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From my experience, this article brushes a very rosy picture of the Chinese language. The bottom line is that even for a native speaker, if you encounter a new

From my experience, this article brushes a very rosy picture of the Chinese language. The bottom line is that even for a native speaker, if you encounter a new character, chances are you don't know what it means or how to pronounce it. If it's simple enough, you may guess, but that's it. Learning Chinese means memorizing characters. A lot of them. It takes over a decade to teach a Chinese kid to even read a simple magazine. Combine this with the use of tones, and you get a pretty complicated mess. You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process. This is why building a search engine in Chinese is so hard. You can't apply a Porter stemming algorithm for example; there's no concept of stem or etymology (no apparently logical one at least). Moreover, combining one character before (or after) another can change the meaning entirely. Adding a third one can again change things. Since you don't separate words with spaces in Chinese, good luck figuring things out programmatically. Things in Chinese are heavily relying on context. Learning Chinese can be an interesting challenge, but understand that it will mostly rely on memorizing characters with little to no logic or trick to help you do so.

isolate 11y ago
> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You can't use Chinese tones, but you can still modulate your speech tonally to convey emotion while respecting them.
- agrand 11y ago
  This, and the use of particles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle
- westiseast 11y ago
  Yeah - my son has a hundred ways to say 没有 that are playful, angry, bossy, funny, etc. It is part of the language, you just use different vocal variations than the classic English ones like 'raise your tone to indicate a question', or 'use harsh dropping tones to indicate anger'
jensen123 11y ago
On the other hand, I would think that a language that uses tones has higher "bandwidth". When you use tones, you can use shorter words. With these shorter tone-words, you can "transfer" more information in less time, compared to a non-tonal language.
- cageface 11y ago
  This is true. Vietnamese is tonal and mostly monosyllabic, for example. But it turns out that people tend to speak very information dense languages like this more slowly, so the overall information density is similar among languages. Maybe humans can only process information so fast? http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0...
yompers888 11y ago
I just wanted to comment on your point about tones. I'm a pretty mediocre Chinese speaker, but I find it much easier to hear Chinese than English. At the level of full sentences, English is far easier for me, but at the word level the advantage is equal in magnitude favoring Chinese. I think it's because it's much easier to hear the voiced sounds that comprise the majority of Chinese, whereas in English a lot of the meaning is loaded into the high-pass unvoiced component. From the perspective of the listener, it seems to make much more sense to use the higher-SNR of voiced sounds to convey the bulk of information (as I believe Chinese does), rather than the much weaker unvoiced sounds (which English makes heavy use of.) I'm guessing the prominence of unvoiced sounds in speech owes to their being less effort to form, or to their universality across different people whose voiced sounds would have substantially different frequency components.
mchaver 11y ago
>> Combine this with the use of tones, and you get a pretty complicated mess. You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process. This seems a bit like linguistic relativity. Native speakers don't have problems with tones. It is a challenge for second language learners of Chinese who don't speak a tonal language. Likewise, stress patterns in English are a challenge for second language learners but native speakers don't struggle with it. There is a lot of word play in Chinese. Just because a syllable has a raising tone does not mean it is the exact same pitch as another syllable with a raising tone later in the phrase, rather the syllables follow the same pattern of starting from a lower pitch and go to a higher one. You can also make vowels longer or shorter. >> Things in Chinese are heavily relying on context. That's the case for most languages. What does 'hit' mean in English? He hit me. Give me a hit. That show is a hit. He hit a tree with his car. I hit a new high. The boss ordered a hit on him. Tomorrow we will be hit by a storm. They hit it off well. She hit on him. That hits close to home. Let's hit the road.
- yen223 11y ago
  Tones are to native English speakers what L's and R's are to native Japanese speakers. Because tones don't carry semantic information in English, we tend to ignore it, which leads to English speakers sounding really weird when speaking any Chinese dialect.
  - talideon 11y ago
    It's not good to confuse your mother (mā) with your horse (mǎ).
  - philh 11y ago
    Unless we're talking about different things - tones carry semantic information, just not the same kind as in Chinese. They indicate things like "I'm asking a question" and "I'm being sarcastic". This does make it hard for English speakers learning Chinese, but I don't think it's quite the same as L/R in Japanese.
- Chathamization 11y ago
agrand 11y ago
OP here. I think the reality is obviously more messy than what the article tends to portray. All natural languages are messy in their own idiomatic ways. One of the goals of the article was to emphasize the structure in the Chinese language, because most people who are not familiar with it just assume it's just a big bunch of meaningless ideograms. It's a "simple" introduction, not a thorough one. It's meant to tease people's curiosity. If you start with a negative bias towards Chinese, you won't be able to see where it shines. Things that you express with tones in English, can be expressed with particles in Chinese. They can also be expressed in other modulations at the sentence level. Some subtleties of English definitely can't be expressed in Chinese, but the reverse is equally true. And that's the point I want to stress. Chinese is very different, and where there is difference, there is richness.
- imron 11y ago
  Hi OP, nice article. I notice however that you've taken a graphic from the front page of my website: http://www.hanzigrids.com http://www.hanzigrids.com (though interestingly, a slightly older version than the graphic currently there). You're welcome to keep using it, but it would be nice if you could add some attribution.
  - agrand 11y ago
    I wasn't sure were it came from (did a google image search for this one), should have been more careful. Fixed.
    - imron 11y ago
      Thanks!
  - oxygenoxy 11y ago
    Is it possible to add stroke order to hanzigrids?
    - stevendaniels 11y ago
cageface 11y ago
I've been living in Vietnam for years now and watched many foreigners struggle to learn the language, which depends even more on tones than Chinese. Tonal languages are very unforgiving, and the differences between tones are very subtle in common conversation. Even when Vietnamese completely mangle the grammar and pronunciation of English you can usually understand what they're trying to say. But if you don't absolutely nail the tones and pronunciation of Vietnamese all you'll get are blank stares back in response. That is, if you haven't accidentally said something wrong or vulgar by mistake. The saving grace of Vietnamese is that the grammar is trivially simple compared to English. No plurals, tenses, cases, verb conjugation etc. And it uses the Latin alphabet so reading and writing it is vastly easier than Chinese.
- polymatter 11y ago
  as someone currently learning Vietnamese do you have any tips for learning the language? I've learnt some Mandarin so I am no stranger to tones - but the tones in Vietnamese seem quite different. I've been using Pimsleur which I highly recommend, but I find I end up atuned to their particular voices and can not understand genuine Vietnamese speech. Also I am using memrise to learn vocabulary, but without example sentences and the like I find it of limited use until I find the same word in a real life context. Interested in your thoughts.
  - cageface 11y ago
    There's no substitute for one on one tutoring with a native speaker. Get somebody to drill you on the tones and the alphabet. Once you have those down you can work on vocabulary on your own. If I'd done this when I first got here I'd be a lot further along now.
    - polymatter 11y ago
      Thanks for the reply. I will do that.
      - contingencies 11y ago
talideon 11y ago
> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process. That's not unusual even in languages without tones. For instance, in Irish, you can't use vocal stress to emphasise particular words like you can in English. Instead, you use a combination of changes in word order and emphatic affixes to convey the same meaning. No expressiveness is lost, it's just that Irish uses as different mechanism to convey the same meaning. My understanding of Mandarin and the other Sinitic languages is similar: they might not use the same mechanisms to convey such information as in English, but they certainly can convey them. > Moreover, combining one character before (or after) another can change the meaning entirely. Adding a third one can again change things. vent con-vent con-vent-tion Mandarin is no different than any other language in this regard. It's just that it's writing system masks what we'd consider words in languages with alphabet-like scripts. Also keep in mind that the Chinese characters make use of punning, so sometimes those weird character combinations are simply very, very old visual or phonological puns. [There's a little bit of cheating in there, because the 'vent' in 'convent' is more like 'ven-t', but the principle still applies, and with some though I could find better examples. However, as mentioned, Chinese characters do rely on punning like this in places, it's not a huge flaw in the example.] > You can't apply a Porter stemming algorithm for example; there's no concept of stem or etymology (no apparently logical one at least). There are a few reasons for that, but the main one is that Mandarin is a largely isolating language. However, to apply some equivalent of Porter stemming, you need to rely on there being a concept similar to a word in the language and its writing system, whereas Chinese characters are more akin to morphemes, so the concept of 'stemming' makes no sense. Pinyin is another matter though. > there's no concept of [...] etymology (no apparently logical one at least). There is, it's just obscured by how divorced the written language is from the spoken language, which isn't the case for languages with alphabets, syllabaries, &c.
DonaldFisk 11y ago
I once built a Chinese search engine, which worked quite well. Stemming isn't an issue as Chinese has absolutely no inflection. The problem is that there are no spaces between words. To separate them, I used a dictionary and a greedy algorithm. At any point in the text, I simply found the longest word in the dictionary which matched and committed to that. On rare occasions, it would get it wrong but soon recover (e.g. if my next few characters are ABCDE and the longest matching word is ABC, I'd match that, followed perhaps by D and E, even if the correct tokenization is AB CD E). Without a dictionary you can't meaningfully tokenize Chinese.
co_dh 11y ago
As a Chinese, I can tell you that there are only 3000 common Chinese characters. My nephew begin to read news paper at grade 4 ( 10 years old). I begin to read very complicate novels at 13. A good thing about Chinese character is: I can easily read laws if I want, because there is not much new vocabulary to read. Tone is not a problem for baby. They can grasp it from day one when they start to speak.( I have 3 kids) There is a lot logic inside Chinese characters.
- talideon 11y ago
  The problem with tone isn't so much that it's hard (not more so than, say, a voicing or aspiration contrast is), but that as people get older, it's harder to hear contrasts that don't exist in the languages you're familiar with.
gbog 11y ago
"You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process." Well, er..., Chinese classic poetry is the quite subtle and expressive, I have heard. And, not sure for your native language but for mine, if I read or hear a word that I do not know, I also have to take the dictionnary. Moreover, in many cases, I will not know how to pronounce a name I never heard before. And, well, building a search engine is much simpler in Chinese, because characters do not change. So yes, there is (almost) no stemming, because you do not need to stem the words before indexing or searching. Another point you did not mention: printing Chinese characters on a paper or a screen is much simpler: all of them have the same width and height. No kerning. No need for text justification (almost). Do you know that when preparing for a book in French the typographs have to make sure there is no "rivers" in the page and adjust word spaces accordingly?
logingone 11y ago
Yes, I started learning a bit of Mandarin this year. Interesting, but tedious. Imagine they constructed their numeral system the way they constructed the (non)alphabet. Instead of 0-9, and all numbers constructed from those, there would be a million characters for counting to one million.
ljk 11y ago
> The bottom line is that even for a native speaker, if you encounter a new character, chances are you don't know what it means or how to pronounce it. If it's simple enough, you may guess, but that's it. Native speaker here, this is definitely true. On top of the characters Also, children learn the phonetic alphabet[1] before learning the characters. That's why it takes so long to even read a simple magazine: no one uses the phonetic alphabet outside of lower level elementary school. This article is like the "Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes"[2] but more like "Learn to read 0.01% of Chinese characters in 15 minutes", but interesting nonetheless [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo [2]http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/

isolate 11y ago

> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You can't use Chinese tones, but you can still modulate your speech tonally to convey emotion while respecting them.

agrand 11y ago
This, and the use of particles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle
westiseast 11y ago
Yeah - my son has a hundred ways to say 没有 that are playful, angry, bossy, funny, etc. It is part of the language, you just use different vocal variations than the classic English ones like 'raise your tone to indicate a question', or 'use harsh dropping tones to indicate anger'

jensen123 11y ago

On the other hand, I would think that a language that uses tones has higher "bandwidth". When you use tones, you can use shorter words. With these shorter tone-words, you can "transfer" more information in less time, compared to a non-tonal language.

cageface 11y ago
This is true. Vietnamese is tonal and mostly monosyllabic, for example. But it turns out that people tend to speak very information dense languages like this more slowly, so the overall information density is similar among languages. Maybe humans can only process information so fast? http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0...

yompers888 11y ago

I just wanted to comment on your point about tones. I'm a pretty mediocre Chinese speaker, but I find it much easier to hear Chinese than English. At the level of full sentences, English is far easier for me, but at the word level the advantage is equal in magnitude favoring Chinese. I think it's because it's much easier to hear the voiced sounds that comprise the majority of Chinese, whereas in English a lot of the meaning is loaded into the high-pass unvoiced component. From the perspective of the listener, it seems to make much more sense to use the higher-SNR of voiced sounds to convey the bulk of information (as I believe Chinese does), rather than the much weaker unvoiced sounds (which English makes heavy use of.) I'm guessing the prominence of unvoiced sounds in speech owes to their being less effort to form, or to their universality across different people whose voiced sounds would have substantially different frequency components.

mchaver 11y ago

>> Combine this with the use of tones, and you get a pretty complicated mess. You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process. This seems a bit like linguistic relativity. Native speakers don't have problems with tones. It is a challenge for second language learners of Chinese who don't speak a tonal language. Likewise, stress patterns in English are a challenge for second language learners but native speakers don't struggle with it. There is a lot of word play in Chinese. Just because a syllable has a raising tone does not mean it is the exact same pitch as another syllable with a raising tone later in the phrase, rather the syllables follow the same pattern of starting from a lower pitch and go to a higher one. You can also make vowels longer or shorter. >> Things in Chinese are heavily relying on context. That's the case for most languages. What does 'hit' mean in English? He hit me. Give me a hit. That show is a hit. He hit a tree with his car. I hit a new high. The boss ordered a hit on him. Tomorrow we will be hit by a storm. They hit it off well. She hit on him. That hits close to home. Let's hit the road.

yen223 11y ago
Tones are to native English speakers what L's and R's are to native Japanese speakers. Because tones don't carry semantic information in English, we tend to ignore it, which leads to English speakers sounding really weird when speaking any Chinese dialect.
- talideon 11y ago
  It's not good to confuse your mother (mā) with your horse (mǎ).
- philh 11y ago
  Unless we're talking about different things - tones carry semantic information, just not the same kind as in Chinese. They indicate things like "I'm asking a question" and "I'm being sarcastic". This does make it hard for English speakers learning Chinese, but I don't think it's quite the same as L/R in Japanese.
Chathamization 11y ago

agrand 11y ago

OP here. I think the reality is obviously more messy than what the article tends to portray. All natural languages are messy in their own idiomatic ways. One of the goals of the article was to emphasize the structure in the Chinese language, because most people who are not familiar with it just assume it's just a big bunch of meaningless ideograms. It's a "simple" introduction, not a thorough one. It's meant to tease people's curiosity. If you start with a negative bias towards Chinese, you won't be able to see where it shines. Things that you express with tones in English, can be expressed with particles in Chinese. They can also be expressed in other modulations at the sentence level. Some subtleties of English definitely can't be expressed in Chinese, but the reverse is equally true. And that's the point I want to stress. Chinese is very different, and where there is difference, there is richness.

imron 11y ago
Hi OP, nice article. I notice however that you've taken a graphic from the front page of my website: http://www.hanzigrids.com http://www.hanzigrids.com (though interestingly, a slightly older version than the graphic currently there). You're welcome to keep using it, but it would be nice if you could add some attribution.
- agrand 11y ago
  I wasn't sure were it came from (did a google image search for this one), should have been more careful. Fixed.
  - imron 11y ago
    Thanks!
- oxygenoxy 11y ago
  Is it possible to add stroke order to hanzigrids?
  - stevendaniels 11y ago

cageface 11y ago

I've been living in Vietnam for years now and watched many foreigners struggle to learn the language, which depends even more on tones than Chinese. Tonal languages are very unforgiving, and the differences between tones are very subtle in common conversation. Even when Vietnamese completely mangle the grammar and pronunciation of English you can usually understand what they're trying to say. But if you don't absolutely nail the tones and pronunciation of Vietnamese all you'll get are blank stares back in response. That is, if you haven't accidentally said something wrong or vulgar by mistake. The saving grace of Vietnamese is that the grammar is trivially simple compared to English. No plurals, tenses, cases, verb conjugation etc. And it uses the Latin alphabet so reading and writing it is vastly easier than Chinese.

polymatter 11y ago
as someone currently learning Vietnamese do you have any tips for learning the language? I've learnt some Mandarin so I am no stranger to tones - but the tones in Vietnamese seem quite different. I've been using Pimsleur which I highly recommend, but I find I end up atuned to their particular voices and can not understand genuine Vietnamese speech. Also I am using memrise to learn vocabulary, but without example sentences and the like I find it of limited use until I find the same word in a real life context. Interested in your thoughts.
- cageface 11y ago
  There's no substitute for one on one tutoring with a native speaker. Get somebody to drill you on the tones and the alphabet. Once you have those down you can work on vocabulary on your own. If I'd done this when I first got here I'd be a lot further along now.
  - polymatter 11y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I will do that.
    - contingencies 11y ago

talideon 11y ago

> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process. That's not unusual even in languages without tones. For instance, in Irish, you can't use vocal stress to emphasise particular words like you can in English. Instead, you use a combination of changes in word order and emphatic affixes to convey the same meaning. No expressiveness is lost, it's just that Irish uses as different mechanism to convey the same meaning. My understanding of Mandarin and the other Sinitic languages is similar: they might not use the same mechanisms to convey such information as in English, but they certainly can convey them. > Moreover, combining one character before (or after) another can change the meaning entirely. Adding a third one can again change things. vent con-vent con-vent-tion Mandarin is no different than any other language in this regard. It's just that it's writing system masks what we'd consider words in languages with alphabet-like scripts. Also keep in mind that the Chinese characters make use of punning, so sometimes those weird character combinations are simply very, very old visual or phonological puns. [There's a little bit of cheating in there, because the 'vent' in 'convent' is more like 'ven-t', but the principle still applies, and with some though I could find better examples. However, as mentioned, Chinese characters do rely on punning like this in places, it's not a huge flaw in the example.] > You can't apply a Porter stemming algorithm for example; there's no concept of stem or etymology (no apparently logical one at least). There are a few reasons for that, but the main one is that Mandarin is a largely isolating language. However, to apply some equivalent of Porter stemming, you need to rely on there being a concept similar to a word in the language and its writing system, whereas Chinese characters are more akin to morphemes, so the concept of 'stemming' makes no sense. Pinyin is another matter though. > there's no concept of [...] etymology (no apparently logical one at least). There is, it's just obscured by how divorced the written language is from the spoken language, which isn't the case for languages with alphabets, syllabaries, &c.

DonaldFisk 11y ago

I once built a Chinese search engine, which worked quite well. Stemming isn't an issue as Chinese has absolutely no inflection. The problem is that there are no spaces between words. To separate them, I used a dictionary and a greedy algorithm. At any point in the text, I simply found the longest word in the dictionary which matched and committed to that. On rare occasions, it would get it wrong but soon recover (e.g. if my next few characters are ABCDE and the longest matching word is ABC, I'd match that, followed perhaps by D and E, even if the correct tokenization is AB CD E). Without a dictionary you can't meaningfully tokenize Chinese.

co_dh 11y ago

As a Chinese, I can tell you that there are only 3000 common Chinese characters. My nephew begin to read news paper at grade 4 ( 10 years old). I begin to read very complicate novels at 13. A good thing about Chinese character is: I can easily read laws if I want, because there is not much new vocabulary to read. Tone is not a problem for baby. They can grasp it from day one when they start to speak.( I have 3 kids) There is a lot logic inside Chinese characters.

talideon 11y ago
The problem with tone isn't so much that it's hard (not more so than, say, a voicing or aspiration contrast is), but that as people get older, it's harder to hear contrasts that don't exist in the languages you're familiar with.

gbog 11y ago

"You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process." Well, er..., Chinese classic poetry is the quite subtle and expressive, I have heard. And, not sure for your native language but for mine, if I read or hear a word that I do not know, I also have to take the dictionnary. Moreover, in many cases, I will not know how to pronounce a name I never heard before. And, well, building a search engine is much simpler in Chinese, because characters do not change. So yes, there is (almost) no stemming, because you do not need to stem the words before indexing or searching. Another point you did not mention: printing Chinese characters on a paper or a screen is much simpler: all of them have the same width and height. No kerning. No need for text justification (almost). Do you know that when preparing for a book in French the typographs have to make sure there is no "rivers" in the page and adjust word spaces accordingly?

logingone 11y ago

Yes, I started learning a bit of Mandarin this year. Interesting, but tedious. Imagine they constructed their numeral system the way they constructed the (non)alphabet. Instead of 0-9, and all numbers constructed from those, there would be a million characters for counting to one million.

ljk 11y ago

> The bottom line is that even for a native speaker, if you encounter a new character, chances are you don't know what it means or how to pronounce it. If it's simple enough, you may guess, but that's it. Native speaker here, this is definitely true. On top of the characters Also, children learn the phonetic alphabet[1] before learning the characters. That's why it takes so long to even read a simple magazine: no one uses the phonetic alphabet outside of lower level elementary school. This article is like the "Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes"[2] but more like "Learn to read 0.01% of Chinese characters in 15 minutes", but interesting nonetheless [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo [2]http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/