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Of course one can become fluent in a language. People do it all the time. It's a function of exposure (time spent practicing, immersion, etc), teacher quality

by endtime 17y ago

Of course one can become fluent in a language. People do it all the time. It's a function of exposure (time spent practicing, immersion, etc), teacher quality, innate ability, and age. Chinese is a special (though, I think, not unique) because the language is based on cultural metaphors. But for learning something like Italian, Tagalog, or Hebrew (each of which I've studied in the past) it is definitely possible to become fluent.

toisanji 17y ago
Yes, Chinese is an extremely special case. You just can't really understand it without knowing having a deep knowledge of the history and culture. I think Japanese is similar.
- mullr 17y ago
  No more than anything else. Can't comment on Chinese, but I'm well into studying Japanese (and living in Japan now) and it doesn't strike me as fundamentally more difficult than English. It's really easier in a lot of ways. Languages are just different from each other. You don't have to know history to really understand a language, as I expect most speakers don't know all that much history. You simply have to learn a bunch of new stuff.
  - donw 17y ago
    What do you do in Japan? I'm looking at moving back there around the end of the year.
    - mullr 17y ago
      I work from home for LargeCorp USA (writing software) while my wife teaches English. One advantage of working for the man is that The System can be used to your own benefit.
  - menloparkbum 17y ago
    I studied Mandarin for a year in university and lived in Japan for one year (yes, took the wrong language series). If anything spoken Mandarin is easier than English and Japanese. The hard part is the tones, but that's not hard if you actually apply yourself. The grammar itself is relatively simple and doesn't have the multiple layers of etiquette like Japanese or the 50%+ irregular "special cases" of English. The writing systems of Japan and China are another story...
    - GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
      Yeah I've been studying Mandarin for the past year and the thing I love about it is that the grammar is really really simple. Compared to French or English it's an absolute dream. There are no irregular verbs because there's NO freaking conjugation whatsoever. No masculine and feminine nouns. Not even singular and plural! The sentence structure is similar to English - but more rigid (i.e. predictable) - in that you generally have to express things in the order that they exist in the real world. "I can tomorrow at the library meet you" but I can't "meet you at the library tomorrow" (since the library is where we're meeting, we have to be there before the meeting can take place). Of course the tones are challenging in the beginning since we just don't have the ears for it, but it's not that hard. Reading and writing Chinese, however, can be difficult even for many Chinese people who were born and raised in China. Just try looking something up in a Chinese dictionary. If you haven't grown up with it, it's pretty much impossible.
dmlorenzetti 17y ago
Adam Gopnik, in his series of essays on living in France (for the New Yorker, and later collected in "From Paris to the Moon"), makes a distinction between understanding when people are serious, when people are joking, and when people are joking-but-not-joking. His example of the last: doctors would ask when his wife got pregnant. Technically it was a joke (they didn't really need to know), but at the same time it was not a joke (they really wanted to know).
patio11 17y ago
Chinese is a special (though, I think, not unique) because the language is based on cultural metaphors. I hear similar things about Japanese all the time. It grates on me, so allow me to reproduce a quote from a famous American translator of the language whose name I can never recall: "People ask me all the time how I can possibly capture the nuance of Japanese in English, as if there were no nuance in English, or as if there no significance to the fact that the word nuance is French." A language with cultural metaphors? Wow. Stop the presses. (Oh, I see what I did there.)
- xiaoma 17y ago
  Allow me to reproduce another famous quotation (Kipling): "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." European languages do have their own cultural metaphors and stories from which phrases are drawn, but they are similar to each other. Regardless of whether the language is English, French, or Finnish, there's a host of common culture to draw from-- Christian stories, outdated alchemical humors (choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic), Grimm's fairy tales, etc... Chinese, on the other hand, requires learning an almost completely separate set of shared stories. Regardless of any purely linguistic issues, this makes learning Chinese a much larger task than learning a European language for an English speaker.
  - patio11 17y ago
    That is more defensible than the "Chinese is based on cultural metaphors [in a fashion that English is not]" claim, but it still vastly overstates the case. For example, your explanation implies that Chinese speakers find English freakishly difficult when you're studying it, because they don't have the Bible, a few thousand years of Christian theology and a smattering of fake Latin, and Grimm's fairy tales to work with. But do you really believe that? I'm going to guess "no". But most people who think that Chinese (or Japanese, or Arabic, or another of "those exotic languages which are totally unlike anything in our experience after you ignore all the ways they're pretty darn similar") is freakishly difficult for English speakers don't say the reverse is true, even when their supposed rationales for it being difficult are logically reciprocal.
menloparkbum 17y ago
Hebrew is WAY harder than Mandarin, FWIW.
- endtime 17y ago
  Really? I think Hebrew is a hard language (and I'm not fluent), but my (admittedly ignorant) impression was that Chinese was on a different level of difficulty. Hebrew is not tonal, uses an alphabet, and doesn't rely on cultural metahpors in the same way that (I thought) Chinese does.

by endtime 17y ago

toisanji 17y ago

Yes, Chinese is an extremely special case. You just can't really understand it without knowing having a deep knowledge of the history and culture. I think Japanese is similar.

mullr 17y ago
No more than anything else. Can't comment on Chinese, but I'm well into studying Japanese (and living in Japan now) and it doesn't strike me as fundamentally more difficult than English. It's really easier in a lot of ways. Languages are just different from each other. You don't have to know history to really understand a language, as I expect most speakers don't know all that much history. You simply have to learn a bunch of new stuff.
- donw 17y ago
  What do you do in Japan? I'm looking at moving back there around the end of the year.
  - mullr 17y ago
    I work from home for LargeCorp USA (writing software) while my wife teaches English. One advantage of working for the man is that The System can be used to your own benefit.
- menloparkbum 17y ago
  I studied Mandarin for a year in university and lived in Japan for one year (yes, took the wrong language series). If anything spoken Mandarin is easier than English and Japanese. The hard part is the tones, but that's not hard if you actually apply yourself. The grammar itself is relatively simple and doesn't have the multiple layers of etiquette like Japanese or the 50%+ irregular "special cases" of English. The writing systems of Japan and China are another story...
  - GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
    Yeah I've been studying Mandarin for the past year and the thing I love about it is that the grammar is really really simple. Compared to French or English it's an absolute dream. There are no irregular verbs because there's NO freaking conjugation whatsoever. No masculine and feminine nouns. Not even singular and plural! The sentence structure is similar to English - but more rigid (i.e. predictable) - in that you generally have to express things in the order that they exist in the real world. "I can tomorrow at the library meet you" but I can't "meet you at the library tomorrow" (since the library is where we're meeting, we have to be there before the meeting can take place). Of course the tones are challenging in the beginning since we just don't have the ears for it, but it's not that hard. Reading and writing Chinese, however, can be difficult even for many Chinese people who were born and raised in China. Just try looking something up in a Chinese dictionary. If you haven't grown up with it, it's pretty much impossible.

dmlorenzetti 17y ago

Adam Gopnik, in his series of essays on living in France (for the New Yorker, and later collected in "From Paris to the Moon"), makes a distinction between understanding when people are serious, when people are joking, and when people are joking-but-not-joking. His example of the last: doctors would ask when his wife got pregnant. Technically it was a joke (they didn't really need to know), but at the same time it was not a joke (they really wanted to know).

patio11 17y ago

Chinese is a special (though, I think, not unique) because the language is based on cultural metaphors. I hear similar things about Japanese all the time. It grates on me, so allow me to reproduce a quote from a famous American translator of the language whose name I can never recall: "People ask me all the time how I can possibly capture the nuance of Japanese in English, as if there were no nuance in English, or as if there no significance to the fact that the word nuance is French." A language with cultural metaphors? Wow. Stop the presses. (Oh, I see what I did there.)

xiaoma 17y ago
Allow me to reproduce another famous quotation (Kipling): "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet." European languages do have their own cultural metaphors and stories from which phrases are drawn, but they are similar to each other. Regardless of whether the language is English, French, or Finnish, there's a host of common culture to draw from-- Christian stories, outdated alchemical humors (choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic), Grimm's fairy tales, etc... Chinese, on the other hand, requires learning an almost completely separate set of shared stories. Regardless of any purely linguistic issues, this makes learning Chinese a much larger task than learning a European language for an English speaker.
- patio11 17y ago
  That is more defensible than the "Chinese is based on cultural metaphors [in a fashion that English is not]" claim, but it still vastly overstates the case. For example, your explanation implies that Chinese speakers find English freakishly difficult when you're studying it, because they don't have the Bible, a few thousand years of Christian theology and a smattering of fake Latin, and Grimm's fairy tales to work with. But do you really believe that? I'm going to guess "no". But most people who think that Chinese (or Japanese, or Arabic, or another of "those exotic languages which are totally unlike anything in our experience after you ignore all the ways they're pretty darn similar") is freakishly difficult for English speakers don't say the reverse is true, even when their supposed rationales for it being difficult are logically reciprocal.

menloparkbum 17y ago

Hebrew is WAY harder than Mandarin, FWIW.

endtime 17y ago
Really? I think Hebrew is a hard language (and I'm not fluent), but my (admittedly ignorant) impression was that Chinese was on a different level of difficulty. Hebrew is not tonal, uses an alphabet, and doesn't rely on cultural metahpors in the same way that (I thought) Chinese does.