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Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)

• rumcajz 12y ago
  The essay is mostly about the chinese writing system, which, indeed, is terrible. However, if you forget about reading/writing and focus on the language itself, it's a delight to learn. Mandarin is highly analytic, parsimonious and systematic. To indicate that something happened in the past, add "le" to the sentence. Compare that to any Indo-european language. There, you can literally write books about how to express past tense.
• yeukhon 12y ago
  I was born and raised in HK. I came to the US after graduating sixth grade, so I am still fluent in Chinese. I think the whole article can be summarized down to just one point: unless you live in China or Taiwan or HK or Macau, you are not going to be fluent in Chinese. There is no magic in learning Chinese. As I said, I was raised in a Chinese-speaking environment. My teachers taught us single words and compound words. I learned to construct simple sentences like Hello World. It may be true that you need over three thousands Chinese words (remind you a word is a single word like 海, which means sea, or ocean) to be truly fluent, but honestly I don't think I need more than two hundreds words to understand Chinese. As @msvan has shown, 海军 (navy) is composed of two words sea and army. If you see anything beings with 海, you can quickly assume there is something about sea. You can assume it may even have something to do with color blue. Sometimes it is funny to see things like this: 海闊天空. Individually, you may read it as SEA, WIDE, SKY, EMPTY. 海闊 describes something wide and broad like the ocean. 天 by itself is sky or divine but you can make it even more explicit or redundant by saying 天空 to point to the sky. Those four words are often used in this famous quote: "忍一時，風平浪靜。退一步，則海闊天空". Basically "hold on to your emotions and worries to keep the peace; take a step back and you will see the bigger picture." Yes. This kind of old quotes are hard to intrepert even for a native, but this is the art of language. You have to read each word, think of the author's origin, bring in any historical and environment context, and figure out the best interpretation. We do that every day even in America. Of course, sometimes you can't get away with single word interpretation easily. Take a newspaper headline: 華人當選 (Chinese, person/people, ? , elect/choose). Note how I skip the 3rd one? 當 by itself is ambiguous. In theory it has a "when" and "where" context 當你 means when you 當下 means right now at this moment 當中 means inside or within this 當心 means be careful 當然 means of course 當選 means elected So you have to know compound words. Even funnier if you write 當心上人對你徵笑 (when your crush smiles at you). Look at 當心 and 心上人. Where is the "be careful"? It's not there because 心上人 (crush) takes over the compound. You need to know the compound words. You need to read and talk to people. So you can get away with 200 words, but you need 1000 compound words to be fluent. But this is not something I learn overnight. I pick up Chinese as I grow up.
  • vorg 12y ago
    > unless you live in China or Taiwan or HK or Macau, you are not going to be fluent in Chinese You forgot Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand.
    • zhemao 12y ago
      New Zealand? Is there that significant of an overseas Chinese population there?
• dsego 12y ago
  Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! This is the same how spelling contests look ridiculous to me as a Croatian.
• zhemao 12y ago
  The site appears to be down. Here is the cached version. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...
  • ttflee 12y ago
    For those who cannot access Google web cache (in China): http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_66674dbd01019jpz.html http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_66674dbd01019jpz.html
• cobrausn 12y ago
  Though he says that tonal languages are 'weird', I found it to be a bit more troublesome than that. As a lifelong monotone English speaker, I was actually unable to hear tonal differences that changed the meaning of words during my short attempt at learning Chinese. Made me glad I had the good fortune to be born in the country that was 'first to internet'.
  • beachstartup 12y ago
    > I was actually unable to hear tonal differences i find this difficult to believe. how can you tell when someone is asking you a question when speaking to you in casual conversation?
    • cobrausn 12y ago
      The more subtle ones I was unable to pick up on. To me, when people spoke, it sounded monotone, especially on those audio exercise sounds played over speakers. I don't have a problem picking up on the tonal differences in English, because the difference is quite a bit more pronounced to me. EDIT: I should also point out that asking a question does not require the shift in tone for it to be understood as a question, e.g., saying 'What are we doing next?' without any change in tone is perfectly fine.
    • zhemao 12y ago
      Those tonal shifts are a lot more obvious than the ones in Chinese. Despite being a "heritage speaker" of Mandarin, I still sometimes confuse words with the same pronunciation but different tones. I remember my mother once asked me to bring her the "bēizi" (cup) and I instead brought her the "bèizi" (blanket). The difference between the two is quite subtle. Chinese speakers rely on context as much as tonality to distinguish similar-sounding words.
      • gohrt 12y ago
        My mother once asked me to bring her a pin, and instead I brought her a pen. Are tones more problematic than homophones (and accent-induced homophones) ?
• zhemao 12y ago
  As a Chinese American, this is so true. Despite going to Chinese school every weekend for many years as a child, I still can't write a damn sentence in Chinese and find it impossible to read a newspaper article. Not having a phonetic alphabet is a real killer.
  • soyouranabc 12y ago
    that's probably why you and other ABCs are viewed as a disgrace to the Chinese race
• jacobmarble 12y ago
  As an American student of Mandarin Chinese, this article provided loads of laughs. To read someone so well-versed in Chinese give such an articulate description of my feelings was satisfying.
  • zhemao 12y ago
    It was even funnier as a Chinese American. Made me feel a bit better about my lackluster proficiency in my "mother tongue".
• xarien 12y ago
  The hardest hurdle after overcoming the superficial points the author makes is the fact that Chinese is an incredibly abstract and implicit language. When you read between the lines, you often find entire paragraphs. When comparing it to an extremely explicit language such as English, there's a fundamental difference in how ideas are propagated into words.
  • cobrausn 12y ago
    The lack of an alphabet is not really a superficial point. That's a huge divide to begin with, and it only diverges further from there.
  • archena 12y ago
    What do "implict" and "explicit" languages even mean? Chinese uses a different grammar, so in that sense it puts ideas into words differently, but the idea that Chinese is somehow less literal than English is nonsense.
    • xarien 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language
• nayefc 12y ago
  The writer is pretty jealous of New York.
• bane 12y ago
  When written Chinese was simplified there was a short-lived movement to move towards non-logographic system called Bopomofo or Zhuyin Fuhao which has the cool aspect of still looking non-Western, but being a phonetic system with unambiguous "spelling". My understanding though is that it still introduces significant issues with homophones (including tones) which is sorted out in written Chinese by unique characters. It probably could have been resolved with superscript numbers and a strictly controlled dictionary that mapped each number to a specific dictionary definition for a homophone. But that's not what happened and instead we ended up with Simplified Chinese which is still among the most complex written languages ever created. I believe it's still used in some dictionaries as a pronunciation guide however. I can't speak for Chinese, but for Korean there's a large number of Chinese loan words, except spoken Korean doesn't have tones and it does introduce a number of comprehension issues when context is ambiguous and the different words are written with the same Hangul. This wasn't really an issue in the past as Korean used the Chinese system until Hangul started becoming more commonplace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo http://www.omniglot.com/writing/zhuyin.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/zhuyin.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters http://hunjang.blogspot.com/2005/04/koreans-reading-comprehension-of.html http://hunjang.blogspot.com/2005/04/koreans-reading-comprehe...
  • matthewrudy 12y ago
    Transliterations have existed since at least the 19th century, most notably with the Wade Giles system. Now though Pinyin is the international standard, and is how mainland schools teach pronunciation. Taiwanese still uses Zhuyin, but in recent years the government has adopted Pinyin for street and city naming. (I'm not sure if schools are still teaching zhuyin, but friends in their 20s don't know pinyin).
    • bane 12y ago
      Well sure, but I've found these kinds of systems, and the number of different systems, difficult to use. Latin just isn't a very good alphabet, even for English. I deal with Koreans more and I always find it better to just see the Hangul than whichever transliteration system of the day is in use because trying to shoehorn vowels and consonants that simply don't exist in Latin into Latin is a tough battle. Zhuyin has the nice aspect of properly representing the spoken language and isn't hard to learn, probably a couple weeks of an hour or two a day and you'll be able to pronounce most things.
• neals 12y ago
  I've been following Chinese lessons for 13 months now. One lessen every 2 weeks in a class with 3 people. Our teacher is Chinese. I must say that I find Chinese to be refreshingly "easy". There is so little grammar and rules that I have fallen in love with the language from day 1. Just learn your words and draw your characters and you'll be fine. Maybe it is because I'm Dutch and Dutch is known for being one of the hardest languages to learn? I don't really like Dutch actually. Also, I've spend a lot of time learning German, which isn't fun at all. Or maybe I've just found the right teacher.
  • archena 12y ago
    Not to nit-pick, but Chinese has as much grammar as any other language. The idea that Chinese "lacks grammar" needs to die. It seems to stem from the very eurocentric view that grammar consists of rules for inflecting words according to case, number, gender, etc. While Chinese lacks these, it does have rules and patterns which dictate how sentences are formed (e.g. the use of'le', topic marking, measure words) - it just doesn't use patterns familiar to speakers of indo-european languages.
    • neals 12y ago
      I'm not saying it doesn't have any grammar at all. But you try to speak Dutch for a month and come back and tell me how you feel about Chinese grammar.
  • wonderzombie 12y ago
    My experience was similar, that at least the basics of the language are easy. The hard part is if you want to learn to read and write-- it's a ton of memorization. It doesn't get any easier, either. Some characters have a radical which is a pronunciation hint, a meaning hint, both, neither, etc. The other, other part is speaking idiomatically. There are a ton of idioms. Don't forget about measure words, either. :) I think you can make yourself understood easily enough, as I could chat a bit with Chinese coworkers or waitresses. But I suspect to truly master it, it's a lot harder than a language (e.g.) with an alphabet.
  • tarikjn 12y ago
• msvan 12y ago
  This essay has circulated in the Chinese learning community for a long time, and David Moser is both highly respected as well as obnoxiously skilled at Mandarin. As someone who has learnt Chinese to a high degree of proficiency, I agree with many of his points, but it paints a picture that is a bit too grim in my opinion. The first thing one should note is that Moser started studying Chinese in the late 80s. Things have changed. There is a wealth of accessible, well-written and free learning resources available online. People like Olle Linge have written much about how to study Chinese efficiently. There is a grammar wiki. There is the amazing Pleco dictionary (among others) with built-in OCR, flashcarding, recorded pronunciations. There are podcasts (check out Popup Chinese). Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months. It was painful, but not impossible thanks to an intensive flashcarding regimen, immersion, and other studying. Chinese grammar, while not trivial, is much simpler than I found French grammar to be. Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates. When you have built up an internal library of individual characters, the meaning of a word like 海军 (navy) will be obvious since 海=sea and 军=army. Also, learning Chinese is incredibly rewarding. It opens up a country with 1.4bn+ inhabitants that is quickly gaining prominence in the world, and with one of the most fascinating scripts ever to be designed. Even though I no longer live in China, I still hear Mandarin all time. This makes learning the language exciting! The hardest part is sticking with it. If you want to learn, it will come so much easier to you.
  • cheepin 12y ago
    Compare the writing to russian/greek/korean however. The helpfulness of phonetic alphabets can't be overstated. Being able to transcribe and sound-out words is a huge amount of memory you don't have to use that can instead be used for things like grammar/idioms/vocab. I like to think of it as the difference between using some sort of intellisense and memorizing the standard library/documentation when programming.
    • wonderzombie 12y ago
      Seconded. I started learning Mandarin some years ago. The written language remained opaque for a very long time since you need to learn a rather long list of hanzi before you can read anything interesting. And there's little guarantee you'll be able to pronounce any of it anyway. Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.
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• Jabbles 12y ago
  A critical response by Benny Lewis: http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/ http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/
• cdelsolar 12y ago
  I actually really want to learn Mandarin Chinese, and I was wondering if anyone here knows of a good app for this, ala Duolingo. I'm ok with just Pinyin/pronunciations.
  • lnanek2 12y ago
    I'm enjoying Memrise
    • Wohui 12y ago
      >Memrise Cheers, I'm using that right now. The real teaching power is in apps.
  • coupdejarnac 12y ago
    If you can find the time, I recommend just going for it and studying abroad in China like I did. I took two semesters of intensive Chinese at Beijing Language University, and it was a life changing experience. http://english.blcu.edu.cn/ http://english.blcu.edu.cn/ Though if I were to return for more classes, I might try a different city, perhaps Xian. The air quality in Beijing is nasty.
    • cdelsolar 12y ago
      How long were the classes each day, what kind of stuff did you do after hours? If I ever did this I'd love to remain able to work at least part time.
      • coupdejarnac 12y ago
        You can do half days or full days. I did half days - 8am to 12. You will have plenty of homework, but plenty of time to see the sights or do work. I chose to study Chinese with the help of my many female friends. :)
  • rahimnathwani 12y ago
    You _can_ make progress without moving to China, but you need to have much more time and will power than most people can muster with work and other things. I know a guy in the UK who spends about 5-6 hours per week studying Chinese (3-4 hours on Skype with a tutor, plus time studying) and he's made steady progress. However, you've got to put in dedicated time outside your lessons to try composition, practice listening etc. Having said that, below are some resources worth investigating: Audio courses: - Pimsleur Mandarin (3 sets of 30 half-hour lessons. Available on CD.) - ChinesePod.com (short audio lessons based around different topics/tasks. Generous free trial last time I checked.) - http://popupchinese.com/ http://popupchinese.com/ (similar to ChinesePod. Worth trying both.) - Clavis Sinica’s collection of short audio samples: http://clavisinica.com/voices.html http://clavisinica.com/voices.html Pronunciation/Pinyin: You really need to get your pinyin and tone pronunciation down. Just search google for 'learning pinyin' and you will find lots of free resources. There are three things worth trying to master here: - Pronunciation of each of the four tones (actually five, as there is also a neutral tone) - Pronunciation of each of the 21 initials (b, p, m, f etc., most of which are the same as English, but some, like x, z, c, zh are very different) and each of the 35 ‘finals’ (like -ong, -uang, -in etc.) - (later) Some words consist of more than one syllable, and there are some rules for when tones change based on the tone of the following syllable. Dictionary: - Pleco for iphone or Android: the free version is a must-have. There are bundles for additional functionality. The two additional functions I use(d) are the full-screen handwriting input (paid on iphone) and the spaced-repetition flashcard functionality (paid). This app is the reason I bought my first iOS device. - Nciku (online dictionary; search by pinyin or by writing the character) Reading/writing characters (probably work on some basic oral Chinese before doing this): - Skritter.com (subscription-based service best used with a mouse or Wacom tablet; doesn’t work well with a laptop touchpad) - Book: http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Simplified-Character/dp/0804835098/ref=pd_sim_b_12 http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Simplified-Cha...
• archena 12y ago
  Much of this article focuses on the writing system, but it's possible to learn to converse in a language without being literate in it. It's a fallacy to say that Chinese is "hard" because it is written with characters (and besides, there's always romanisation via Pinyin). I'm glad it made sure to state that difficulty is relative in language - the Chinese learn their languages just fine afterall. I don't think tone is as big of a problem as it's made out to be. As a foreiger who studies Mandarin I've found that with enough listening I began to pick out the tones well (although I still can't reproduce them as acurately!). Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation surrounding Chinese. A good book mentioned in the bibliography is The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis.
  • mikeash 12y ago
    Foreign language learning in general has a strange emphasis on literacy over speaking. I don't understand why we don't make people learn foreign languages the same way that children learn native languages. Children spend years learning to speak before they start to learn to read and write. It seems to work well. Perhaps older people need to learn differently, but I'm not convinced. I have to imagine that learning Chinese would be a lot easier if you learned to speak it reasonably well first, and then started learning the writing system only after attaining some mastery of the spoken language. Instead, you're trying to learn new phonetics and tones and grammar and trying to learn stroke order and radicals and a bunch of other stuff all at the same time.
    • chen1i 12y ago
      It's all about environment when you try to speak around. I believe your Chinese teachers encourage you practice speaking in class, but trying to speak Chinese to others after class? If you have Chinese friends, then you are lucky! :)
      • mikeash 12y ago
        The teachers do encourage speaking, but they also spend an inordinate amount of time on reading and writing, even in absolute beginner classes.
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• yongjik 12y ago
  (Disclaimer: I can't speak a single Chinese word.) TL;DR: The author tries to write "Chinese characters are damn weird" in five different ways (items 1,2,3,5,7). OK, I got the point, but a bit less repetition might have been better. Also, if you want to objectively assess just how difficult the Chinese language is, I guess native Chinese speakers are exactly those people you don't want to ask. After all, Chinese is the native language for them: how can they reliably compare it to any other language which are foreign to them? Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both. I had memorized roughly a thousand Chinese characters in high school. Sure, it would be nothing compared to what's actually needed to read Chinese, but learning each character isn't much more difficult than learning how to pronounce catastrophe, cooperate, thesaurus, and the likes.
  • thedufer 12y ago
    > Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both. You seem to be implying that you've provided evidence that Chinese is not, in fact, more difficult than English. Or at least that you have reason to believe that. What is that reason? Is it so hard to believe that maybe Chinese is objectively more difficult to learn?
    • yongjik 12y ago
      Well, as I said, I personally found remembering Chinese characters about as difficult as remembering English spellings. Of course, either comprises a very small part of the difficulty of learning either language (and I don't speak Chinese so I can't really say anything about it), but since everybody seemed to be fixating on Chinese characters... (shrug) I am ready to be persuaded if there's a convincing argument that Chinese is objectively more difficult. What I was trying to say is that asking Chinese people how hard it is proves nothing. And (I presume) a native English speaker comparing Chinese and European languages doesn't instill a lot of confidence, either. Of course Chinese is harder than French... to an average English speaker.
• gaoshan 12y ago
  From a practical point of view I feel like the tones are the biggest hinderance for many people. Anyone, with some work, can memorize the characters (and the radicals that make up their component parts) but for some people the tones are just not doable, no matter how hard they try. Anyone that gets praised by Chinese for having good pronunciation is likely familiar with the mush-mouthed pronunciation of a great many foreigners. I've met people with much larger vocabularies than myself, and with better grammar, but whose pronunciation was almost insurmountably poor. Someone like me, who has generally good pronunciation, will get praised by Chinese people as having "amazing" pronunciation (and yes, a certain amount of this is just Chinese people being polite but over the years one learns where one stands on this issue) but my comprehension and vocabulary is far and away from fluent yet I will be viewed as having "better" spoken Chinese... never mind that I can only read at an elementary school level. No matter how much vocabulary you amass and no matter how perfect your grammar not mastering the tones can completely kill any hope you have of Chinese people understanding you. There's nothing worse than the confused look on someone's face after you say something that you think is perfectly comprehensible, only to discover you (ever so slightly, to your ear) screwed up a key tone... it's like suddenly discovering the brakes on your car don't work.
  • crazygringo 12y ago
    Funny, I was going to say the opposite. I took Chinese for a couple years, and while the tones can be annoying for the first few weeks, there's only 4 (or 5) of them. It ain't rocket science. If you can recognize the melodies of songs, then your brain has the necessary parts to recognize tones too. Nobody in any of our beginner Chinese sections ever found the tones "just not doable". Some people would take a few days to get the hang of them, and other people a couple of months, but if more than a billion people in China can do it, you almost certainly can do it too. (And if you're really having trouble you can always hire a private tutor. Honestly, most people with pronunciation problems in any language, just need some individualized help. A group classroom might not do it, but one-on-one tutoring almost certainly will.) On the other hand, most people simply don't have the time to memorize the characters and pronunciation. The fact that there are virtually no cognates makes the hurdle to amassing vocabulary simply gigantic, let alone the characters. You say that "anyone, with some work, can memorize the characters", but "some work" in this case is a truly gigantic amount of work.
• mikeash 12y ago
  Some of these are good points, some are just silly. (First, background: my wife is Chinese, I took a year of formal classes in college, and have subsequently learned by exposure. I can speak and understand a fair amount, enough to survive on my own in Beijing if need be, but I wouldn't consider myself fluent by any means. In particular, I can't read or write worth a damn.) I think this article would be better if it were titled, "Why written Chinese is so damn hard." Spoken Chinese is actually pretty easy. To the extent that it is hard, it's hard only because it's different. It's hard for the same reason that Japanese or Arabic or Sanskrit are hard. The comparison with French is a bit off, because languages like French where an English speaker can take advantage of vast quantities of shared vocabulary and history are rare. Most languages are hard in this way. So that stuff is really just, "Why learning almost any language is so damn hard." And while that can be interesting, there's no reason to focus on Chinese there. And in fact, spoken Chinese is relatively easy. The grammar is extremely simple. There are effectively no tenses, and there is no conjugation. Learning French, I spent weeks, possibly months, learning the proper ways to state that an event happened in the past. And while I do consider myself fluent in French, I'm far from perfect here. While I think I get it right most of the time, I really couldn't explain why one case demands the passé composé and another case demands the imparfait. Even knowing which to use, completely learning the conjugation rules for them took quite a bit of effort. By contrast, it takes about five seconds to learn how to say that something occurred in the past in Chinese, assuming you already know 1) how to say that it happened in the present and 2) how to state the time in question. You just stick the time in the right part of the sentence, and bam, it's now in the past. You go from "I eat" to "I yesterday eat". Couldn't be simpler. My Chinese vocabulary still stinks after years of exposure because there are almost no cognates to build on, but the grammar is one of the easiest around. Written Chinese, on the other hand, is practically a different language. There is little link between the characters on the page and the sound you make to indicate the same words. It's common for people who speak completely mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects to still be able to communicate through writing. Chinese TV is almost universally subtitled for this reason. Lots of people can't understand what the people on TV say, but they can read the subtitles. Written Chinese is hard. It's the vocabulary problem turned up to 11. It effectively doubles the work needed to learn a word. Worse if you're not good at the sort of visual learning and recognition needed to distinguish between thousands of characters. Unlike the spoken version, where it's only hard for reasons that any language is hard, written Chinese is just inherently hard. Native speakers take longer and require more study to become literate, too. Because of this, I think you need to treat spoken and written Chinese completely differently when it comes to learning them and the question of the difficulty of learning them. And the fact that this article freely mixes the two is unfortunate because of that, especially since it gives the impression that spoken Chinese is hard to learn, and it really is not. As a side note, technology is starting to really help out here. You can get apps that are able to do live character recognition using a smartphone's camera, and offer basic translations on the fly. I used one called Waygo during a recent visit to China and it was really helpful. Even if the translation sucks, it'll give you the pronunciation of the characters so you can look them up more easily, or ask somebody what they mean, or whatever.
• jtsnow 12y ago
  I'll soon have to decide whether to enroll my child in the dual language immersion program at our public elementary school. Subjects such as math, social studies, science are taught in Chinese. Anyone have experience with or know of any good studies on kids learning language in this way? How valuable is it for an American to speak Chinese vs something like Spanish or French?
  • dublinben 12y ago
    Immersion is definitely the best way to learn a language, at any age. With very few exceptions, it is much more valuable for an American to know Mandarin than Spanish or French.
    • jtsnow 12y ago
      But is a 3-4 hours per day for 4-5 days per week true immersion? And is it enough to master a complex language such as Mandarin Chinese? I suspect that, using this model with Chinese, a child can become conversationally proficient and gain some basic reading comprehension. Whereas, with a more simple language, they may be able to read, write, and speak on the same level as a native-speaker. Looking for evidence to prove me wrong.
  • zhemao 12y ago
    > Subjects such as math, social studies, science are taught in Chinese. Why? I don't really see much use in this unless the sole aim is for your children to become fluent in Chinese. Having an understanding of math, history, and science will be more useful to them in the future than being fluent in Chinese. I don't think Chinese fluency is worth making it more difficult for them to learn the other subjects by having it taught in a language they aren't as familiar with. For math and science especially, this doesn't really make much sense, as English is the lingua franca of the technical world. My father is a native Chinese speaker and a biologist. I majored in computer engineering and now work as a software engineer. Many of my classmates and coworkers are native Chinese speakers. Even when they speak in Chinese, the technical vocabulary is all English because that is the language they learned the material in.
• T-R 12y ago
  While what the author says is true, I feel like there's a hint of ethnocentrism - his complaints all (over)emphasize the use of the link between the pronunciation of a word and its written representation. Whenever the author discusses things like writing the word "president" or forgetting how to spell "tin can", implicit and unmentioned is that the hypothetical person knows the pronunciation of the word, and is attempting to translate it into writing, which, of course, is a natural thing for someone coming from a phonetic language to assume the importance of. Yes, more logographic languages like Chinese have a weaker link between pronunciation and written form, but this is a tradeoff, not simply bad design. One could similarly make an argument about English speakers forgetting what words mean (or for that matter, just that it takes forever to say anything in English).
  • thedufer 12y ago
    > One could similarly make an argument about English speakers forgetting what words mean The implication here seems to be that the Chinese written word gives hints as to meaning, right? How can that be so, if 10 years of studying isn't enough to read a newspaper? Your claim would imply that reading in Chinese would be easier to pick up (compared to non-character languages), while speaking would be more difficult - one seemingly immediately shown to be false. Not to mention that a language can both give hints to meaning and have a link between writing and speaking. At the very least, English does - the example closest to hand is that I've never heard the word ethnocentrism before, but I immediately understood it. That said - great point about possibly overemphasizing the link between spoken and written words. From an English background, that seems like something so obviously important that it hardly bears thinking about, but clearly there could be other important considerations (even if I don't know what they might be).
    • T-R 12y ago
      Familiarity with a character is a lot like familiarity with a latin root word in English - if you know most or all of the characters that compose a word, you can usually do a pretty good job guessing the meaning of it. Certainly there are exceptions (and there may be more in Chinese than Japanese, which I'm more familiar with, as Chinese uses non-phonetic characters explicitly), but I'd still argue that it's quite useful. In Korean, which has a phonetic alphabet (though based on the same characters), I can always sound out a word, but I'll often have no idea what it means, whereas in Japanese, often I can't read a word out loud, but I know exactly what it means. For every "uptight", there are a dozen 心電図 (心:heart + 電:electric + 図:map = electrocardiogram). It works with spoken language as well, though - often times I'll hear someone say a new word, and I'll ask "is this the right character/syllable breakdown?", and if it is, then I already know what it means. Edit: To your point regarding English having both connection to meaning and pronunciation - that's definitely true, it's just not as immediately clear/visually identifiable, and not as dense. One could certainly argue that, if native speakers are having serious issues learning pronunciation in a language, then the language makes a poor tradeoff with density there.
• daphneokeefe 12y ago
  English must be pretty damn hard, too. When I studied conversational Mandarin a few years ago, it gave me a real sympathy for native Chinese speakers learning English. Basically, in Mandarin, there are no verb tenses or cases or persons. I go, you go, he go, they go, or I is, you is, he is, they is. You don't know when it happened. Today, yesterday, tomorrow. You get the timing from the context. How hard it must be to understand that it's a different word if I went yesterday, we are going tomorrow, he might have gone, if we could have gone....I can't do more than basic conversation in Mandarin, but studying it really helped me to understand the challenges some of my friends and coworkers have faced.
  • crazychrome 12y ago
    Exactly. Even after 10 years living in UK I still make mistakes with verb. Consider this: http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/English/have.html http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/English/have.html, a table just for "have"!
    • dublinben 12y ago
      What's so complicated about that? It's far from the most irregular verb in the language. The participle is really the only curve ball.
    • Raphael 12y ago
      with verbs
    • Gorkys 12y ago
      Dude, that's nothing. Romance languages are much worse. Check out Italian: http://italian.about.com/library/verb/blverb_avere.htm http://italian.about.com/library/verb/blverb_avere.htm
      • frooxie 12y ago
        Well, then there's Finnish with its noun cases, etc: http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Perkele_ddd3f7_5063375.jpg http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Perkele_ddd3f7_5063375.jpg
• bayesianhorse 12y ago
  Too long, didn't read completely, but having more than "dabbled" for a few years in the Chinese language, I agree that you have to be attracted to the language for the intrinsic reward of the learning process itself, while external goals probably are not enough.
• jokoon 12y ago
  I've already thought about how latin languages writing systems differ from ideogram languages writing systems. The eye can easily, quickly identify a word made of 10 latin letters, so it's easy to make a sentence, although its length will quickly increase, but the amount of possible word is still very high, and very flexible, and very straightforward to pronounce. Ideogram languages are different because it uses "word element" objects, and then use them together to describe things and create new words. I still wonder if the eye can quickly read a sequence of 2 or more ideograms, but since you need a fairly high number of those ideograms to effectively describe concepts, it's becoming inevitably hard to read something, whereas the latin alphabet is simple enough to already associate letters to form words ! Ideograms are still fascinating because it seems to quickly increase the amount of things you can write with less space, but only if you're really able to read it and memorize it. The important difference is that ideogram languages are much harder to memorize pronunciation. Overall, I still think ideograms happened to be a form of closed communication, like an obscure way to communicate with peers without your enemy understanding you. I guess that makes sense since Asia's history for war is quite bleaker than the west's.
• cpher 12y ago
  I don't want to derail, other than to ask about teaching children Chinese/Mandarin....What are your experiences? My children have been learning Mandarin since age 4-5 (they're now 6-7) at a Chinese school (taught in English other than Mandarin lessons). They also have one-on-one lessons after school. My wife and I are native English speakers, so we can't help them. There's a big push in our city (spoiler...Chicago) with learning Mandarin, but I see a bunch of high schools introducing the language, like it's Spanish. Nothing against Spanish, per se, but observing the Mandarin language makes me laugh at learning the romantic languages--there are no similarities. Watching my kids write pinyin and asking me questions about things just blows my mind. So, are any of you non-"Chinese" speaking (Mandarin/Cantonese) people trying to guide your children down this path?
• byuu 12y ago
  A very insightful article. In my experience though, having studied both; and also from a friend who is moderately fluent in both; I believe Japanese is more difficult than Chinese. When it comes to the writing system, a Chinese character can have one pronunciation (two in very rare exceptions.) A Japanese character can have ten takes on how to pronounce the Chinese reading (onyomi), and be hammered into another ten Japanese-native words and verbs (kunyomi), and six ways they can be pronounced in names that your IME will refuse to ever recognize (nanori). The problem of not knowing how to pronounce what you are reading is made far worse in Japanese. With the one nice exception that material designed for young children sometimes have the syllables written above the characters for reference (furigana.) Next up you have the SOV writing style instead of SVO. So unless you enjoy thinking and speaking like Yoda, you get to flip entire sentences in your head. In real-time. And then you have particles that can mean a hundred different things based on context. Even some native speakers tend to have no idea when to use 'wa' or 'ga', it just becomes instinctual after a lifetime of language use. Next, there's the verb conjugations. "They're simple, there's only one polite form, a handful of plain forms, and the two irregular verb forms!" ... and then they add on about a thousand possible verb endings that imply different meanings (-tai = to want, -takereba = to not want, -zu ni = another negative form like -nai but slightly more polite, etc.) And then you get the fun of stacking them! -saserareru (to be forced to do something) + -zu ni -> -saserarezu. And then you can extend that to be in the passive form, or to have it occur in the past ... and then you can just outright fuse two verbs together to form new ones! Tsuku + Nukeru -> Tsukinukeru + all your verb endings above = aneurysm to decipher in real-time conversation. Then you have the polite language system (keigo, or alternate ways to say just about everything based on who you are talking to) where you have to practice for years before you won't either sound like a school girl or offend someone. There are other hard parts (regional dialects, classical forms, synonyms, etc), but since Chinese shares them, I omit them here. The big red herring is the two syllabic alphabets, hiragana and katakana. Those are very easy. But they do become a nightmare from hell when you are faced with a script that has no kanji at all (like older video games.) The synonym problem, on a scale of 1 to 10, goes from a 12 to a 50. When I look at Chinese ... the biggest negative it has over Japanese, is that it's intensely more difficult in spoken form than Japanese. It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words. And with so many similar sounds, you end up with poems like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D... Despite a lot of differences between how the Chinese and Japanese use the same characters, and in fact characters that only exist in one or the other ... horrifyingly, I find that I understand more when playing a Chinese game than a Japanese game, despite having studied Chinese for less than 1/20th as much as I have studied Japanese.
• cpher 12y ago
  Can you assholes stop talking about how Mandarin compares to German/Russian! WE DON'T FUCKING CARE. If you don't have something productive to say about the FUCKING TOPIC then shut the FUCK UP! I'm sick of this stupid reddit bullshit that derails everything, then 1,000 comments later you find something related to what the actual topic is.
  • cpher 12y ago
    I love how I get downvoted when the entire thread has derailed.
    • Major_Grooves 12y ago
      to be fair your comment was insulting and completely useless.
      • cpher 12y ago
        Yes, it was. I apologize.
• pikapikachu 12y ago
  A very related topic is the Japanese writing system, which is based on Chinese writing system, and majority “Japanese” words are actually Chinese words. I agree with evreything this is an article on the complexity of Chinese says. Almost everything is valid for Japanese of course, sans there are less Chinese characters in contemporary Japanese. However, to complete the picture, you just have to add myriad ways of reading a single Chinese character in Japanese. Being a foreigner lived in Japan for years, let me sum it up: Chinese writing system, Chinese-style construction of Chinese characters (have fun explaining how not, moon and sun adds up to mean bowel to me as in 腸, or tree + mouth = to be in trouble 困) and words (I haven’t met a person that will think of a log when say them “round and fat” 丸太, I also don’t know how “bad heart” can mean nausea 悪心). As a whole, it’s not beautiful at all, and it is unnecessarily complex. The complexity also goes for wrong Japanization of the English load-words (it both meaning and spelling: no it’s not shinapsu, it is synapse, and no gurasu and garasu are both the wrong spellings of the same word glass, used to mean different objects). Nihon-shiki romanization is also deeply flawed (I don’t know any language with Roman-based script that would spell shatyou as shachou in English), yet Japanese people are thought Nihon-shiki romanization instead of something that makes more sense such as Hepburn romanization. But these are best to be saved for another discussion. On a related tangent. I would very much appreciate if Japanese people could write my name using Romaji instead of some katakana non-sense that doesn’t even sound true. That non-sense became my name in Japan for years, and I was really sick of it. Tell me about being respectful to people then jackass. And believe it or not, in one rare instance where my name is written in the actual script (my graduation certificate), they wrote it wrong.
  • frooxie 12y ago
    > I also don’t know how “bad heart” can mean nausea It's the same in many other languages. In French, having "mal au cœur" — pain in the heart — can mean that you're nauseous. In Estonian, to "have the heart bad" (using that word order) means the same thing.
• jamesdutc 12y ago
  This article comes up every so often, and I'm sure that every learner of Chinese has run across it at least once. It's a mix of common frustrations for Chinese learners and a lot of self-aggrandizement (on the part of both native speakers and successful learners.) It does correctly illustrate differences between (learning) Chinese and Romance languages, though some of the points are out of date. e.g., I believe that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin has become the only romanisation scheme for teaching Chinese in English Thankfully, speaking Chinese is slowly becoming "boring." By itself it's no longer enough to make you interesting, and non-"heritage" speakers demonstrating conversational fluency in Chinese has become somewhat normalised. Hopefully within my lifetime, a non-heritage learner will get the same reaction from speaking Chinese as they'll get from speaking Spanish in Texas. Frankly, I find unbearably tedious the folks who still try to parade basic conversational fluency as though it were something magical. (I currently live in NYC. If I happen by Canal St, I'll run into waiters who can effectively converse in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, English, and some additional family dialect. No one seems very impressed by their skills at language-acquisition, despite being the result of much less formal schooling than we might enjoy...) Learning Chinese from English is obviously harder than learning Spanish from Italian, but it's easily within what one can accomplish with a little focus and effort. I did a bachelor's degree in Chinese at a state school with a good programme and good professors but at a school that just isn't particularly well-known for East Asian studies. My classmates were mixed between "heritage students" and students who had no background in any East Asian culture or language. Over the course of four years, many of them were able to achieve very high degrees of professional fluency. It just wasn't a big deal.
  • vorg 12y ago
    > waiters who can effectively converse in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien, English, and some additional family dialect Chinese who can speak any one of those languages (Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkein) or some others (like Hunanese, Gan) can easily pick up one of the others by living in one of the places where they're spoken.
    • jamesdutc 12y ago
      This is, of course, true, but I don't know that it really diminishes the accomplishment. (As the joke goes, for some dialects, you just "modulate [the tones] down.")
• erikb 12y ago
  There are so many comments here that, at least for me, are even more interesting than the article itself. It was especially interesting for me to compare my experiences with the comments of others here. For example when I was at the A1/A2 level of learning Chinese I felt that Chinese is actually quite simple. Much simpler in fact than my mother tounge German. But now that I am trying to get from about B1 to B2 I feel like standing in front of a huge wall of grammar and never-seen-vocabs that I seem to need to know to produce meaning from reading a chinese article. Luckily technology helps a lot already and writing/speaking is not as hard as reading, but still it can be frustrating at times when you feel your skill improved a lot but still you are not able to read a simple blog article better than months ago.
• peferron 12y ago
  Chinese is high maintenance, and has very small cultural overlap with westerners. Becoming good at a language is only half the battle; the second half is to stay good, and for that you need to maintain it. English has the massively unfair advantage of being culturally dominant in the western world. As a Frenchman, once I became good at English, it was dead easy to maintain it. All I had to do was to keep doing what I had been doing since I was five: watching Hollywood movies (but not dubbed anymore), reading sci-fi books (but not translated anymore), and so on. The maintenance gets taken care of naturally. Now, take German: at the end of high school, I was completely fluent in German. But now, I couldn't say two words to save my life. That's because after high school, I didn't maintain it, and it rot away. With Chinese, in addition to learning new characters, I had to spend an ever increasing amount of time every day just to avoid forgetting the ones I had already learnt. Unlike American culture, I have no particular interest in Chinese culture, so the upkeep had to be paid entirely through sheer, conscious effort. Living in China alleviates part of this effort, but after watching all the issues China is plagued with get worse rather than better over the past 5 years, I don't want to live there long-term anymore. So I decided to just drop Chinese. Thinking back on this decision makes me extremely sad, but the truth is there are many things I'd rather do with my time rather than keep paying the Chinese upkeep. I could just drop the characters and focus on speaking and listening instead, but ugh, just the idea of being illiterate grosses me out, even in a foreign language. It's irrational, but I can't help it. After traveling to Taiwan - which is awesome btw - I even started learning the traditional writing of every character I knew. To be fair, traditional isn't that difficult, but that wasn't making things easier either. Oh well...
  • contingencies 12y ago
    While it's true that it's easy to forget characters ... after 13 years of not really giving a damn past the basics, I don't worry too much about my fluctuating character memory, but can read very well for the base 2-3k characters, including not quite as well in traditional. I periodically put in effort to slog through classical Chinese texts and always have to look things up. That's OK. Yes, the mainland issues are becoming bad. I have been moving to smaller / more natural places to compensate, and have been spending time elsewhere as well: it's still pretty comfy here in Yunnan though. Dawn now... sound of birds, tasty breakfast, electric scooters, clean air, mountains to climb, lakes to swim.
• grifpete 12y ago
  I remember going to Africa where I encountered sounds so radically different that on my return it was luminously clear to me that French, German and Italian were close kin to English in comparison. It gave me food for thought. Chinese is indeed very different from English. But so are many African languages.
• sekasi 12y ago
  mā ma qí mǎ, mǎ màn, mā ma mà mǎ That's a legitimate sentence, and there's only the slightest intonation difference between the different words. This to me is why Mandarin is hard. Not the writing, not the history of the language and not the 'construction of words'. It's the extremely subtle differences in tonality which makes it madness for a westerner (Swedish born here) to try and comprehend, and even worse to try and speak.
  • frooxie 12y ago
    Well, some Swedish words are differentiated by pitch accent, which isn't all that different. (Like the difference in pronunciation between tomten (the gnome) and tomten (the plot of land), or anden (the spirit) and anden (the duck).
• lvturner 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti Though this point has pretty much been raised, English is hard too - it doesn't follow it's own rules and borrows from so many languages. The arguments in this article (excepting the ones about the writing system) can be applied to so many languages. For bonus points, why isn't "gauge" pronounced the same as "gouge"?
• jmzbond 12y ago
  I had a long conversation with my Chinese professor about the pros/cons of learning Chinese if you have 0 background vs. if you have some background (I was born in China, moved to US when I was 6). Both are biases one can push past, but good to think about as you're learning. The Rules (e.g., grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc.) If you have 0 background you are a blank slate, and like a blank slate, you can absorb whatever the teacher throws at you. Provided you work hard, have natural language ability, etc. etc., this means you'll likely be better at me than grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc. Why? Because my frame of reference is that of a 6 year old speaking elementary Chinese. Whenever I'm uncertain, or whenever my parents are uncertain (i.e., they're not sure I'll understand what they're saying), the default is to regress to this very elementary way of speaking. The Feelings On the other hand, if you have 0 background, it will be very difficult to master the tonality to perfection and the nuances of what "sounds right." For example, if you were really pedantic, you'd know that the appropriate pronunciation for the Eight Trigrams is not ba1 gua4 (as is commonly spoken) but ba2 gua4. But... no one uses the rigorously correct way anymore, and it's this sense of what's right that almost seems to be absorbed via osmosis that the person with a background will have a better control of.
• tokenadult 12y ago
  I read the article the last time it was discussed here on Hacker News. The author correctly leads off with the main reason Chinese is hard to learn as a second language, and not easy to learn to full literacy even for a native speaker. My HN user profile discloses that I am a second-language learner of Chinese. I began study of the language in 1975. There are all kinds of interesting challenges in learning Chinese. One that is underestimated is how much the various Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") are not cognate even for vocabulary that would be cognate for French and Spanish, or for English and German. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？ 他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？ 佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters. On the whole, I find Chinese grammar fits my preferences (I like languages in which word order is the main element of grammar, and dislike languages like most Indo-European languages with a lot of inflection shown by changes in word endings), I can deal with Chinese pronunciation (but my children find it much more "natural" than I do to use phonological tone to distinguish differing words, a common feature of many languages but not my native language, English), and I just have to suck it up and exert a lot of effort to be literate in Chinese, even with today's computer aids. The Chinese writing system is HARD even for native speakers of Modern Standard Chinese.
  • franzwong 12y ago
    Sometimes, the grammar is different too. English: I go first Mandarin: 我先走 Cantonese: 我走先
• chewxy 12y ago
  I am currently in China for a holiday. I can read chinese (learnt it since I was young), but I have never actually used Chinese - my parents simply made me learn it on the off chance I would need to go to China. I have for the first few days found some difficulty, but reading has since became relatively easy. Chinese is a contextual language, and contextual cues gives rise to understanding of the word that you don't really know. Sure I have to look up some words/phrases (especially adult ones because they all seem to be slang terms), but it is quite easy to read. I agree with his other points up to too many romanization processes. There is one: Hanyu Pinyin. Others are old, and should be discarded. The bit about tonal language has led to some rather hilarious situations where I accidentally sexually propositioned to someone else. However, upon arriving in Luoyang, I realize that Chinese being a tonal language doesn't really matter. Accents exist, and they change the tone of the language. And yet I still could, after a bit of adjusting, get used to them
• cburgmer 12y ago
  A few years back I started to work on a Python library around Chinese called cjklib (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cjklib https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cjklib). The intention was to facilitate the creation of Open Source tools for language learners. I even built my own application on that, sadly only for KDE (https://code.google.com/p/eclectus/wiki/About https://code.google.com/p/eclectus/wiki/About). To be fair I've done a few things wrong (up-front design, no feedback process). However, I still found the general response less then I had hoped for. I hope there are still a bunch of hackers around that like to solve similar problems. One is certainly https://github.com/nieldlr/Hanzi https://github.com/nieldlr/Hanzi and that would be something I hacked on if I was coming back to the world.
  • wisty 12y ago
    Awesome library :)
  • stevendaniels 12y ago
    I've been pushing together a lot of Chinese functionality into this Ruby library: https://github.com/stevendaniels/zhongwen_tools https://github.com/stevendaniels/zhongwen_tools
• be5invis 12y ago
  I have to point out that, until modern era, Colloqual Chinese and Literary Chinese are COMPLETELY two systems. While Colloqual Chinese evolves fast, Literary Chinese remained unchanged for thousands of years, until 1900s.
• sarreph 12y ago
  This is why we need Hi-LAB sooner than later...
• epsylon 12y ago
  As a French native, I have a minor nitpick on the comparison between Diderot / Voltaire and Confucius / Mencius. Diderot and Voltaire wrote Modern French, which is incredibly similar to the French that is spoken nowadays. I doubt a 4th-year French student would breeze as easily through, say, Rabelais' Gargantua, a 16th century text written in ancien français, before the modernization of French. It's so difficult to read even for natives (I've done the experience myself) that there are usually bilingual "Old French" — Modern French editions available for students. And that's not even speaking about earlier medieval French which wasn't a single language, but a collection of langues d'oïl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Gargantua/%C3%89dition_Juste,_1535 http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Gargantua/%C3%89dition_Juste,_... The study of classical texts in general is difficult in any language when we're talking about timespans of centuries or even millenia.
• goatsmilk 12y ago
  While the title suggests that this article is from 2010, it appears to be much older (more like 1992) see http://lingualbee.blogspot.com.au/2006/08/why-chinese-is-so-damn-hard.html http://lingualbee.blogspot.com.au/2006/08/why-chinese-is-so-... and http://pocketcultures.com/2009/03/23/how-difficult-is-chinese/ http://pocketcultures.com/2009/03/23/how-difficult-is-chines...
  • dang 12y ago
    Thanks. Changed.
• exclipy 12y ago
  The article demonstrates in what way Chinese is so damn hard, but it doesn't explain why it's so hard. How did it come to be this way? How did this civilisation not only survive, but prosper, despite such a exclusionary language? That is the real question.
• drstrangevibes 12y ago
  i found learning to speak chinese rather easy, but writing was very hard. I remember being taught to write characters with a ballpoint pen and my teacher commenting on how much pressure should be applied during each part of the stroke, it was around then that i gave up.
• franzwong 12y ago
  It is lucky if you learn Mandarin Chinese, try Cantonese Chinese. In Mandarin Chinese, there are 4 tones, as the article said, each tone can mean differently. In Cantonese Chinese, there are 9 tones.
• dmytrish 12y ago
  I've been dabbling with Chinese for some time and I can say that online dictionaries, Google Translate facilities for handwritten input, its audio recognition, Mac OS built-in input methods for Chinese greatly alleviate the pain of looking up a character. I think this (+Youtube and easy access to Chinese web) is a powerful leverage in learning Chinese that has not been available to learners before, it's a language craving for digital instruments much more than European languages.