6 ms·

'They say Chinese is difficult - European languages are more difficult'

58 points by soyelmango 16y ago

CWuestefeld 16y ago
Recently my wife (born and raised in China) was on the phone with her dad. She was trying to tell him something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking insect), but she didn't know the Chinese word. She looked it up in the English->Chinese dictionary, and that told her what the character is. But since she was on the phone -- voice only -- she was still unable to communicate it, since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. She tried to describe the strokes in the character to dad, but just couldn't get it across. EDIT: to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. That's because Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. A given pronunciation would only address one specific local pronunciation of one specific sub-language, so it's not so useful. Also, his complaints about not being able to figure out new words aren't really valid. Since so much of English consists of building words from roots stolen from Latin and other languages, if you know those roots, it does get you a good deal of the way toward understanding new words.
- chime 16y ago
  Could she not have said "blood sucking insect"?
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    What, you mean mosquitos?
    - chime 16y ago
      You have a point there. I stand corrected.
    - joubert 16y ago
      "no dad, I meant the blood sucking arachnids, not insects"
      - CWuestefeld 16y ago
        D'oh! But in colloquial Chinese, do they reflect the same zoological classifications that we have in the West? Maybe they just have a generic "bug" or something. This is one of the things that's very easy to assume, but not doesn't really have any strong intrinsic logic to support, much like recent conversations here about color perception. Also, why do we always orient maps with the North pointing up or away from us, and reference those maps based on that assumed orientation? Why not have East pointing up?
        joubert 16y ago
        unless the other guy quite literally doesn't have experience/knowledge of a tick, I think one can figure out a way to describe it :-) north: although ptolemy introduced the convention of north/up, I can easily see how the use of a lodestone could naturally give rise to the custom (north --> lodestone points forward; when you tilt the surface perpendicular to the ground, it is up).
        sliverstorm 16y ago
        > Maybe they just have a generic "bug" or something. You have an excellent point there. I remember when I was learning Japanese I asked my teacher what the word for 'rat' was (mouse is 'nezumi') and she said just use 'nezumi', or use a qualifier e.g. 'ookii nezumi' (big mouse)
        hugh3 16y ago
        For what it's worth, I saw an Australian stand-up comic once making fun of American English in which all insects are referred to as "bugs". (Australian English tends to reserve the word "bug" for beetles.) It was funnier in context, trust me.
  - deleted 16y ago
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  - billybob 16y ago
    Seconded. One of the most valuable tools for me in Spanish is the ability to describe things I can't say. I don't know the word for tick, but I could say "an insect that [hmmm, don't know the word for 'sucks'...] eats your blood, and it doesn't fly, and it stays there on your skin for an hour or two, and it gets bigger while it eats..." and the person would say, "oh, a tick!" And I'd learn a new word.
    - georgieporgie 16y ago
      And that's how we got kangaroo, which means, "I don't know." "Hey, you, what's that... that jumpy thing over there?" "I don't know." "Ah! An I don't know, eh? Spectacular!" (note: it appears that there is reason to believe this old story is untrue, but it still serves to illustrate a real and hilarious problem when speaking across languages)
- misterbwong 16y ago
  One possible solution would be to find a dictionary that has either pinyin or zhuyin fuhao to guide pronunciation. I believe zhongwen.com provides this.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    In this case pinyin would have worked, since (afaik) it's a representation of Mandarin pronunciation, which happens to be the language they were speaking at the time. However, (1) we don't have such a dictionary, and I think demanding such a specialized dictionary violates the argument in the OP; and (2) if they'd been speaking Shanghainese, which is her other Chinese tongue, or another dialect, pinyin wouldn't have helped. I'm not familiar with zhuyin, but given what I understand about the problem, I imagine the same weakness would apply.
- est 16y ago
  > something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking insect) 蜱 It's indeed a rare word.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    She got that far, but how do you pronounce it in Mandarin? How about in Shanghainese?
    - est 16y ago
      use this http://cn.voicedic.com/ http://cn.voicedic.com/ the last option is for Shanghaiese
    - kroger 16y ago
      For Mandarin I like this dictionary: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=tick http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&...
- FooBarWidget 16y ago
  "to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation" What? Every Chinese dictionary I've seen says how a word is written in Pinyin, allowing one to pronounce it. Every person in mainland China who has gone to school knows Mandarin and Pinyin. For example Cantonese is just a locally spoken dialect, children learn Mandarin at school.
  - baby 16y ago
    old dictionary didn't have pinyin. But the fact that characters don't give out pronunciation is a big issue when you come across one in your everyday life (restaurant menu for example) and can't pronounce it, nor can ask someone to explain it to you later (unless you remember how to write it).
  - bfung 16y ago
    to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation Depends who's Chinese =P If you buy a dictionary in Taiwan, you can look up words using the Zhuying Fuhao system (Bopomofo). There are 37 characters, with about the first 21-24 can be used as the first sound, 3 as a middle sound, and the last 13-16 as the second sound of words (plus the 4 (ok, 5 sorta) intonations). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo But yes, it really depends on the sanctioned system and the dialect. Can't really use pinyin for Cantonese... For example Cantonese is just a locally spoken dialect, children learn Mandarin at school. Not completely true. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is written as well as spoken. For example, the English phrase's meaning of "do not have" can be translated into Mandarin as 没有, however, in Cantonese, spoken and written, is expressed more commonly as 冇. 没有 - http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/words/9084/ http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/words/9084/ 冇 - http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/256/ http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/256/
- ww520 16y ago
  The term "suck blood insect" is tick. Why is she looking up an obscure word?
- yuan 16y ago
  > ...since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of 虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right). > Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up online[2]. > Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan). It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc, and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change soon. [1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical [2] http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh-CN&q=%E8%9C%B1&hl=en http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh-CN&...
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly I suspect you have some exposure to Cantonese, then. My experience in discussing this with many native Chinese speakers is that Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Fujianese are all mutually unintelligible. And not just slightly so, but as difficult to convey understanding as I (an English speaker with a touch of French) experience in Mexico. But don't just take my word for it: Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. [1] (The above quotation bears this footnote: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages." ) As you suggest that I may be prejudiced for political reasons, I respond that in this subject I have absolutely no bias. And let me add that the very same criticism could be directed at you. A final criterion in differentiating language from dialect involves a language's political status, a factor that is external to the form of the language and sometimes even at variance with the culture of the speakers. Do the political authorities in a country consider two language forms to be separate languages or dialects of a single language? Extremely different, non-mutually intelligible language forms may be called dialects simply because they are spoken within a single political entity and it behooves the rulers of that entity to consider them as such: this was the case with Ukrainian and Russian in the days of the Russian Empire, where Ukrainian (called Little Russian) was considered a substandard variety of Russian (called Great Russian). This could also be said to be the case with the so-called dialects of Chinese in the People's Republic of China. On the other hand, language forms that are quite mutually intelligible can be considered separate languages also for purely political reasons. Such is the case with Serbian and Croatian in the former Yugoslavia. Linguistically, these two language forms are more similar than the English spoken in Texas and New York; linguists, in fact, usually called them both by the name Serbo-Croatian. However, for entirely political reasons the Serbs and the Croats have deliberately invented separate literary standards to render their language more divergent than it really is. Furthermore, the Croats, being Catholics, use the Latin alphabet, while the Orthodox Serbs use a version of Cyrillic. A similar situation pertains is other cases, notably Hindi/Urdu, and Bengali/Assamese. [2] Finally, you note that Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used in movies, etc. This is true for most of the PRC, but is not true for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and (I think) Tibet. But I don't see what it proves in any case. I will add, though, that in Chinese movies I frequently see Chinese subtitles, presumably put there so that those used to different "dialects" can understand. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language [2] http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/dialectology.htm http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/dial...
samratjp 16y ago
Ah, but the complainers are the adults who are pretty lazy (& lousy - in relative to children of course) at learning a foreign language. The U.S. especially needs to do a better job of teaching foreign languages. But sadly, most start a second language in schools around high school and are not very good at it either. As about the european languages argument, the comparison is mostly about vocabulary it seems. That's hardly a justifiable comparison. Sure, words may indeed be simpler in Chinese, but the sad reality is that languages are a cultural heirloom that gets guarded but yet is stolen many times. Part of the gosh-darn specialty of these languages is to strengthen the cultural ties and keep it in. In fact, you might as well compare english with scientific papers written in english...
kurtosis 16y ago
It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european! Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a native speaker! The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn? I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes. "chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence of the word from the french word for "candlestick"
- Bjoern 16y ago
  Something like "Aus der Wohnung ausziehen.." is perfectly fine for "moving out". http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed&sectHdr=on&spellToler=&search=move+out http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0...
  - ugh 16y ago
    Both “off” and “out” are translated to „aus“ in German. „Ausziehen” could be translated as “to pull off” (for clothes) or ”to pull out” (for houses and apartments). Hence the two meanings. When you put your clothes on or move in you don‘t have the same problem. “On” and “in” are translated to „an“ and „ein“, respectively. That’s why there is „anziehen“ (“to pull on”, for clothes) and „einziehen“ (“to pull in”, for houses and apartments). (To the grandparent: You really should try you luck creating compound words in German even when you are not sure whether the word exists. That’s a very German thing to do :)
- baby 16y ago
  Even in the comment you use "langauge", so doubtful I checked if the world "langauge" existed haha. When he says it's simple, he means to understand. But sometimes you can still guess words. Few examples that you could have find if you're familiar with chinese (because you're learning it for example) : _出租车 (chuzuche) means taxi (rent - car) _火车 (huoche) means train (fire - car) _飞机 (feiji) means airplane (fly - machine)
ambulatorybird 16y ago
As someone who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, I've noticed the same thing. E.g., lobster is "dragon shrimp," computer is "electric brain," etc. I wonder if the reason European languages have so many apparently 'unique' words is their inclusion of other older European languages such as Greek and Latin. Chinese, by comparison, seems to have borrowed mainly from itself.
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  Yes, that's the exact reason. The words mentioned in the article all make total sense if you know Latin and/or Ancient Greek: * bus (from omnibus, latin for "for everyone") * shampoo - that's actually coming from the Hindi champo (according to Wikipedia, I didn't know it) where it means "head massage" * isotope - that's actually Greek, but still not hard to figure out; iso = same, topos (τόπος) = place * communism - that doesn't even need explanation * computer - also no explanation needed My point is, the only thing that makes these words sound "unique" is that they are usually borrowed from other languages, especially Latin or Ancient Greek. Many of these words are just as simply structured as their Chinese equivalents.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    The other thing that makes many of them sound unique is the way they are put together (conjugated?), which produces a new sound. To an unfamiliar ear, isotope and iso topos sound like different words.
- deleted 16y ago
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- joubert 16y ago
  Icelandic has some beautiful examples of creative language (purism), e.g. instead of using a word derived from the Greek for electricity, it uses "rafmagn" which literally means "amber power". Another example is sími, the word for telephone (which comes from the greek "tele" (far) and "phone" (voice)).
  - 16y ago
rick888 16y ago
Every language has its difficulties. Chinese grammar is very easy compared to English. However, to get to a basic reading level, you need to know at least 2300 characters (in other languages, the alphabet is very small). There are also tones (mandarin only has 5. Other dialects like Cantonese have 9). It's also nearly impossible to know the meaning of a character (or how to pronounce it), unless you have already seen it (you can look at the root, but that doesn't always work).
- deleted 16y ago
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- iamwil 16y ago
  This is true. In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun. And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent.
  - vorg 16y ago
    "In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun." The 50+ classifiers can be hard to remember, though admittedly you can just use 个 every time when speaking and it doesn't sound too bad. "And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent." When to use each verb modifier (e.g. 了, 过, 正在, 起来, 下去) and how they combine with negators and auxiliaries (e.g. 没, 不, 会, 能) seems more difficult than in English.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    Those things may well trip you up when writing. But in reading English and other European languages, those things can be clues to deciphering the stuff you don't know. They help you see how the words of the sentence relate to each other, so without them you've got a little less information for puzzling it out.
  - Naga 16y ago
    Articles are used to distinguish between whether or not you are talking about a specific item, or a general item (which I'm sure you know). This is actually very valuable. I've studied Latin, and sometimes you can't know which is which, because Latin doesn't distinguish. Also, I don't think 'a' and 'an' are fundamentally different. 'An' just has the extra sound to smooth speech over. It doesn't really matter if you write "a apple" or "an apple". Also, verb conjugation in English is pretty nonexistant, compared to other languages, like Romance languages. There are usually three different verb forms: the standard (write), the past (writed) and the third person singular present (writes). I know there are some irregularities, but generally if you want to say a verb, you use the standard.
chime 16y ago
I never knew this was the case. It actually makes me want to learn Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese etc.) now because it sounds like a very neat system.
skermes 16y ago
It looks like the problem the author is struggling with is vocab-as-meaning vs vocab-as-etymology. She complains that english creates new words for everything; "bus", "envelope", etc, but we really tend to re-use words for different but allegorical meanings all the time. I'm sure all the readers here are familiar with at least one meaning of 'bus' that has nothing to with wheels. And the noun 'envelope' would be, I think, a pretty easy word to guess if you saw it in context and were already familiar with the verb 'envelop'.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  This is one of the wonderful things about English (and other European languages that I have knowledge of). My wife (also referenced in this thread here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439092 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439092 ) struggled with English at first until an ESL teacher showed her how easy it is to manufacture noun, verb, adjective, or adverb forms from a single base. She had been working hard memorizing every word form that was taught her until somebody showed her that the way English actually works is generally pretty logical. She says her vocabulary tripled overnight.
- deleted 16y ago
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mhartl 16y ago
Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"? It's amazing how much this sounds like Newspeak. Evidently you can translate Newspeak into Chinese.
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toddh 16y ago
I took Chinese in college and the problem for me was the tones. If you don't grow up hearing them then they are very hard to pickup as an adult. The characters you an learn with effort. But the tone shifts just didn't register.
mhartl 16y ago
I think the central claim about Chinese isn't that it's hard to speak; it's that it's hard to read and write. Although the wonderful article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard" (http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html) does mention the lack of cognates and the difficulty of tonal languages, which are clearly a matter of perspective, there is little doubt that the Chinese writing system is more difficult than alphabets in absolute terms.
jhg 16y ago
> Chinese like everything simple, doesn't have to be too exact Oh, don't start. "I don't know what the bug was, but I fixed it." - verbatim quote. This was a mode of operation of disturbingly large number of Chinese devs I have worked with. After several bugfixing iterations of this kind it was easier to throw the code away and redo it from scratch than to understand how that managed to work. So, yeah, "don't have to be exact" is certainly there.
- spotter 16y ago
  LOL Anyone who's ever worked with a Chinese PhD's, grad students or serious developers (such as in finance) knows this is complete horseshit... But you're right, this thread is the perfect place for some casual racism to vent your frustrations in working with third-rate developers foisted upon you by your company's outsource policies.
  - jhg 16y ago
    My primary experience stems from working for a Canadian-based company with 200+ developers (located in Canada), 80% of which were Chinese programmers. The CTO of the company was Chinese and he had an obvious preference for hiring graduates from his own university and/or country. Top picks, but few with more than a couple of years of non-Chinese experience. Just to emphasize - EIGHT PERCENT of my coworkers came from Chinese software development companies and they quite naturally brought their work ethics with them. My four years in this company is a basis for my original comment. If it's not obvious, I am not talking about Chinese nationality, I am talking about developers with Chinese way of working in a software development environment. The way that revolves around never saying No to the boss, which in turn is deeply rooted in their cultural heritage. If the project manager says that the bug needs to be fixed today, it will be fixed today. Meaning that it will no longer be reproducible. How it will be fixed and what else is going to broken along the way is secondary. This will create another bug that can be taken care of later in the same manner. And this was the company that developed sophisticated networking software including their own embedded OS down to the kernel level. Moreover most of these guys were perfectly capable of NOT cutting corners and doing a splendid coding job if forced. But god forbid if they would ever do it on their own accord. Everything was always done in a rush and sketchy-patchy way. I don't have any other explanation except for it to be a cultural thing. You can certainly call it a horseshit and a casual racism if you'd like. However that's how things are in reality.
Bjoern 16y ago
As a half-german when I see this I just think literally wth. > There are German words as long as > "Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft".
- slashcom 16y ago
  It's kind of like saying there are english words as long as antidisestablishmentarianism.
  - tbrownaw 16y ago
    My system dictionary has supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes.
- vetinari 16y ago
  With all respect, all the guilt for this word belongs to Austrians :).
est 16y ago
Classical Chinese is very difficult here is a list of Chinese words about horses: http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8273127/ http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8273127/ 马骎騤駉驵骜骥骀驽騑骖驷骃骅骆骊騧骐骠骝骢骓牿驺
- hugh3 16y ago
  Here is a list of English words about horses: horse, mare, stallion, gelding, foal, colt, yearling, filly, pony, equine, Equus ferus caballus, mustang, brumby, mount, steed,... and so forth, without getting into different breeds of horses or special-purpose horses.
  - igravious 16y ago
    brumby? now i know fo shizzle that y'all just yankin my chain...
mbenjaminsmith 16y ago
A language being highly synthetic is actually a liability in the case of non-delimited written languages (which is the case with Chinese and Thai, the latter of which I have some fluency). While Thai is more logical in one sense (subway = electric vehicle under ground, transliterated: rotfaidaidin) trying to read a sentence with no separation between those words just adds to the confusion. When most words in a language are combinations of other, complete words, it really raises the bar for being able to read something and get the gist of it, which is critical for moving on to true fluency.
yosho 16y ago
it might be simple to say, and it might even be simple to understand, but it's freakin difficult as hell to read and write. I think the author needs to expand more on how he defines simple. Being a native Chinese speaker, I can understand and say most things in Mandarin, but I still cannot read or write well. Even after years of Chinese School and years of my parents trying to make me learn, It's just too easy to forget once you stop using it.
gwern 16y ago
> Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%. Good luck reading sentences where the most important and meaningful word is the one you don't know. And what's with the interest in characters? Didn't you just get done praising how most words are formed out of a bunch of characters? So now we need to memorize a few thousand characters and memorize how multiple characters form a word/concept. The alphabet looks better all the time...
billswift 16y ago
Read Asia's Orthographic Dilemma by William Hannas. Apparently, not only is there a ridiculous number of symbols to learn, the dogma that all the spoken versions share the same written language is not true. Also, writers commonly make up their own written forms of words on the fly, especially for technical and academic writing, so even an experienced reader is left struggling, trying to figure things out.
- olifante 16y ago
  I found Hannas' book boring. I much prefer John DeFrancis' The Chinese Language - Fact and Fantasy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fantasy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fant...) and Sampson's Writing Systems. These are the books that taught me that Chinese writing is more usable and more adapted to the particular needs of the Chinese language than we in the West tend to believe. In particular, the phonetic element in Chinese characters is much more important than I imagined. Also, while it is true that the road to fluent reading is much longer for the Chinese than for readers of phonemic scripts, this is partly compensated by the higher reading efficiency of fluent Chinese readers. One way to look at Chinese writing is to see it as a highly defective phonemic writing system with semantic annotations. In other words, Chinese characters constitute a morphophonemic writing system, much like English (for/four/fore) but with a much stronger emphasis on the morphemic aspect.
misterbwong 16y ago
From OP Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%. Anyone know where I can get my hands on this list? This would help tremendously while learning chinese.
- ximeng 16y ago
  http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/ http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/ Try this site for some frequency lists.
soyelmango 16y ago
(I submitted this link, and I should add that I'm not the author.) I think the commenters who write about distinguishing learning vocab from digging deeper into understanding etymology ( eg skermes, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131 ) have hit the nail on the head (translate that one!). At that point, learning vocab, whatever the language, becomes more fun for me. Back to the cooking thing though... I'm surprised that most comments I see so far are about the language, because what drew me to the article in the first place is the author's connection between the Chinese language and Chinese cooking with non-specialised tools, and how that contrasts with western cooking. I think both Chinese and 'western' cooking tools have specialized, though interestingly in opposite directions. The Chinese specialization towards one wok, one cleaver, one chopping board (prep hygiene, anyone?), chopsticks (and food cut and cooked to size) and green tea minimizes the toolset. The 'Western' way specializes in a different way: specialize the tool to what's being cooked and eaten - a fish pan, a medium sized knife to prep, a fish knife to eat, and white rather than red wine. I'm not saying one is better than the other - I'll happily eat both Chinese or western food (or any other) if you're cooking for me! ... I'm just interested in studying the differences and similarities. Disclosure: I'm Chinese.
- nwomack 16y ago
  Also, when eating out in Western culture you are more prone to just ordering your own meal, whereas in Chinese culture it's typically family style. It is also, with few exceptions, acceptable to grab food in the 'center' with your own chopsticks. I guess chopsticks don't get dirty :) One thing that drives me crazy about chopsticks is when you want to cut something, you have to do that X trick and sort of cross the chopsticks, or use the spoon. I'm a wiz with chopsticks, but a knife and fork is the ultimate combo. It wins at every category except noodle soup and sushi.
  - soyelmango 16y ago
    Those chopsticks and communal sauces do get 'dirty', but hey, a few germs keep your immune system on its toes! There may well be an aspect of group bonding there in saliva-exchange. If you have to cut food, that's someone else's failing before it gets to the table - tough cheap meat, cut too big, or cooked badly. But yes, I've often had to cut meat with a blunt china spoon too! Yes, the spoon - glad to hear you're one of the few non-Chinese (I presume, from your name) who uses it. Always amusing to watch people eating rice 2 grains at a time with chopsticks...
nwomack 16y ago
I am a white American, lived in the US for 29 years and now have been in Taiwan for 3 months with my Taiwanese Fiance. I have been studying Chinese for about a year, with increasing fever since coming to Taiwan. From what I can gather so far, Chinese is much harder to get to a basic level than English.. Let's say a 1st grade level. This is primarily due to the tones, and the characters having no correlation to the words (this is the big one... thank god for flash cards). My unqualified claim is that Chinese is "Hard to learn, (relatively) easy to Master" due to the reasons stated in the article... English would be "Easy to learn, hard to master", primarily due to the insane vocabulary and tricky grammar. How many chinese born speakers have you heard say "the, than, 's, that, which, at, " and the like, not to mention correctly pronounce all the various english sounds, not to mention American vs British english. Anyways.. Point is. Chinese is hard. But so are other languages. Of course, picking up another language that is similar to yours would be much easier. (English -> German), or (Mandarin Chinese -> Cantonese). It's all relative. Something pretty curious about Chinese, though, is how difficult it is to understand if you don't know it. When being welcomed to a shop, they say 歡迎光臨 (Huānyíng guānglín) which I never noticed until I learned it, after which point I have heard it constantly. For comparison, in Tokyo, I vividly remember countless occurances of "irashaimase"
rit 16y ago
I say, you european languages, using 26 or slightly more alphabets, you had a great chance to make your language simple and easy to learn, why do you make it so complicated? Except, of course, most European languages are intermingled with other languages so intrinsically that they don't stand on their own. Look in an English dictionary at how many times you see "from <some other language, like French>" in the source. English itself is descended, as I recall from old German. It split off from Middle English and left Scots (The lowland language, not the Gaelic of the highlands) still looking and sounding much like Middle English well into modern times. Hell, American English shares a whole bunch of words from Scottish English which don't exist in "standard" English (such as Janitor, Pinkie, and I believe "Proven" is a quirk of "proved" which is specific to these two offshoots). Core English itself is heavily influenced by French, which is descended from Latin. It has, especially for technical things, a huge amount of borrowings from Greek and Latin in and of itself. Again, I can't speak for other European languages as apart from American English I only know some Scots & Irish Gaelic and had a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. But part of what made English a lingua franca was the willingness to take and borrow words from other languages. Why come up with a "Local" word for something when the other language's word will suffice? (I can't find examples of the words or remember how to spell them, but Scottish Gaelic in particular lately has been absorbing "Modern" words like Computer and Internet and applying a Gaelic-sounding inflection and spelling to them. Same word, just ... "Gaelicized") Further, Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"? ... I'm taking a wild stab here, but the ability for European languages to absorb arbitrary new words that people come up with is part of what has led to such a flexible growth. It's frustrating for new learners to adapt to the language but the flexibility of the written word to introduce new concepts is astounding. Yes, we could have called the Internet "Network-of-connected-computers" but coining a word for it made it somehow more concrete, and real. In a "Hacker" context take an article from yesterday which talked about how Scala is not a better Java. I'm paraphrasing from memory but the author argued that Java's beauty comes from it's simple structure, small list of keywords, etc etc. Scala allows huge flexibility, defining your own keywords, internal DSLs and a lot of things. Java has power in it's rigidity and stricture. Scala is incredibly flexible and adaptable. There are good things about both - but I can make Scala code read like prose (Oh god, I just had reminders of "Literate Programming") because I'm free to define new syntax that fits my needs. _EDIT_: When I say a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. I mean that I at one point had a fairly good knowledge of Spanish. When I moved to Miami after high school (I grew up in Philadelphia - wasn't a lot of exposure to Spanish in the day-to-day at the time), I couldn't understand a word people were saying or vice versa. The syntax, accents, etc were so drastically different from what I was taught that I was lost. I've since more or less let my Spanish knowledge atrophy (I can remember how to conjugate but damned if I can remember much of the actual words/word roots). This itself is actually an argument aside from my previous statements. I don't know much about Chinese but I'm curious as to how locality affects the language. Is syntax and accent so drastically different from one region to another so as to make two people practically unable to communicate? English has cases like that - there are a variety of regional dialects where two native English speakers from distinct regions might swear neither was speaking English. I'm to understand that fragmentation is getting greater since England stopped pushing "Received Pronunciation" (An "official" way to pronounce words taught in schools up through at least WW2). I'm from Mid-Atlantic US which to me seems a fairly "neutral" accent (I have a few quirks of speech specific to my region of birth - I'll often pronounce Water as "wood-er" [whereas in NY where I now live it's "Watt-er] or Creek as "crick"]). But some Southern accents can be practically inscrutable. I won't even begin to go into trying to understand what the hell people from Canada are saying.
aristus 16y ago
Wait, what? I think the author is just ignorant of Greek and Latin roots (it's ok, most native speakers are too). iso-tope is literally "at the same place" commun-ism is literally "share-ism"
- sabat 16y ago
  You're absolutely right. It's just that, at least in the case of isotope, most people wouldn't realize that "iso" and "tope" have meanings. They might notice that "iso" also occurs in "isolate" but probably wouldn't look much beyond that. The author's point is that the Chinese use simple, everyday words instead of archaic words from dead versions of languages.
  - Nitramp 16y ago
    Be careful. "isolate" comes from Latin "insulare" (or insolare? I don't know). "isos" is Greek for equal, and "in" is a Latin prefix for not.
- deleted 16y ago
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michaelcampbell 16y ago
It's all just a matter of abstraction. "In Chinese, a bus is called a "public wagon"..." Ok. What's "public"? What's "wagon"? Would it not be easier to use "all people carrier"? Then, what's "people? Since it's turtles all the way down, the article is picking an arbitrary (and comfortable) turtle to stop at and say, "this is the right spot".
ww520 16y ago
Every language has its quirks and pluses; otherwise, it won' survive. For Chinese vs English (or other alphabet-based languages) in term of semantic representation, the main distinction is semantic GRANULARITY of a base term. English has 26 alphabets as base term, which have no meaning. The 26 alphabets are combined to form words, which have meaning. When a new thing comes along, a brand new word has to be invented. On the other hand, Chinese has couple thousands (or more) root words as base term that have meaning, which can be used by themselves alone or they can be combined as two-word or three-word phrase as new terms for things. The mixing of root words into new words happen in both Chinese and English. E.g. Firetruck comes from fire and truck, and provides some semantic description of what the term is. It's just that in Chinese, the word combination is the 95% of the language because of large root word set, while only a very small percentage in English due to the inconvenience of combining long words. In Chinese is very easy and cheap to build new term (2-word or N-word phrase) to describe new thing and got accepted by other people since the semantic of the new term has strong relationship to its composing root words. As in English, firetruck is probably related to fire and truck. You won't call a firetruck as waterboat.
GiraffeNecktie 16y ago
After two years studying Mandarin quite intensely I've stopped thinking of the language as "hard" and recognize that it just takes a long time to get where I want to go. Driving to the next big city is not hard but it does take longer than driving to the corner store. Learning any language involves rewiring the brain and, for a westerner, learning Chinese involves a lot more of that rewiring because almost nothing from English is transferable. When I say 'rewiring' I mean coaxing my neurons to grow into a useful framework that someday will support that magical skill I posess in English of knowing exactly what people are saying and exactly what I want to say. No amount of "hard work" is going to make that happen ... I can't force my neurons to develop no matter how hard I grit my teeth and study. It just takes repetition repetition repetition, immersion and lots and lots of time for those neural pathways to develop.
julius_geezer 16y ago
Sounds as if he wants German...
sh4na 16y ago
A language where a spoken word has completely different meanings depending on how hoarse you are that day can be a lot of things, but "simple" is not one of them, imho. The author doesn't understand that most european words aren't just made up on the spot for new things, they are built with the same process as he describes for chinese: pick an existing term and adapt it for a new use, or pick several terms and join them up. Of course, you probably have to go back a few hundreds or thousands of years to get at the root of the thing. otoh, I could say that the advantage of having a small non-meaningful alphabet is that you're not stuck with the symbolism of existing characters, so you're free to actually make words up if you want to. The advantage of having a (for the most part) neutral tonal system in european languages combined with a small neutral system of characters, combined with the rich heritage of the small number of base languages that created all these languages (latin, greek, etc) and the freedom to synthesize words whenever appropriate is what is making english the lingua franca that it is, and what keeps all other (let's not say euro, but western) languages up there on the importance chart. I wonder if it would be easy for chinese speakers to understand how western languages work if we say that each character in the latin alphabet is the equivalent of a single stroke in chinese...

58 points by soyelmango 16y ago

Recently my wife (born and raised in China) was on the phone with her dad. She was trying to tell him something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking insect), but she didn't know the Chinese word. She looked it up in the English->Chinese dictionary, and that told her what the character is. But since she was on the phone -- voice only -- she was still unable to communicate it, since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. She tried to describe the strokes in the character to dad, but just couldn't get it across. EDIT: to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. That's because Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. A given pronunciation would only address one specific local pronunciation of one specific sub-language, so it's not so useful. Also, his complaints about not being able to figure out new words aren't really valid. Since so much of English consists of building words from roots stolen from Latin and other languages, if you know those roots, it does get you a good deal of the way toward understanding new words.

chime 16y ago
Could she not have said "blood sucking insect"?
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  What, you mean mosquitos?
  - chime 16y ago
    You have a point there. I stand corrected.
  - joubert 16y ago
    "no dad, I meant the blood sucking arachnids, not insects"
    - CWuestefeld 16y ago
      D'oh! But in colloquial Chinese, do they reflect the same zoological classifications that we have in the West? Maybe they just have a generic "bug" or something. This is one of the things that's very easy to assume, but not doesn't really have any strong intrinsic logic to support, much like recent conversations here about color perception. Also, why do we always orient maps with the North pointing up or away from us, and reference those maps based on that assumed orientation? Why not have East pointing up?
      - joubert 16y ago
        unless the other guy quite literally doesn't have experience/knowledge of a tick, I think one can figure out a way to describe it :-) north: although ptolemy introduced the convention of north/up, I can easily see how the use of a lodestone could naturally give rise to the custom (north --> lodestone points forward; when you tilt the surface perpendicular to the ground, it is up).
      - sliverstorm 16y ago
        > Maybe they just have a generic "bug" or something. You have an excellent point there. I remember when I was learning Japanese I asked my teacher what the word for 'rat' was (mouse is 'nezumi') and she said just use 'nezumi', or use a qualifier e.g. 'ookii nezumi' (big mouse)
      - hugh3 16y ago
        For what it's worth, I saw an Australian stand-up comic once making fun of American English in which all insects are referred to as "bugs". (Australian English tends to reserve the word "bug" for beetles.) It was funnier in context, trust me.
- deleted 16y ago
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- billybob 16y ago
  Seconded. One of the most valuable tools for me in Spanish is the ability to describe things I can't say. I don't know the word for tick, but I could say "an insect that [hmmm, don't know the word for 'sucks'...] eats your blood, and it doesn't fly, and it stays there on your skin for an hour or two, and it gets bigger while it eats..." and the person would say, "oh, a tick!" And I'd learn a new word.
  - georgieporgie 16y ago
    And that's how we got kangaroo, which means, "I don't know." "Hey, you, what's that... that jumpy thing over there?" "I don't know." "Ah! An I don't know, eh? Spectacular!" (note: it appears that there is reason to believe this old story is untrue, but it still serves to illustrate a real and hilarious problem when speaking across languages)
misterbwong 16y ago
One possible solution would be to find a dictionary that has either pinyin or zhuyin fuhao to guide pronunciation. I believe zhongwen.com provides this.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  In this case pinyin would have worked, since (afaik) it's a representation of Mandarin pronunciation, which happens to be the language they were speaking at the time. However, (1) we don't have such a dictionary, and I think demanding such a specialized dictionary violates the argument in the OP; and (2) if they'd been speaking Shanghainese, which is her other Chinese tongue, or another dialect, pinyin wouldn't have helped. I'm not familiar with zhuyin, but given what I understand about the problem, I imagine the same weakness would apply.
est 16y ago
> something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking insect) 蜱 It's indeed a rare word.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  She got that far, but how do you pronounce it in Mandarin? How about in Shanghainese?
  - est 16y ago
    use this http://cn.voicedic.com/ http://cn.voicedic.com/ the last option is for Shanghaiese
  - kroger 16y ago
    For Mandarin I like this dictionary: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=tick http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&...
FooBarWidget 16y ago
"to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation" What? Every Chinese dictionary I've seen says how a word is written in Pinyin, allowing one to pronounce it. Every person in mainland China who has gone to school knows Mandarin and Pinyin. For example Cantonese is just a locally spoken dialect, children learn Mandarin at school.
- baby 16y ago
  old dictionary didn't have pinyin. But the fact that characters don't give out pronunciation is a big issue when you come across one in your everyday life (restaurant menu for example) and can't pronounce it, nor can ask someone to explain it to you later (unless you remember how to write it).
- bfung 16y ago
  to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation Depends who's Chinese =P If you buy a dictionary in Taiwan, you can look up words using the Zhuying Fuhao system (Bopomofo). There are 37 characters, with about the first 21-24 can be used as the first sound, 3 as a middle sound, and the last 13-16 as the second sound of words (plus the 4 (ok, 5 sorta) intonations). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo But yes, it really depends on the sanctioned system and the dialect. Can't really use pinyin for Cantonese... For example Cantonese is just a locally spoken dialect, children learn Mandarin at school. Not completely true. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is written as well as spoken. For example, the English phrase's meaning of "do not have" can be translated into Mandarin as 没有, however, in Cantonese, spoken and written, is expressed more commonly as 冇. 没有 - http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/words/9084/ http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/words/9084/ 冇 - http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/256/ http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/256/
ww520 16y ago
The term "suck blood insect" is tick. Why is she looking up an obscure word?
yuan 16y ago
> ...since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of 虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right). > Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up online[2]. > Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan). It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc, and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change soon. [1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical [2] http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh-CN&q=%E8%9C%B1&hl=en http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh-CN&...
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly I suspect you have some exposure to Cantonese, then. My experience in discussing this with many native Chinese speakers is that Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Fujianese are all mutually unintelligible. And not just slightly so, but as difficult to convey understanding as I (an English speaker with a touch of French) experience in Mexico. But don't just take my word for it: Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. [1] (The above quotation bears this footnote: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages." ) As you suggest that I may be prejudiced for political reasons, I respond that in this subject I have absolutely no bias. And let me add that the very same criticism could be directed at you. A final criterion in differentiating language from dialect involves a language's political status, a factor that is external to the form of the language and sometimes even at variance with the culture of the speakers. Do the political authorities in a country consider two language forms to be separate languages or dialects of a single language? Extremely different, non-mutually intelligible language forms may be called dialects simply because they are spoken within a single political entity and it behooves the rulers of that entity to consider them as such: this was the case with Ukrainian and Russian in the days of the Russian Empire, where Ukrainian (called Little Russian) was considered a substandard variety of Russian (called Great Russian). This could also be said to be the case with the so-called dialects of Chinese in the People's Republic of China. On the other hand, language forms that are quite mutually intelligible can be considered separate languages also for purely political reasons. Such is the case with Serbian and Croatian in the former Yugoslavia. Linguistically, these two language forms are more similar than the English spoken in Texas and New York; linguists, in fact, usually called them both by the name Serbo-Croatian. However, for entirely political reasons the Serbs and the Croats have deliberately invented separate literary standards to render their language more divergent than it really is. Furthermore, the Croats, being Catholics, use the Latin alphabet, while the Orthodox Serbs use a version of Cyrillic. A similar situation pertains is other cases, notably Hindi/Urdu, and Bengali/Assamese. [2] Finally, you note that Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used in movies, etc. This is true for most of the PRC, but is not true for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and (I think) Tibet. But I don't see what it proves in any case. I will add, though, that in Chinese movies I frequently see Chinese subtitles, presumably put there so that those used to different "dialects" can understand. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language [2] http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/dialectology.htm http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/dial...

samratjp 16y ago

Ah, but the complainers are the adults who are pretty lazy (& lousy - in relative to children of course) at learning a foreign language. The U.S. especially needs to do a better job of teaching foreign languages. But sadly, most start a second language in schools around high school and are not very good at it either. As about the european languages argument, the comparison is mostly about vocabulary it seems. That's hardly a justifiable comparison. Sure, words may indeed be simpler in Chinese, but the sad reality is that languages are a cultural heirloom that gets guarded but yet is stolen many times. Part of the gosh-darn specialty of these languages is to strengthen the cultural ties and keep it in. In fact, you might as well compare english with scientific papers written in english...

kurtosis 16y ago

It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european! Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a native speaker! The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn? I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes. "chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence of the word from the french word for "candlestick"

Bjoern 16y ago
Something like "Aus der Wohnung ausziehen.." is perfectly fine for "moving out". http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0&cmpType=relaxed&sectHdr=on&spellToler=&search=move+out http://dict.leo.org/ende?lp=ende&lang=de&searchLoc=0...
- ugh 16y ago
  Both “off” and “out” are translated to „aus“ in German. „Ausziehen” could be translated as “to pull off” (for clothes) or ”to pull out” (for houses and apartments). Hence the two meanings. When you put your clothes on or move in you don‘t have the same problem. “On” and “in” are translated to „an“ and „ein“, respectively. That’s why there is „anziehen“ (“to pull on”, for clothes) and „einziehen“ (“to pull in”, for houses and apartments). (To the grandparent: You really should try you luck creating compound words in German even when you are not sure whether the word exists. That’s a very German thing to do :)
baby 16y ago
Even in the comment you use "langauge", so doubtful I checked if the world "langauge" existed haha. When he says it's simple, he means to understand. But sometimes you can still guess words. Few examples that you could have find if you're familiar with chinese (because you're learning it for example) : _出租车 (chuzuche) means taxi (rent - car) _火车 (huoche) means train (fire - car) _飞机 (feiji) means airplane (fly - machine)

ambulatorybird 16y ago

As someone who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, I've noticed the same thing. E.g., lobster is "dragon shrimp," computer is "electric brain," etc. I wonder if the reason European languages have so many apparently 'unique' words is their inclusion of other older European languages such as Greek and Latin. Chinese, by comparison, seems to have borrowed mainly from itself.

DrJokepu 16y ago
Yes, that's the exact reason. The words mentioned in the article all make total sense if you know Latin and/or Ancient Greek: * bus (from omnibus, latin for "for everyone") * shampoo - that's actually coming from the Hindi champo (according to Wikipedia, I didn't know it) where it means "head massage" * isotope - that's actually Greek, but still not hard to figure out; iso = same, topos (τόπος) = place * communism - that doesn't even need explanation * computer - also no explanation needed My point is, the only thing that makes these words sound "unique" is that they are usually borrowed from other languages, especially Latin or Ancient Greek. Many of these words are just as simply structured as their Chinese equivalents.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  The other thing that makes many of them sound unique is the way they are put together (conjugated?), which produces a new sound. To an unfamiliar ear, isotope and iso topos sound like different words.
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joubert 16y ago
Icelandic has some beautiful examples of creative language (purism), e.g. instead of using a word derived from the Greek for electricity, it uses "rafmagn" which literally means "amber power". Another example is sími, the word for telephone (which comes from the greek "tele" (far) and "phone" (voice)).
- 16y ago

rick888 16y ago

Every language has its difficulties. Chinese grammar is very easy compared to English. However, to get to a basic reading level, you need to know at least 2300 characters (in other languages, the alphabet is very small). There are also tones (mandarin only has 5. Other dialects like Cantonese have 9). It's also nearly impossible to know the meaning of a character (or how to pronounce it), unless you have already seen it (you can look at the root, but that doesn't always work).

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iamwil 16y ago
This is true. In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun. And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent.
- vorg 16y ago
  "In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun." The 50+ classifiers can be hard to remember, though admittedly you can just use 个 every time when speaking and it doesn't sound too bad. "And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent." When to use each verb modifier (e.g. 了, 过, 正在, 起来, 下去) and how they combine with negators and auxiliaries (e.g. 没, 不, 会, 能) seems more difficult than in English.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  Those things may well trip you up when writing. But in reading English and other European languages, those things can be clues to deciphering the stuff you don't know. They help you see how the words of the sentence relate to each other, so without them you've got a little less information for puzzling it out.
- Naga 16y ago
  Articles are used to distinguish between whether or not you are talking about a specific item, or a general item (which I'm sure you know). This is actually very valuable. I've studied Latin, and sometimes you can't know which is which, because Latin doesn't distinguish. Also, I don't think 'a' and 'an' are fundamentally different. 'An' just has the extra sound to smooth speech over. It doesn't really matter if you write "a apple" or "an apple". Also, verb conjugation in English is pretty nonexistant, compared to other languages, like Romance languages. There are usually three different verb forms: the standard (write), the past (writed) and the third person singular present (writes). I know there are some irregularities, but generally if you want to say a verb, you use the standard.

chime 16y ago

I never knew this was the case. It actually makes me want to learn Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese etc.) now because it sounds like a very neat system.

skermes 16y ago

It looks like the problem the author is struggling with is vocab-as-meaning vs vocab-as-etymology. She complains that english creates new words for everything; "bus", "envelope", etc, but we really tend to re-use words for different but allegorical meanings all the time. I'm sure all the readers here are familiar with at least one meaning of 'bus' that has nothing to with wheels. And the noun 'envelope' would be, I think, a pretty easy word to guess if you saw it in context and were already familiar with the verb 'envelop'.

CWuestefeld 16y ago
This is one of the wonderful things about English (and other European languages that I have knowledge of). My wife (also referenced in this thread here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439092 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439092 ) struggled with English at first until an ESL teacher showed her how easy it is to manufacture noun, verb, adjective, or adverb forms from a single base. She had been working hard memorizing every word form that was taught her until somebody showed her that the way English actually works is generally pretty logical. She says her vocabulary tripled overnight.
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mhartl 16y ago

Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"? It's amazing how much this sounds like Newspeak. Evidently you can translate Newspeak into Chinese.

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toddh 16y ago

I took Chinese in college and the problem for me was the tones. If you don't grow up hearing them then they are very hard to pickup as an adult. The characters you an learn with effort. But the tone shifts just didn't register.

mhartl 16y ago

I think the central claim about Chinese isn't that it's hard to speak; it's that it's hard to read and write. Although the wonderful article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard" (http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html) does mention the lack of cognates and the difficulty of tonal languages, which are clearly a matter of perspective, there is little doubt that the Chinese writing system is more difficult than alphabets in absolute terms.

jhg 16y ago

> Chinese like everything simple, doesn't have to be too exact Oh, don't start. "I don't know what the bug was, but I fixed it." - verbatim quote. This was a mode of operation of disturbingly large number of Chinese devs I have worked with. After several bugfixing iterations of this kind it was easier to throw the code away and redo it from scratch than to understand how that managed to work. So, yeah, "don't have to be exact" is certainly there.

spotter 16y ago
LOL Anyone who's ever worked with a Chinese PhD's, grad students or serious developers (such as in finance) knows this is complete horseshit... But you're right, this thread is the perfect place for some casual racism to vent your frustrations in working with third-rate developers foisted upon you by your company's outsource policies.
- jhg 16y ago
  My primary experience stems from working for a Canadian-based company with 200+ developers (located in Canada), 80% of which were Chinese programmers. The CTO of the company was Chinese and he had an obvious preference for hiring graduates from his own university and/or country. Top picks, but few with more than a couple of years of non-Chinese experience. Just to emphasize - EIGHT PERCENT of my coworkers came from Chinese software development companies and they quite naturally brought their work ethics with them. My four years in this company is a basis for my original comment. If it's not obvious, I am not talking about Chinese nationality, I am talking about developers with Chinese way of working in a software development environment. The way that revolves around never saying No to the boss, which in turn is deeply rooted in their cultural heritage. If the project manager says that the bug needs to be fixed today, it will be fixed today. Meaning that it will no longer be reproducible. How it will be fixed and what else is going to broken along the way is secondary. This will create another bug that can be taken care of later in the same manner. And this was the company that developed sophisticated networking software including their own embedded OS down to the kernel level. Moreover most of these guys were perfectly capable of NOT cutting corners and doing a splendid coding job if forced. But god forbid if they would ever do it on their own accord. Everything was always done in a rush and sketchy-patchy way. I don't have any other explanation except for it to be a cultural thing. You can certainly call it a horseshit and a casual racism if you'd like. However that's how things are in reality.

Bjoern 16y ago

As a half-german when I see this I just think literally wth. > There are German words as long as > "Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft".

slashcom 16y ago
It's kind of like saying there are english words as long as antidisestablishmentarianism.
- tbrownaw 16y ago
  My system dictionary has supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes.
vetinari 16y ago
With all respect, all the guilt for this word belongs to Austrians :).

est 16y ago

Classical Chinese is very difficult here is a list of Chinese words about horses: http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8273127/ http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8273127/ 马骎騤駉驵骜骥骀驽騑骖驷骃骅骆骊騧骐骠骝骢骓牿驺

hugh3 16y ago
Here is a list of English words about horses: horse, mare, stallion, gelding, foal, colt, yearling, filly, pony, equine, Equus ferus caballus, mustang, brumby, mount, steed,... and so forth, without getting into different breeds of horses or special-purpose horses.
- igravious 16y ago
  brumby? now i know fo shizzle that y'all just yankin my chain...

mbenjaminsmith 16y ago

A language being highly synthetic is actually a liability in the case of non-delimited written languages (which is the case with Chinese and Thai, the latter of which I have some fluency). While Thai is more logical in one sense (subway = electric vehicle under ground, transliterated: rotfaidaidin) trying to read a sentence with no separation between those words just adds to the confusion. When most words in a language are combinations of other, complete words, it really raises the bar for being able to read something and get the gist of it, which is critical for moving on to true fluency.

yosho 16y ago

it might be simple to say, and it might even be simple to understand, but it's freakin difficult as hell to read and write. I think the author needs to expand more on how he defines simple. Being a native Chinese speaker, I can understand and say most things in Mandarin, but I still cannot read or write well. Even after years of Chinese School and years of my parents trying to make me learn, It's just too easy to forget once you stop using it.

gwern 16y ago

> Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%. Good luck reading sentences where the most important and meaningful word is the one you don't know. And what's with the interest in characters? Didn't you just get done praising how most words are formed out of a bunch of characters? So now we need to memorize a few thousand characters and memorize how multiple characters form a word/concept. The alphabet looks better all the time...

billswift 16y ago

Read Asia's Orthographic Dilemma by William Hannas. Apparently, not only is there a ridiculous number of symbols to learn, the dogma that all the spoken versions share the same written language is not true. Also, writers commonly make up their own written forms of words on the fly, especially for technical and academic writing, so even an experienced reader is left struggling, trying to figure things out.

olifante 16y ago
I found Hannas' book boring. I much prefer John DeFrancis' The Chinese Language - Fact and Fantasy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fantasy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fant...) and Sampson's Writing Systems. These are the books that taught me that Chinese writing is more usable and more adapted to the particular needs of the Chinese language than we in the West tend to believe. In particular, the phonetic element in Chinese characters is much more important than I imagined. Also, while it is true that the road to fluent reading is much longer for the Chinese than for readers of phonemic scripts, this is partly compensated by the higher reading efficiency of fluent Chinese readers. One way to look at Chinese writing is to see it as a highly defective phonemic writing system with semantic annotations. In other words, Chinese characters constitute a morphophonemic writing system, much like English (for/four/fore) but with a much stronger emphasis on the morphemic aspect.

misterbwong 16y ago

From OP Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%. Anyone know where I can get my hands on this list? This would help tremendously while learning chinese.

ximeng 16y ago
http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/ http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/ Try this site for some frequency lists.

soyelmango 16y ago

(I submitted this link, and I should add that I'm not the author.) I think the commenters who write about distinguishing learning vocab from digging deeper into understanding etymology ( eg skermes, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131 ) have hit the nail on the head (translate that one!). At that point, learning vocab, whatever the language, becomes more fun for me. Back to the cooking thing though... I'm surprised that most comments I see so far are about the language, because what drew me to the article in the first place is the author's connection between the Chinese language and Chinese cooking with non-specialised tools, and how that contrasts with western cooking. I think both Chinese and 'western' cooking tools have specialized, though interestingly in opposite directions. The Chinese specialization towards one wok, one cleaver, one chopping board (prep hygiene, anyone?), chopsticks (and food cut and cooked to size) and green tea minimizes the toolset. The 'Western' way specializes in a different way: specialize the tool to what's being cooked and eaten - a fish pan, a medium sized knife to prep, a fish knife to eat, and white rather than red wine. I'm not saying one is better than the other - I'll happily eat both Chinese or western food (or any other) if you're cooking for me! ... I'm just interested in studying the differences and similarities. Disclosure: I'm Chinese.

nwomack 16y ago
Also, when eating out in Western culture you are more prone to just ordering your own meal, whereas in Chinese culture it's typically family style. It is also, with few exceptions, acceptable to grab food in the 'center' with your own chopsticks. I guess chopsticks don't get dirty :) One thing that drives me crazy about chopsticks is when you want to cut something, you have to do that X trick and sort of cross the chopsticks, or use the spoon. I'm a wiz with chopsticks, but a knife and fork is the ultimate combo. It wins at every category except noodle soup and sushi.
- soyelmango 16y ago
  Those chopsticks and communal sauces do get 'dirty', but hey, a few germs keep your immune system on its toes! There may well be an aspect of group bonding there in saliva-exchange. If you have to cut food, that's someone else's failing before it gets to the table - tough cheap meat, cut too big, or cooked badly. But yes, I've often had to cut meat with a blunt china spoon too! Yes, the spoon - glad to hear you're one of the few non-Chinese (I presume, from your name) who uses it. Always amusing to watch people eating rice 2 grains at a time with chopsticks...

nwomack 16y ago

I am a white American, lived in the US for 29 years and now have been in Taiwan for 3 months with my Taiwanese Fiance. I have been studying Chinese for about a year, with increasing fever since coming to Taiwan. From what I can gather so far, Chinese is much harder to get to a basic level than English.. Let's say a 1st grade level. This is primarily due to the tones, and the characters having no correlation to the words (this is the big one... thank god for flash cards). My unqualified claim is that Chinese is "Hard to learn, (relatively) easy to Master" due to the reasons stated in the article... English would be "Easy to learn, hard to master", primarily due to the insane vocabulary and tricky grammar. How many chinese born speakers have you heard say "the, than, 's, that, which, at, " and the like, not to mention correctly pronounce all the various english sounds, not to mention American vs British english. Anyways.. Point is. Chinese is hard. But so are other languages. Of course, picking up another language that is similar to yours would be much easier. (English -> German), or (Mandarin Chinese -> Cantonese). It's all relative. Something pretty curious about Chinese, though, is how difficult it is to understand if you don't know it. When being welcomed to a shop, they say 歡迎光臨 (Huānyíng guānglín) which I never noticed until I learned it, after which point I have heard it constantly. For comparison, in Tokyo, I vividly remember countless occurances of "irashaimase"

rit 16y ago

I say, you european languages, using 26 or slightly more alphabets, you had a great chance to make your language simple and easy to learn, why do you make it so complicated? Except, of course, most European languages are intermingled with other languages so intrinsically that they don't stand on their own. Look in an English dictionary at how many times you see "from <some other language, like French>" in the source. English itself is descended, as I recall from old German. It split off from Middle English and left Scots (The lowland language, not the Gaelic of the highlands) still looking and sounding much like Middle English well into modern times. Hell, American English shares a whole bunch of words from Scottish English which don't exist in "standard" English (such as Janitor, Pinkie, and I believe "Proven" is a quirk of "proved" which is specific to these two offshoots). Core English itself is heavily influenced by French, which is descended from Latin. It has, especially for technical things, a huge amount of borrowings from Greek and Latin in and of itself. Again, I can't speak for other European languages as apart from American English I only know some Scots & Irish Gaelic and had a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. But part of what made English a lingua franca was the willingness to take and borrow words from other languages. Why come up with a "Local" word for something when the other language's word will suffice? (I can't find examples of the words or remember how to spell them, but Scottish Gaelic in particular lately has been absorbing "Modern" words like Computer and Internet and applying a Gaelic-sounding inflection and spelling to them. Same word, just ... "Gaelicized") Further, Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"? ... I'm taking a wild stab here, but the ability for European languages to absorb arbitrary new words that people come up with is part of what has led to such a flexible growth. It's frustrating for new learners to adapt to the language but the flexibility of the written word to introduce new concepts is astounding. Yes, we could have called the Internet "Network-of-connected-computers" but coining a word for it made it somehow more concrete, and real. In a "Hacker" context take an article from yesterday which talked about how Scala is not a better Java. I'm paraphrasing from memory but the author argued that Java's beauty comes from it's simple structure, small list of keywords, etc etc. Scala allows huge flexibility, defining your own keywords, internal DSLs and a lot of things. Java has power in it's rigidity and stricture. Scala is incredibly flexible and adaptable. There are good things about both - but I can make Scala code read like prose (Oh god, I just had reminders of "Literate Programming") because I'm free to define new syntax that fits my needs. _EDIT_: When I say a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. I mean that I at one point had a fairly good knowledge of Spanish. When I moved to Miami after high school (I grew up in Philadelphia - wasn't a lot of exposure to Spanish in the day-to-day at the time), I couldn't understand a word people were saying or vice versa. The syntax, accents, etc were so drastically different from what I was taught that I was lost. I've since more or less let my Spanish knowledge atrophy (I can remember how to conjugate but damned if I can remember much of the actual words/word roots). This itself is actually an argument aside from my previous statements. I don't know much about Chinese but I'm curious as to how locality affects the language. Is syntax and accent so drastically different from one region to another so as to make two people practically unable to communicate? English has cases like that - there are a variety of regional dialects where two native English speakers from distinct regions might swear neither was speaking English. I'm to understand that fragmentation is getting greater since England stopped pushing "Received Pronunciation" (An "official" way to pronounce words taught in schools up through at least WW2). I'm from Mid-Atlantic US which to me seems a fairly "neutral" accent (I have a few quirks of speech specific to my region of birth - I'll often pronounce Water as "wood-er" [whereas in NY where I now live it's "Watt-er] or Creek as "crick"]). But some Southern accents can be practically inscrutable. I won't even begin to go into trying to understand what the hell people from Canada are saying.

aristus 16y ago

Wait, what? I think the author is just ignorant of Greek and Latin roots (it's ok, most native speakers are too). iso-tope is literally "at the same place" commun-ism is literally "share-ism"

sabat 16y ago
You're absolutely right. It's just that, at least in the case of isotope, most people wouldn't realize that "iso" and "tope" have meanings. They might notice that "iso" also occurs in "isolate" but probably wouldn't look much beyond that. The author's point is that the Chinese use simple, everyday words instead of archaic words from dead versions of languages.
- Nitramp 16y ago
  Be careful. "isolate" comes from Latin "insulare" (or insolare? I don't know). "isos" is Greek for equal, and "in" is a Latin prefix for not.
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michaelcampbell 16y ago

It's all just a matter of abstraction. "In Chinese, a bus is called a "public wagon"..." Ok. What's "public"? What's "wagon"? Would it not be easier to use "all people carrier"? Then, what's "people? Since it's turtles all the way down, the article is picking an arbitrary (and comfortable) turtle to stop at and say, "this is the right spot".

ww520 16y ago

Every language has its quirks and pluses; otherwise, it won' survive. For Chinese vs English (or other alphabet-based languages) in term of semantic representation, the main distinction is semantic GRANULARITY of a base term. English has 26 alphabets as base term, which have no meaning. The 26 alphabets are combined to form words, which have meaning. When a new thing comes along, a brand new word has to be invented. On the other hand, Chinese has couple thousands (or more) root words as base term that have meaning, which can be used by themselves alone or they can be combined as two-word or three-word phrase as new terms for things. The mixing of root words into new words happen in both Chinese and English. E.g. Firetruck comes from fire and truck, and provides some semantic description of what the term is. It's just that in Chinese, the word combination is the 95% of the language because of large root word set, while only a very small percentage in English due to the inconvenience of combining long words. In Chinese is very easy and cheap to build new term (2-word or N-word phrase) to describe new thing and got accepted by other people since the semantic of the new term has strong relationship to its composing root words. As in English, firetruck is probably related to fire and truck. You won't call a firetruck as waterboat.

GiraffeNecktie 16y ago

After two years studying Mandarin quite intensely I've stopped thinking of the language as "hard" and recognize that it just takes a long time to get where I want to go. Driving to the next big city is not hard but it does take longer than driving to the corner store. Learning any language involves rewiring the brain and, for a westerner, learning Chinese involves a lot more of that rewiring because almost nothing from English is transferable. When I say 'rewiring' I mean coaxing my neurons to grow into a useful framework that someday will support that magical skill I posess in English of knowing exactly what people are saying and exactly what I want to say. No amount of "hard work" is going to make that happen ... I can't force my neurons to develop no matter how hard I grit my teeth and study. It just takes repetition repetition repetition, immersion and lots and lots of time for those neural pathways to develop.

julius_geezer 16y ago

Sounds as if he wants German...

sh4na 16y ago

A language where a spoken word has completely different meanings depending on how hoarse you are that day can be a lot of things, but "simple" is not one of them, imho. The author doesn't understand that most european words aren't just made up on the spot for new things, they are built with the same process as he describes for chinese: pick an existing term and adapt it for a new use, or pick several terms and join them up. Of course, you probably have to go back a few hundreds or thousands of years to get at the root of the thing. otoh, I could say that the advantage of having a small non-meaningful alphabet is that you're not stuck with the symbolism of existing characters, so you're free to actually make words up if you want to. The advantage of having a (for the most part) neutral tonal system in european languages combined with a small neutral system of characters, combined with the rich heritage of the small number of base languages that created all these languages (latin, greek, etc) and the freedom to synthesize words whenever appropriate is what is making english the lingua franca that it is, and what keeps all other (let's not say euro, but western) languages up there on the importance chart. I wonder if it would be easy for chinese speakers to understand how western languages work if we say that each character in the latin alphabet is the equivalent of a single stroke in chinese...