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hah, I was reading the page and going "why does this 'yingzi' sound more and more like chinese as I keep reading?" The English spelling system doesn't sound li

hah, I was reading the page and going "why does this 'yingzi' sound more and more like chinese as I keep reading?" The English spelling system doesn't sound like that much of a pain compared to Chinese since some of the aspects of both spelling methods are similar enough: prefixes and suffixes and some Latin roots are pretty close to the idea of radicals. But consider this: pronouncing English words are nowhere near as difficult as pronouncing hanzi because English uses an alphabet and has pronunciation rules that make it easy to at least approximate what a word should sound like. Chinese has no such luxury with hanzi (i.e. the characters alone, without pinyin)...if you come across a character you don't know how to pronounce and you have no way to look it up, you might be able to guess at best if you see some sort of radical or character that looks like some other one you know. Lastly, I will say this having spent the last few months trying to learn Mandarin...both typing and writing is frustrating to me. One accidental lengthening of a stroke turns a hanzi into something completely different. If I don't know the pinyin for the hanzi it takes me forever to type it (and unfortunately I haven't gotten used to any other keyboard-based input method) and I end up going to my iPhone to use the handwriting recognition. I type slow as molasses despite being comfortable writing in both hanzi and pinyin. I grew up bilingual (english and korean), but this is a completely different experience. And of course, the page mentions the simplification of hanzi...I can't practice using the language because all my Chinese-fluent friends know Cantonese, and not Mandarin Chinese. Talk about a massive brainfuck because of the differences in writing (simplified vs. traditional, which affects lots of commonly written radicals and characters) and speaking, although it's interesting to see how the same characters can be pronounced so differently. On the upside, I would not mind dreaming that I could take the best of both worlds and combine it into one language. Chinese grammar is ridiculously simple while the English vocabulary simpler to use. I took French and Spanish back in high school and all I remember from then are nothing but conjugations while with Chinese I didn't have to stress over that and could focus on other things. Soooooo simple. Can't get over how simple it is ;)

wallflower 18y ago
Yes, it is a repost. Here is a classic essay by David Moser: "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard". David Moser has taught linguistics at Beijing Foreign Studies University, and he has dubbed the voice of Curly for Three Stooges in Mandarin. http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
- tokenadult 18y ago
  I am a native speaker of English who learned Chinese as a second language, beginning at the beginning of my university studies. I was part of the norming administration for the (never officially launched) test of Chinese as a foreign language developed in the early 1980s by a consortium of United States universities, and set the bar for all other test-takers with my reading score, and did very well in my grammar score too. For most of the 1980s, I was a contract Chinese-English interpreter for the United States Information Agency. On Professor Moser's points: 1) Agree. Professor William Boltz points out that China missed one chance, historically, to transition to a more user-friendly writing system along the lines of Japanese kana syllabaries more than 2,000 years ago. https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_2KO0LUDAZ.HTM https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_2KO0LUDAZ.HTM 2) Actually, there has only been mass literacy in China since alphabetical writing (either National China's zhuyin fuhao [BO PO MO FO] system or the PRC's Hanyu pinyin system) has been used for primary reading instruction. But, yes, there has never been an extension of that use of alphabetical writing into a sufficiently large number of adult texts for the systems to become pervasive in Chinese-speaking countries. 3) Historical sound change has played havoc with the originally sound-indicating aspects of traditional Chinese writing, so, yes, one can't rely on pronunciation as a guide to what to write, nor can one reliably read aloud an unfamiliar written character in most cases. 4) The next objection only applies to native speakers of English (or another Indo-European language) learning a second Indo-European language. Or else it's a mere restatement of what is above. In fact, the many Chinese people who are not native speakers of Mandarin http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_169500.html http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_1695... (a number far larger than most Western observers guess) rely heavily on cognate features of their native Sinitic languages (Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.) to muddle through in speaking and even writing Mandarin. 5) Yes, dictionary look-up in Chinese is very messy. The best approach, and the approach taken by professional editors in Chinese-speaking countries, is to learn the alphabetic writing systems well enough for alphabetic look-up. (I have seen this done.) But one still has to be able to count strokes to look up an unfamiliar written character of unknown pronunciation. 6) A peculiarity of the modern Chinese written language is the preservation of many stock phrases and cliches from the ancient written language, which has quite different grammar and some significant semantic changes in the meaning of individual characters. A well-read reader of English can bluff through some French and some Latin, but a reader of Chinese has to deal with much more ancient language. 7) This is just a restatement of point 2 above. If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese), the official ones would be used for romanization. Hanyu pinyin is in fact very elegant, having been designed by a team of linguists from the Soviet Union and the Chinese communist movement, and I find it very easy to use. 8) Yes, that's very Anglo-centric. I know various speakers of various languages (Ibo is one example) who have thrived when learning Chinese because their native language has phonologically distinctive tones, so learning tones is no problem for them. I agree with most native speakers of English that learning Chinese tones is difficult, but I can manage to speak Chinese over the telephone. The late Y. R. Chao told a funny story of traveling to Sweden one time and failing to buy a train ticket to his destination because he pronounced Malmö with the wrong tone. (Swedish has tone, also.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language#Sounds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language#Sounds 9) Big deal. That's what makes Chinese fun.
shiranaihito 18y ago
True, Chinese has no (?) conjugation, but to compensate, there's quite a strict word order. I took a couple of courses of Chinese too, but gave up because of the nasty characters, difficult pronounciation, and the countless ways in which you can screw up even one word by mis-pronouncing the tones of the syllables :) On the other hand, pronouncing Japanese is virtually like pronouncing Finnish, but I never bothered to learn those Chinese characters for Japanese either.
- trevelyan 18y ago
  In all seriousness, give us a shot: http://popupchinese.com http://popupchinese.com We're a Beijing startup and are changing the face of Chinese language instruction. If characters are causing problems just switch everything to pinyin. We've got a huge variety of shows and tests and speaking drills and are getting rave reviews. There are lots of issues with traditional educational methods. In my personal opinion the biggest is that traditional classroom-based methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language.
  - shiranaihito 18y ago
    Well, I took my beginner's course in Chinese in 2000.. I gave up on it around 2002, and have since moved on to learning Japanese up to daily conversation level, and now I'm considering taking a look at Korean. > methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language. From my experience, I'd say that this is a good point. Our teacher made us (try to) draw those Chinese characters quite a bit, and it didn't really help me at all. There was no way I was going to remember those scary things that soon. My Chinese studies were spread out over two years and two courses, and I only remember a few simple sentences. Only one of them happens to be relevant now: "Wo you yi ge gongzi" (+tones) - I own a company. :P A sole proprietorship, to be exact, but technically a company anyway!
kingkongrevenge 18y ago
> The English spelling system doesn't sound like that much of a pain compared to Chinese English spelling is only mildly complicated compared to the romance languages or arabic. All ideographic writing systems are a horrible mistake. They are much harder. In an ideal world the Chinese and Japanese systems could be completely scrapped and replaced with purely phonetic systems. This gets tossed around every now and then, and was seriously considered during the cultural revolution, but it would obviously be close to impossible to pull off.
- whacked_new 18y ago
  > All ideographic writing systems are a horrible mistake. Practically, yes; functionally, no. I recall there was research on the phonetic activation (and thus dependence) during reading of Chinese hieroglyphs: as predicted, there was less phonetic activation. There are some characters I cannot pronounce, but know the meaning of. It's a strange sensation, but very efficient.
  - tokenadult 18y ago
    but very efficient It's not efficient for a country to have low rates of literacy, and indeed low levels of speaking proficiency in the national language.
    - whacked_new 18y ago
      Efficiency above is in the context of me reading, not in the context of a nation or culture's literacy. Here are two more tangible examples: consider a traffic light that has no colors, but flashes "stop" and "go" in text. The analogous "efficient" in my comment is the colored light, in which you don't think about the phonology of the words but understand its meaning. Other example: a digital vs. an analog clock. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it is plausible that you can tell "oh, it's late!" by looking at the shape of the analog clock, whereas in the digital clock you'd have to parse the numbers. "Efficient" would be the analog clock. Again, this example is suspect; it doesn't apply to myself (I read digital much faster). But in any case I'm not using "efficiency" to describe the writing system; I'm using it to describe a mechanism in reading comprehension.

wallflower 18y ago

Yes, it is a repost. Here is a classic essay by David Moser: "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard". David Moser has taught linguistics at Beijing Foreign Studies University, and he has dubbed the voice of Curly for Three Stooges in Mandarin. http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

tokenadult 18y ago
I am a native speaker of English who learned Chinese as a second language, beginning at the beginning of my university studies. I was part of the norming administration for the (never officially launched) test of Chinese as a foreign language developed in the early 1980s by a consortium of United States universities, and set the bar for all other test-takers with my reading score, and did very well in my grammar score too. For most of the 1980s, I was a contract Chinese-English interpreter for the United States Information Agency. On Professor Moser's points: 1) Agree. Professor William Boltz points out that China missed one chance, historically, to transition to a more user-friendly writing system along the lines of Japanese kana syllabaries more than 2,000 years ago. https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_2KO0LUDAZ.HTM https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_2KO0LUDAZ.HTM 2) Actually, there has only been mass literacy in China since alphabetical writing (either National China's zhuyin fuhao [BO PO MO FO] system or the PRC's Hanyu pinyin system) has been used for primary reading instruction. But, yes, there has never been an extension of that use of alphabetical writing into a sufficiently large number of adult texts for the systems to become pervasive in Chinese-speaking countries. 3) Historical sound change has played havoc with the originally sound-indicating aspects of traditional Chinese writing, so, yes, one can't rely on pronunciation as a guide to what to write, nor can one reliably read aloud an unfamiliar written character in most cases. 4) The next objection only applies to native speakers of English (or another Indo-European language) learning a second Indo-European language. Or else it's a mere restatement of what is above. In fact, the many Chinese people who are not native speakers of Mandarin http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_169500.html http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200501/03/eng20050103_1695... (a number far larger than most Western observers guess) rely heavily on cognate features of their native Sinitic languages (Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.) to muddle through in speaking and even writing Mandarin. 5) Yes, dictionary look-up in Chinese is very messy. The best approach, and the approach taken by professional editors in Chinese-speaking countries, is to learn the alphabetic writing systems well enough for alphabetic look-up. (I have seen this done.) But one still has to be able to count strokes to look up an unfamiliar written character of unknown pronunciation. 6) A peculiarity of the modern Chinese written language is the preservation of many stock phrases and cliches from the ancient written language, which has quite different grammar and some significant semantic changes in the meaning of individual characters. A well-read reader of English can bluff through some French and some Latin, but a reader of Chinese has to deal with much more ancient language. 7) This is just a restatement of point 2 above. If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese), the official ones would be used for romanization. Hanyu pinyin is in fact very elegant, having been designed by a team of linguists from the Soviet Union and the Chinese communist movement, and I find it very easy to use. 8) Yes, that's very Anglo-centric. I know various speakers of various languages (Ibo is one example) who have thrived when learning Chinese because their native language has phonologically distinctive tones, so learning tones is no problem for them. I agree with most native speakers of English that learning Chinese tones is difficult, but I can manage to speak Chinese over the telephone. The late Y. R. Chao told a funny story of traveling to Sweden one time and failing to buy a train ticket to his destination because he pronounced Malmö with the wrong tone. (Swedish has tone, also.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language#Sounds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language#Sounds 9) Big deal. That's what makes Chinese fun.

shiranaihito 18y ago

True, Chinese has no (?) conjugation, but to compensate, there's quite a strict word order. I took a couple of courses of Chinese too, but gave up because of the nasty characters, difficult pronounciation, and the countless ways in which you can screw up even one word by mis-pronouncing the tones of the syllables :) On the other hand, pronouncing Japanese is virtually like pronouncing Finnish, but I never bothered to learn those Chinese characters for Japanese either.

trevelyan 18y ago
In all seriousness, give us a shot: http://popupchinese.com http://popupchinese.com We're a Beijing startup and are changing the face of Chinese language instruction. If characters are causing problems just switch everything to pinyin. We've got a huge variety of shows and tests and speaking drills and are getting rave reviews. There are lots of issues with traditional educational methods. In my personal opinion the biggest is that traditional classroom-based methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language.
- shiranaihito 18y ago
  Well, I took my beginner's course in Chinese in 2000.. I gave up on it around 2002, and have since moved on to learning Japanese up to daily conversation level, and now I'm considering taking a look at Korean. > methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language. From my experience, I'd say that this is a good point. Our teacher made us (try to) draw those Chinese characters quite a bit, and it didn't really help me at all. There was no way I was going to remember those scary things that soon. My Chinese studies were spread out over two years and two courses, and I only remember a few simple sentences. Only one of them happens to be relevant now: "Wo you yi ge gongzi" (+tones) - I own a company. :P A sole proprietorship, to be exact, but technically a company anyway!

kingkongrevenge 18y ago

> The English spelling system doesn't sound like that much of a pain compared to Chinese English spelling is only mildly complicated compared to the romance languages or arabic. All ideographic writing systems are a horrible mistake. They are much harder. In an ideal world the Chinese and Japanese systems could be completely scrapped and replaced with purely phonetic systems. This gets tossed around every now and then, and was seriously considered during the cultural revolution, but it would obviously be close to impossible to pull off.

whacked_new 18y ago
> All ideographic writing systems are a horrible mistake. Practically, yes; functionally, no. I recall there was research on the phonetic activation (and thus dependence) during reading of Chinese hieroglyphs: as predicted, there was less phonetic activation. There are some characters I cannot pronounce, but know the meaning of. It's a strange sensation, but very efficient.
- tokenadult 18y ago
  but very efficient It's not efficient for a country to have low rates of literacy, and indeed low levels of speaking proficiency in the national language.
  - whacked_new 18y ago
    Efficiency above is in the context of me reading, not in the context of a nation or culture's literacy. Here are two more tangible examples: consider a traffic light that has no colors, but flashes "stop" and "go" in text. The analogous "efficient" in my comment is the colored light, in which you don't think about the phonology of the words but understand its meaning. Other example: a digital vs. an analog clock. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it is plausible that you can tell "oh, it's late!" by looking at the shape of the analog clock, whereas in the digital clock you'd have to parse the numbers. "Efficient" would be the analog clock. Again, this example is suspect; it doesn't apply to myself (I read digital much faster). But in any case I'm not using "efficiency" to describe the writing system; I'm using it to describe a mechanism in reading comprehension.