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I am not sure I know what you mean by 'spaces', but I think I do. It's the fact that there is no natural separation of grouped words. Without vocab it's really

I am not sure I know what you mean by 'spaces', but I think I do. It's the fact that there is no natural separation of grouped words. Without vocab it's really hard to understand a sentence. Also there is a cultural element (much more so than other languages perhaps) But thats kind of the advantage too, there is no preset standard grammatical way of looking at anything, you simply take it all in and infer everything on context. No learning verb conjugations and endless rules like in some languages (I'm looking at you, French) People are saying Chinese is harder to learn than other languages, and it's true, but mostly only for the first few years, after that, it's way easier to learn than a new romance language for a native speaker of a romance language

schoen 9y ago
> But thats kind of the advantage too, there is no preset standard grammatical way of looking at anything, you simply take it all in and infer everything on context. No learning verb conjugations and endless rules like in some languages (I'm looking at you, French) I don't speak Chinese, so I don't have a personal intution about this, but in this case, I think you're conflating as many as three different linguistic issues. * Word boundaries not being represented in orthography means that there is more ambiguity about whether something should be regarded a compound word, a fixed phrase, or a single word. Speakers of languages like English may disagree about items like "mail box" vs. "mailbox" or "zu Hause" vs. "zuhause" ('at home' in German). In Chinese orthography there does not necessarily need to be an answer to these questions and people don't necessarily need to take a position on them. * "No grammar" might be an intuition that people form about Chinese, but it's not true at all. Chinese doesn't mark a large number of grammatical categories that other languages do, but it marks some that other languages don't, such as classifiers or measure words used with numbers. https://digchinese.com/measure-words https://digchinese.com/measure-words Also, Chinese word order is not free and forms a part of the grammar. So 我爱你 'I love you' is a different sentence from 你爱我 'you love me', and that distinction is a grammatical distinction. In Latin, "ego amo te" and "te amo ego" have the same meaning! (The inverse is any permutation of the words "tu me amas".) In comparison with other languages, this is one way in which Chinese speakers don't just "take it all in and infer everything on context", because they get to use word order to derive the meaning, which would be a far less useful signal in Latin or Russian. * Chinese pretty much never inflects words, so there aren't tables of inflections to learn as there would be in an inflected language. But conceivably an inflected language speaker might feel that Chinese is being verbose (!) by requiring the expression of subject pronouns in order to indicate grammatical subject. For example, a speaker of inflected pro-drop languages (where subject pronouns are optional) like Latin or Spanish might find it weird that you have to use two "words" 你有 to express what to them is just a "simple" word like "habes" or "tienes" 'you have', that inherently reveals the identity of the subject in a concise and intuitive way. :-) Or for tense, speakers of these languages might find it strangely verbose to have to throw in 以前 'formerly' or 曾经 'once' or something, instead of a concise infix like -ba- (amabas, in both languages, instead of something like 你以前爱 which can be regarded as three distinct words ... or maybe, as you said, not always analyzed that way by some speakers!).
- mcguire 9y ago
  "Word boundaries not being represented in orthography means that there is more ambiguity about whether something should be regarded a compound word, a fixed phrase, or a single word." DeFrancis' counterexample for the myth that each Chinese character is a word is "coral", 珊瑚 (I hope). According to the dictionary he quoted, the two characters, individually, mean "coral" but they're never used separately.
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    Sure, there are words like this, but they're very much the exception, not the rule. An analogy would be English words like "flabbergasted", which is clearly composed of "flabber" and the past tense of "to gast", neither of which is ever used in its own.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
Word spacing is used in the spoken language. I think that's why people find it easier to learn Chinese by speaking first, instead of reading & writing. Unfortunately for me, I'm a programmer, not an English teacher, so I spend all my time reading instead of speaking. So I have to learn it the hard way.

schoen 9y ago

> But thats kind of the advantage too, there is no preset standard grammatical way of looking at anything, you simply take it all in and infer everything on context. No learning verb conjugations and endless rules like in some languages (I'm looking at you, French) I don't speak Chinese, so I don't have a personal intution about this, but in this case, I think you're conflating as many as three different linguistic issues. * Word boundaries not being represented in orthography means that there is more ambiguity about whether something should be regarded a compound word, a fixed phrase, or a single word. Speakers of languages like English may disagree about items like "mail box" vs. "mailbox" or "zu Hause" vs. "zuhause" ('at home' in German). In Chinese orthography there does not necessarily need to be an answer to these questions and people don't necessarily need to take a position on them. * "No grammar" might be an intuition that people form about Chinese, but it's not true at all. Chinese doesn't mark a large number of grammatical categories that other languages do, but it marks some that other languages don't, such as classifiers or measure words used with numbers. https://digchinese.com/measure-words https://digchinese.com/measure-words Also, Chinese word order is not free and forms a part of the grammar. So 我爱你 'I love you' is a different sentence from 你爱我 'you love me', and that distinction is a grammatical distinction. In Latin, "ego amo te" and "te amo ego" have the same meaning! (The inverse is any permutation of the words "tu me amas".) In comparison with other languages, this is one way in which Chinese speakers don't just "take it all in and infer everything on context", because they get to use word order to derive the meaning, which would be a far less useful signal in Latin or Russian. * Chinese pretty much never inflects words, so there aren't tables of inflections to learn as there would be in an inflected language. But conceivably an inflected language speaker might feel that Chinese is being verbose (!) by requiring the expression of subject pronouns in order to indicate grammatical subject. For example, a speaker of inflected pro-drop languages (where subject pronouns are optional) like Latin or Spanish might find it weird that you have to use two "words" 你有 to express what to them is just a "simple" word like "habes" or "tienes" 'you have', that inherently reveals the identity of the subject in a concise and intuitive way. :-) Or for tense, speakers of these languages might find it strangely verbose to have to throw in 以前 'formerly' or 曾经 'once' or something, instead of a concise infix like -ba- (amabas, in both languages, instead of something like 你以前爱 which can be regarded as three distinct words ... or maybe, as you said, not always analyzed that way by some speakers!).

mcguire 9y ago
"Word boundaries not being represented in orthography means that there is more ambiguity about whether something should be regarded a compound word, a fixed phrase, or a single word." DeFrancis' counterexample for the myth that each Chinese character is a word is "coral", 珊瑚 (I hope). According to the dictionary he quoted, the two characters, individually, mean "coral" but they're never used separately.
- jpatokal 9y ago
  Sure, there are words like this, but they're very much the exception, not the rule. An analogy would be English words like "flabbergasted", which is clearly composed of "flabber" and the past tense of "to gast", neither of which is ever used in its own.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

Word spacing is used in the spoken language. I think that's why people find it easier to learn Chinese by speaking first, instead of reading & writing. Unfortunately for me, I'm a programmer, not an English teacher, so I spend all my time reading instead of speaking. So I have to learn it the hard way.