-year memorization of several thousand ideograms should be obvious to all. It is possible to learn virtually any alphabet (Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, etc.) in a matter of *days *because an alphabet of a couple dozen building blocks constitutes a much more efficient system than having to memorize several thousand ideograms over a chunk of your lifetime.
But that’s not all. It’s not just ignorant foreigners such as myself who maintain such politically incorrect views. The Chinese themselves have had real concerns about the viability of their language for most of the modernization of China (read: the advent of science and technology):
Simplified Chinese is certainly easier that Traditional, but it remains one of the world’s hardest scripts to learn, and the low standards employed to measure (and boost) the official literacy rates highlight this inefficiency. Here is a bit more about how Chinese themselves sought to reform their script into something more suitable for modern times:
There is a huge misconception that Pinyin (transliteration of Chinese into the Roman aphabet) is a system for foreigners. It’s not: it is a system for the Chinese themselves. The real story is that the Chinese government itself was looking for a more efficient writing system, and one that would allow a common, efficient, and **standardized **use of putonghua throughout most of the country - a need that traditional Chinese script could not meet, and that Simplified script has failed to deliver.
In the end, pinyin was a casualty of national chauvinistic aspirations on the part of the government, who wanted one country with one national language and corresponding political unity. Which was perhaps good from the cultural point of view (retention of a thousands-year old script) but hardly a step forward for the acquisition of literacy, science, technology, and other aspects important in the modern age.
Any way you look at it Chinese script is of considerably lower efficiency than any alphabetical language, a problem that is only emphasized when it comes to science. Becoming literate in an alphabet requires a tiny effort compared to the effort required by Chinese; this allows the student of the language more time to spend on other pursuits, such as other areas of growth and development (like the acquisition of *scientific *literacy). Also, as mentioned before, years of emphasis on tedious rote memorization is not exactly a boon to the development of young minds.
I did not mean letters but everything. Grammar mostly. The seem to have a high number of rules, declinations, conjugations and things like that. More than German or even Latin.
The same can be said for transcribing between any two languages. Arabic has 5 different sounds that sound like an H or a mixture of H and K. And don’t get me started on the vowels which are so completely different than European vowels that you simply can’t guess what they sound when looking at the transcription.
The proof that Chinese script is unsuited for science and technology can be found in the similar Japanese script which is also unsuitable for the same reasons and due to this Japan has always been a backwards and primitive country wou couldn’t make a can opener if their life depended on it.
On the other hand just look at Latin-America who use the latin script in its simplest form which is simple, elegant and well suited for science and technology. Due to this they are way ahead in the sciences and technology and a huge number of inventions come from there. Not to mention the best automobiles, electronic products, software, etc. They are the undisputed #1.
You are presenting false and disingenuous new arguments in an attempt to avoid existing ones. The achievements of a nation in any field do not result solely from the suitability of a language for such purpose. It is foolish to suggest that (even as an underhanded rhetorical discussion tactic) because many more factors must be considered if you really want to make such an analysis.
Just because a language like Chinese (for the reasons already argued) presents a number of problems does not necessarily mean that an entire country that uses the language must be “backwards and primitive”. That has never been my argument.
What it **does **mean is that Chinese presents difficulties in a number of applications, or simply when trying to achieve and measure widespread literacy among the population, as argued earlier.
Written Chinese is difficult even for native speakers. Schools kids spend an extra ordinary amount of time in the first to third grade to gain mastery. In Shanghai at least, then learn over 10 new words per day. My third grade daughter who went to a regular local Chinese school for 2 years and then a mixed chinese/english program for 3rd grade reads at least 3000 characters and probably more. And it’s not like she is a star pupil. There are kids that start the first grade already knowing how to read newspapers. But kids do spend a lot of time to get up the literacy curve. Picture a first grader with hours of homework every night.
Abe: You’re finding examples to support your suppositions since you don’t have personal knowledge of the language you’re commenting on. It is freaking ludicrous to think that a college educated, much less a PhD level person only knows 3 or 4000 characters. My third grade daughter is at that level. I finished university with a 5 or 6,000 character level, and I’m hardly a native speaker.
Typing chinese is certainly not a barrier and can be as fast as an average english language typist.
As pointed out earlier, Chinese is extremely logical. Grammar is perhaps the most simplistic on the planet.
As for spoken Chinese, I’m not aware of any major difference barriers compared with a romance language. It’s not difficult for a native speaker to learn how to speak Chinese as a child. Again, it’s a most logical language so it may be easier. Don’t confuse the fact that it is a difficult language to learn as an adult foreigner with it being difficult for a Chinese child. Ancedotally, all 3 of my kids picked up chinese much earlier and faster than they did English.
Koxinga, with all due respect, you sound like someone that’s only spent time in Taiwan and never spent any real time in China. You’re comments like mainlanders “are wak” is just odd…See for yourself instead of repeating Taiwanese cold war prejudice. And I lived in Taiwan for 3 years in the 1980’s and still go there for work. Despite 10 or 20% of the Taiwanese population living and working in China at any given time, there’s still a lot of these old views.
Even Sven, you have a very atypical experience if people are not gushing about how great your chinese is when you only say “Ni Hao.” The normal process is a gweiloh says a few words, and the praises start like it’s the second coming. Then when you show that actually you can speak fluently then even more gushing. I get this all the time at work, and I work for a foreign company in Shanghai. You should hear the hosannas when I go see customers in Hubei or some other place in the boonies. I’m used to it but dislike it. If you knew I have a degree in Chinese, have been married to a Shanghaiese for 15 years, lived in Greater China for 20 years, etc, actually my Chinese kinda sucks and you’re comparing me to a low bar.
When I was going around bumfuck Sichuan in 1987 with some college buddies that knew how to say “meiguo” “ershiwu” “meiyou” to the stock questions of: “where are you from”, how old are you, and are you married, were treated to jaw dropping amazement. It was also the only chinese they could say, but we were asked the same stock questions every time and gave the same stock answers every time that it got to be a running joke with us.
njtt: I think you’re confusing Japanese (using borrowed Chinese characters) with Chinese.
On the contrary, I have spent ALL my time in the REAL China, the FREE China, the everlovin’ REPUBLIC OF CHINA (on Taiwan)! I have a tattoo on my left arm that says “Overthrow the Communist Bandits” and a picture of Chiang Ching-kuo over my bedroom door, to which I bow three times every morning! And on the weekends, I go to Kinmen Island and stuff decadent western split-crotch underwear into a capsule to which I attach to a weather balloon and let it sail over bandit-held territory, all the while shouting CHUNG HUA MIN KUO WAN SUI!