11 ms·

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

by 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.
  - ithkuil 12y ago
    I had that same problem while learning Arabic, and that was just about missing short vowels.
    - entropy_ 12y ago
      Well, when it comes to Arabic, the short vowels should be written out as accents of sorts. However, they are quite often missing in actual written text. However, even as a native Arabic speaker I will struggle with text written like that and it will take me a while to read it. That's because most Arabs(at least the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptians I've mostly been exposed to) do not speak the written Arabic. Rather, we speak a colloquial language that will differ from one region to another. These are visibly descended from the formal, written, Arabic but they are not at all the same language. They have many different words, a completely different grammar, and very different pronunciation. So as far as most Arabs I know, the written Arabic is pretty much yet another foreign language they learn rather than their native language. The similarity between the written and spoken is similar to the difference between say Latin and languages that were descended from it(such as French).
- msvan 12y ago
  Chinese writing is phonetic, just not for your first 1000-2000 characters. I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters, because things get dramatically easier when you have learnt a lot of them. These are all pronounced "ding": 丁订盯顶钉, because they all have that T-like phonetic component. Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no. I will agree though that it is daunting to get started with.
  - SeanLuke 12y ago
    > These are all pronounced "ding" Sort of. The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write. Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
    - jliechti1 12y ago
      I don't know if simplification has broken a great deal of the relationships, but it certainly has broken some. Here is a specific example: Traditional Chinese 車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident) 不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but) Simplified Chinese 车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation) 不过 (same meaning/pronunciation) Notice the 咼 in the Traditional 過 and 禍. This phonetic component gives you some indication that is is pronounced like "luo, huo, guo, wo". In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively. The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
      - kusimanse 12y ago
        But even in that case the relationships weren't completely broken. While 过 changed, 娲wa, 祸 huo，涡 wo，窝wo，锅 guo，蜗 wo，etc. still share the radical to the right, and 过 is a very common character, you shouldn't need to guess how to read it.
- Tomte 12y ago
  Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool. I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like). But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun! So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier. Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word. "Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar". I felt like the king of the world. :-)
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    My parents were both linguists in the military in the 80s, so when I had gotten to around 8 years old or so, they started trying to teach me Russian. Needless to say, it didn't stick, but I've recently been trying it again. I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/dp/2203009144 http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/... And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed. The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
    - guard-of-terra 12y ago
      Trust me you're not going to pronounce Russian fluently. So my advice as a native speaker is: speak slowly and clearly. Speak as it is written. And good luck.
    - geoka9 12y ago
      > The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. Heh, I have the opposite problem: I tend to mumble when speaking English (I'm a native Russian speaker). Wanna trade?
austinz 12y ago
> Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates. I'm quite glad that the Chinese of the late 19th/early 20th century often took the Japanese approach of coining semantically meaningful neologisms, rather than trying to transliterate everything.
- moogleii 12y ago
  I would love to read the history about that. Got any sources/references?
  - Kronopath 12y ago
    I don't have any references for you, but I can think of a few off the top of my head. As an example, a lot of technological words are compounds containing the 电 (diàn) character, meaning "electricity": 电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television 电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie 电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be: 火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.
    - moogleii 12y ago
      Oh, I know they use such compounds, but I meant more like the history of the idea forming in the 19th/20th century, and China moving towards the Japanese model of doing so as the commenter claimed.
      - dengnan 12y ago
        I'm a Chinese. According to my knowledge, most modern compound words are directly taken from Japanese (since we share lots of characters), who borrowed those words from classical Chinese. Many words like 选举政治数学 etc. are actually from classical Chinese articles. Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words. Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me. Edit: typo.
moogleii 12y ago
I actually thought his article was pretty terrible. It's a fun, casual read for a rant, but I wouldn't hold it as much evidence of anything. "If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) " Ha, German people told me the same thing about German when I was in Germany. Guess it depends who you ask. Grammatically, I think Mandarin is pretty simple. Pronouncing it and writing it is another story. Grammatically, I think Japanese is tougher than Chinese, writing is just as hard when using Chinese characters (maybe harder, because many kanji have different, dissimilar readings), but easier when using the kana, and the pronunciation is easy as can be. On another tangent, having sampled various metropolises, I think NY is actually very livable. English, my native language, has plenty of bonkers exceptions.
- pantalaimon 12y ago
  Well German is only hard if you want to get all the grammar right, but grammar is not crucial to intelligibility.
  - ama729 12y ago
    The point is that everyone say that about their own language, I've encountered French, Dutch and Hungarian proclaiming their language is the hardest.
    - anon4 12y ago
      It's not properly hard until the verb system has all the necessities to fluently express every time-travel scenario. Also known as HG-hard. Most languages can only describe time-travel scenarios using related concepts - this is called HG-complete.
  - ithkuil 12y ago
    well, I guess some grammar is crucial to intelligibility, not necessarily the prescriptive grammar. When a lot of people make the same mistakes, they share a new code, new intelligibility expectations, a new grammar. I think many people forget that when talking about how the newest generation mistreat their language, or whether foreigner's mistakes can be understood. heck, sometimes it's funny when a native speaker tells me that I speak X very well (I don't), just because I use some prescriptive form correctly.
Kronopath 12y ago
As someone who's been learning a bit of Mandarin the past few months, I agree—the essay hits on all the points as to why learning Chinese is challenging, but is unrelentingly pessimistic about it in a way that I think is unjustified. In particular, it hits on the two biggest barriers to learning Chinese that I've noticed in my recent experience—the writing system, and the linguistic and cultural distance between the East and West. What it doesn't talk about is how, these days, things are much easier, especially with today's technology. At about the same time I started learning Chinese, I finally bought myself a modern smartphone, and I've been thoroughly impressed at the features it has for Chinese. Using the phone's built-in pinyin keyboard, I don't have to remember how to draw out a character—I just need to know how to write the pinyin (which is a phonetic romanization of the character), and how to recognize it well enough to pick it out of a list. No more problems with writing notes. Using the drawing input mode, where I actually draw out the character on the touchscreen, renders his complaints about dictionary lookup moot, since I can just sketch the character and feed it into an online dictionary. Hell, recently I discovered the iPhone actually has voice recognition for Mandarin—if I know how to say a word but not write it, I can look up the written character by just saying it in a sentence into the microphone. And if I have the opposite problem, where I know the character but not the pronunciation, I just feed it into MDBG [3] or even Google Translate—Google's translations are not very accurate, but it'll give me the phonetic pinyin and let me listen to the Chinese text-to-speech as well. And the issues with linguistic and cultural distance? That's harder to get around—you still have to make an effort to pick that stuff up. But these days, you have the internet. You might not know what something means, but you have at your fingertips a repository of all human knowledge and culture, from all around the world. For example: the audiobooks I've been learning from had a note about how you should never give a Chinese man a green hat, since that may imply you're sleeping with his wife. It didn't elaborate on that at all, but a quick Google search later and I found a blog post that explains (in English, no less) how that saying has its origins in an old folk tale.[0] It's definitely harder than learning practically any other language. Tones can be tricky to get used to, learning the writing system at the same time is like learning two languages at once, one spoken, one written, and an unfamiliar character can be a showstopper for comprehension if you don't have a smartphone or dictionary handy. But it's doable, and some things in the language are actually easier than in Western languages—the grammar, for example, is much simpler, and you don't have to worry about conjugations, or even verb tense as much. Through a combination of Pimsleur audiobooks [1] that I checked out of the library for spoken Mandarin, Memrise [2] spaced repetition software for learning vocabulary and characters, MDBG [3] for looking up translations, and Google Translate for other, random stuff, I've been able to learn pretty well even with the limited time I spare to it. I'm not quite at the level where I can be conversational yet, but I can understand and speak enough that I feel I'd be able to stumble my way around adequately were I to travel to Shanghai tomorrow. [0] If you're curious: http://an-american-family.blogspot.ca/2010/04/dont-wear-green-hat-in-china-here-is.html http://an-american-family.blogspot.ca/2010/04/dont-wear-gree... [1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Mandarin-Pimsleur-Language-Programs/dp/0671790617 http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Mandarin-Pimsleur-Language-Pro... — They're expensive to buy, but definitely worth it if you can get it from your local library. Highly recommended. [2] http://www.memrise.com/ http://www.memrise.com/ [3] http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php
henrymercer 12y ago
"Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months" That is impressive. I took two years of Chinese in college and did not get anywhere close to that ability. How many hours a day did you practice Chinese during that 10 months?
- msvan 12y ago
  I was borderline obsessed. Full-time studying in Beijing. With the caveat that reading that first novel was very much a test of endurance.
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- threatofrain 12y ago
  The problem with Chinese characters is that they are idiosyncratic. For example, I orally tell you "mao mi": how do you write it? If you've never seen it before, your chances of figuring this out is very sad. You claim that 90% of Chinese writing are phonographs. Perhaps this is true to the most technical sense, but to most students this is useless. Try taking that 90% claim into a Chinese language test at university. The teacher will laugh at you as you arrogantly think you can decipher the phonetics of characters just because you know the "radicals". There is absolutely no reliable system for translating radicals to character phonetics, because it's all just so messy and hit and miss.
  - stevendaniels 12y ago
    I once did a little project where I looked for phonetic components of about 20,000 characters. More than 90% had a phonetic component, but most of those characters are extremely rare. In the first 300 characters a learner would study, there were about 5 characters with phonetic components. Phonetics don't really start to make a difference until about 2000 characters in.
footpath 12y ago
This is off-topic, but one of my favorite essays in English that deals with Chinese culture is this one by David Moser on Chinese "stand-up comedy": http://www.danwei.org/tv/stifled_laughter_how_the_commu.php http://www.danwei.org/tv/stifled_laughter_how_the_commu.php This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473
kkwok 12y ago
Would love any further chinese resources worth checking out!
stevendaniels 12y ago
I talked with Professor Moser before and his article happened to come up (it always seems to). He agrees with you about Chinese becoming more approachable. Brendan O'Kane, a translator, said it pretty well: learning Chinese use to be a vocation, something you'd do for your entire life. That's no longer true, which is a good thing.
baby 12y ago
As someone who is french and has spent a year in Beijing learning chinese, I have to agree on what you said. French grammar must be the worst, I haven't run into a more difficult language at the moment, and I found chinese quite easy to learn. It's easier to learn a language that uses a latin alphabet of course, but chinese has almost no grammar, it's so easy to build sentences in the language! I don't think it's fair to say that chinese is a difficult language to learn when compared to other languages. But yeah now we have pleco, nciku, sergemelnyks, mgdb...
- prewett 12y ago
  Shameless plug: I just released Eight Brains as an iPhone Chinese dictionary targeted at new Chinese learners. I do like the simplicity of the grammar, no conjugating, no adj/verb agreement, just naked words. But the simplicity it is compensated for with a variety of grammatical constructions: 要...了, 是...的, 挺...的, etc. (Simple grammar is summarized in the above-mentioned dictionary :)
SixSigma 12y ago
How would one say "the navy is like a sea army" ?
OlleLinge 12y ago
I have discussed that article with David Moser and he highlights more or less the same differences between learning then and now as you do. He has also started writing an article about this (and some other things), but it isn't quite ready yet (although the draft looks very promising). There are definitely huge differences between learning now and before the advent of smart phones (OCR, handwriting input, pop-up dictionaries). The number of free resources available online is also incredible! I try to contribute and write articles about learning Chinese (thanks for the mention) on http://www.hackingchinese.com http://www.hackingchinese.com I've also started working on a book. I'll give anyone from HN 10% off once the book is released, just mention HN in the comment when you sign up: http://www.hackingchinese.com/about/hacking-chinese-book-project/ http://www.hackingchinese.com/about/hacking-chinese-book-pro... I think learning Chinese has been interesting at all levels, but for completely different reasons. In the beginning, I thought it was exotic and a bit cool, on the intermediate level, I found it fascinating to be able to start actually communicating with people and on the advanced level I've found that mastering Chinese really is a lifetime project. Naturally, I spend more and more time teaching and writing about Chinese, but I have a lot to learn myself and keep studying as much as I can.

by msvan 12y ago

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.
- ithkuil 12y ago
  I had that same problem while learning Arabic, and that was just about missing short vowels.
  - entropy_ 12y ago
    Well, when it comes to Arabic, the short vowels should be written out as accents of sorts. However, they are quite often missing in actual written text. However, even as a native Arabic speaker I will struggle with text written like that and it will take me a while to read it. That's because most Arabs(at least the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptians I've mostly been exposed to) do not speak the written Arabic. Rather, we speak a colloquial language that will differ from one region to another. These are visibly descended from the formal, written, Arabic but they are not at all the same language. They have many different words, a completely different grammar, and very different pronunciation. So as far as most Arabs I know, the written Arabic is pretty much yet another foreign language they learn rather than their native language. The similarity between the written and spoken is similar to the difference between say Latin and languages that were descended from it(such as French).
msvan 12y ago
Chinese writing is phonetic, just not for your first 1000-2000 characters. I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters, because things get dramatically easier when you have learnt a lot of them. These are all pronounced "ding": 丁订盯顶钉, because they all have that T-like phonetic component. Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no. I will agree though that it is daunting to get started with.
- SeanLuke 12y ago
  > These are all pronounced "ding" Sort of. The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write. Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
  - jliechti1 12y ago
    I don't know if simplification has broken a great deal of the relationships, but it certainly has broken some. Here is a specific example: Traditional Chinese 車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident) 不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but) Simplified Chinese 车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation) 不过 (same meaning/pronunciation) Notice the 咼 in the Traditional 過 and 禍. This phonetic component gives you some indication that is is pronounced like "luo, huo, guo, wo". In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively. The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
    - kusimanse 12y ago
      But even in that case the relationships weren't completely broken. While 过 changed, 娲wa, 祸 huo，涡 wo，窝wo，锅 guo，蜗 wo，etc. still share the radical to the right, and 过 is a very common character, you shouldn't need to guess how to read it.
Tomte 12y ago
Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool. I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like). But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun! So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier. Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word. "Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar". I felt like the king of the world. :-)
- moron4hire 12y ago
  My parents were both linguists in the military in the 80s, so when I had gotten to around 8 years old or so, they started trying to teach me Russian. Needless to say, it didn't stick, but I've recently been trying it again. I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/dp/2203009144 http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/... And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed. The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    Trust me you're not going to pronounce Russian fluently. So my advice as a native speaker is: speak slowly and clearly. Speak as it is written. And good luck.
  - geoka9 12y ago
    > The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. Heh, I have the opposite problem: I tend to mumble when speaking English (I'm a native Russian speaker). Wanna trade?

austinz 12y ago

> Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates. I'm quite glad that the Chinese of the late 19th/early 20th century often took the Japanese approach of coining semantically meaningful neologisms, rather than trying to transliterate everything.

moogleii 12y ago
I would love to read the history about that. Got any sources/references?
- Kronopath 12y ago
  I don't have any references for you, but I can think of a few off the top of my head. As an example, a lot of technological words are compounds containing the 电 (diàn) character, meaning "electricity": 电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television 电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie 电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be: 火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.
  - moogleii 12y ago
    Oh, I know they use such compounds, but I meant more like the history of the idea forming in the 19th/20th century, and China moving towards the Japanese model of doing so as the commenter claimed.
    - dengnan 12y ago
      I'm a Chinese. According to my knowledge, most modern compound words are directly taken from Japanese (since we share lots of characters), who borrowed those words from classical Chinese. Many words like 选举政治数学 etc. are actually from classical Chinese articles. Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words. Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me. Edit: typo.

moogleii 12y ago

I actually thought his article was pretty terrible. It's a fun, casual read for a rant, but I wouldn't hold it as much evidence of anything. "If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) " Ha, German people told me the same thing about German when I was in Germany. Guess it depends who you ask. Grammatically, I think Mandarin is pretty simple. Pronouncing it and writing it is another story. Grammatically, I think Japanese is tougher than Chinese, writing is just as hard when using Chinese characters (maybe harder, because many kanji have different, dissimilar readings), but easier when using the kana, and the pronunciation is easy as can be. On another tangent, having sampled various metropolises, I think NY is actually very livable. English, my native language, has plenty of bonkers exceptions.

pantalaimon 12y ago
Well German is only hard if you want to get all the grammar right, but grammar is not crucial to intelligibility.
- ama729 12y ago
  The point is that everyone say that about their own language, I've encountered French, Dutch and Hungarian proclaiming their language is the hardest.
  - anon4 12y ago
    It's not properly hard until the verb system has all the necessities to fluently express every time-travel scenario. Also known as HG-hard. Most languages can only describe time-travel scenarios using related concepts - this is called HG-complete.
- ithkuil 12y ago
  well, I guess some grammar is crucial to intelligibility, not necessarily the prescriptive grammar. When a lot of people make the same mistakes, they share a new code, new intelligibility expectations, a new grammar. I think many people forget that when talking about how the newest generation mistreat their language, or whether foreigner's mistakes can be understood. heck, sometimes it's funny when a native speaker tells me that I speak X very well (I don't), just because I use some prescriptive form correctly.

Kronopath 12y ago

As someone who's been learning a bit of Mandarin the past few months, I agree—the essay hits on all the points as to why learning Chinese is challenging, but is unrelentingly pessimistic about it in a way that I think is unjustified. In particular, it hits on the two biggest barriers to learning Chinese that I've noticed in my recent experience—the writing system, and the linguistic and cultural distance between the East and West. What it doesn't talk about is how, these days, things are much easier, especially with today's technology. At about the same time I started learning Chinese, I finally bought myself a modern smartphone, and I've been thoroughly impressed at the features it has for Chinese. Using the phone's built-in pinyin keyboard, I don't have to remember how to draw out a character—I just need to know how to write the pinyin (which is a phonetic romanization of the character), and how to recognize it well enough to pick it out of a list. No more problems with writing notes. Using the drawing input mode, where I actually draw out the character on the touchscreen, renders his complaints about dictionary lookup moot, since I can just sketch the character and feed it into an online dictionary. Hell, recently I discovered the iPhone actually has voice recognition for Mandarin—if I know how to say a word but not write it, I can look up the written character by just saying it in a sentence into the microphone. And if I have the opposite problem, where I know the character but not the pronunciation, I just feed it into MDBG [3] or even Google Translate—Google's translations are not very accurate, but it'll give me the phonetic pinyin and let me listen to the Chinese text-to-speech as well. And the issues with linguistic and cultural distance? That's harder to get around—you still have to make an effort to pick that stuff up. But these days, you have the internet. You might not know what something means, but you have at your fingertips a repository of all human knowledge and culture, from all around the world. For example: the audiobooks I've been learning from had a note about how you should never give a Chinese man a green hat, since that may imply you're sleeping with his wife. It didn't elaborate on that at all, but a quick Google search later and I found a blog post that explains (in English, no less) how that saying has its origins in an old folk tale.[0] It's definitely harder than learning practically any other language. Tones can be tricky to get used to, learning the writing system at the same time is like learning two languages at once, one spoken, one written, and an unfamiliar character can be a showstopper for comprehension if you don't have a smartphone or dictionary handy. But it's doable, and some things in the language are actually easier than in Western languages—the grammar, for example, is much simpler, and you don't have to worry about conjugations, or even verb tense as much. Through a combination of Pimsleur audiobooks [1] that I checked out of the library for spoken Mandarin, Memrise [2] spaced repetition software for learning vocabulary and characters, MDBG [3] for looking up translations, and Google Translate for other, random stuff, I've been able to learn pretty well even with the limited time I spare to it. I'm not quite at the level where I can be conversational yet, but I can understand and speak enough that I feel I'd be able to stumble my way around adequately were I to travel to Shanghai tomorrow. [0] If you're curious: http://an-american-family.blogspot.ca/2010/04/dont-wear-green-hat-in-china-here-is.html http://an-american-family.blogspot.ca/2010/04/dont-wear-gree... [1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Mandarin-Pimsleur-Language-Programs/dp/0671790617 http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Mandarin-Pimsleur-Language-Pro... — They're expensive to buy, but definitely worth it if you can get it from your local library. Highly recommended. [2] http://www.memrise.com/ http://www.memrise.com/ [3] http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php

henrymercer 12y ago

"Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months" That is impressive. I took two years of Chinese in college and did not get anywhere close to that ability. How many hours a day did you practice Chinese during that 10 months?

msvan 12y ago
I was borderline obsessed. Full-time studying in Beijing. With the caveat that reading that first novel was very much a test of endurance.

deleted 12y ago

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threatofrain 12y ago
The problem with Chinese characters is that they are idiosyncratic. For example, I orally tell you "mao mi": how do you write it? If you've never seen it before, your chances of figuring this out is very sad. You claim that 90% of Chinese writing are phonographs. Perhaps this is true to the most technical sense, but to most students this is useless. Try taking that 90% claim into a Chinese language test at university. The teacher will laugh at you as you arrogantly think you can decipher the phonetics of characters just because you know the "radicals". There is absolutely no reliable system for translating radicals to character phonetics, because it's all just so messy and hit and miss.
- stevendaniels 12y ago
  I once did a little project where I looked for phonetic components of about 20,000 characters. More than 90% had a phonetic component, but most of those characters are extremely rare. In the first 300 characters a learner would study, there were about 5 characters with phonetic components. Phonetics don't really start to make a difference until about 2000 characters in.

footpath 12y ago

This is off-topic, but one of my favorite essays in English that deals with Chinese culture is this one by David Moser on Chinese "stand-up comedy": http://www.danwei.org/tv/stifled_laughter_how_the_commu.php http://www.danwei.org/tv/stifled_laughter_how_the_commu.php This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473

kkwok 12y ago

Would love any further chinese resources worth checking out!

stevendaniels 12y ago

I talked with Professor Moser before and his article happened to come up (it always seems to). He agrees with you about Chinese becoming more approachable. Brendan O'Kane, a translator, said it pretty well: learning Chinese use to be a vocation, something you'd do for your entire life. That's no longer true, which is a good thing.

baby 12y ago

As someone who is french and has spent a year in Beijing learning chinese, I have to agree on what you said. French grammar must be the worst, I haven't run into a more difficult language at the moment, and I found chinese quite easy to learn. It's easier to learn a language that uses a latin alphabet of course, but chinese has almost no grammar, it's so easy to build sentences in the language! I don't think it's fair to say that chinese is a difficult language to learn when compared to other languages. But yeah now we have pleco, nciku, sergemelnyks, mgdb...

prewett 12y ago
Shameless plug: I just released Eight Brains as an iPhone Chinese dictionary targeted at new Chinese learners. I do like the simplicity of the grammar, no conjugating, no adj/verb agreement, just naked words. But the simplicity it is compensated for with a variety of grammatical constructions: 要...了, 是...的, 挺...的, etc. (Simple grammar is summarized in the above-mentioned dictionary :)

SixSigma 12y ago

How would one say "the navy is like a sea army" ?

OlleLinge 12y ago

I have discussed that article with David Moser and he highlights more or less the same differences between learning then and now as you do. He has also started writing an article about this (and some other things), but it isn't quite ready yet (although the draft looks very promising). There are definitely huge differences between learning now and before the advent of smart phones (OCR, handwriting input, pop-up dictionaries). The number of free resources available online is also incredible! I try to contribute and write articles about learning Chinese (thanks for the mention) on http://www.hackingchinese.com http://www.hackingchinese.com I've also started working on a book. I'll give anyone from HN 10% off once the book is released, just mention HN in the comment when you sign up: http://www.hackingchinese.com/about/hacking-chinese-book-project/ http://www.hackingchinese.com/about/hacking-chinese-book-pro... I think learning Chinese has been interesting at all levels, but for completely different reasons. In the beginning, I thought it was exotic and a bit cool, on the intermediate level, I found it fascinating to be able to start actually communicating with people and on the advanced level I've found that mastering Chinese really is a lifetime project. Naturally, I spend more and more time teaching and writing about Chinese, but I have a lot to learn myself and keep studying as much as I can.