Sunday, December 31, 2006

Why Chinese is So Hard

Some people have an innate ability to pick up a second language quite rapidly, but I don’t seem to have that gift so I just do the best I can to communicate effectively in English.

One language that’s notoriously difficult to master is Chinese. Until now, I thought this was mostly a problem for Westerners. But as it turns out, Chinese is tough for anyone – even for Chinese people.

David Moser, an expert in Chinese Studies wrote an essay, “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard.” It’s a long essay, but a fascinating look at Asian linguistics. You can read the entire analysis if you want, but I’ve quoted some of the more interesting accounts on Moser’s experience studying Chinese and why it is so hard to learn.

Complex writing system

Instead of an alphabet, Chinese consists of characters, which are ideograms that represent ideas. There are thousands of characters to learn just to begin reading simple passages.

While many experts say that you only need to learn 2,000 or so characters to be able to read a newspaper, Moser says that these characters may take on different meaning when combined with other characters.

For example, he points out that in English, knowing the meaning of the words “up” and “tight” won’t provide much of a clue in understanding the meaning of “uptight,” the type of concept that may be formed by two Chinese characters.

Moser describes the frustration of the slow pace of many who choose to study Chinese:

“The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me ‘My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can’t read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can’t skim to save my life.’ This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers.

“The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels – La nausée by Sartre, Voltaire’s Candide, L’étranger by Camus – plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc.”

No helpful alphabet

The first step to studying English is to learn the alphabet. Once you do, it doesn’t take long to figure out that the text is read from left to right and that there are spaces that divide the letters into words.

A Chinese character, on the other hand, consists of various strokes that impart meaning to the character. These strokes may appear anywhere within the character – top, bottom, left, right, or middle. This two-dimensional approach is far more complex than the one dimension (left to right) we use to write in English.

It can take months of studying Chinese just to learn how to write all the strokes. As Moser points out:

“Chinese people I know who have studied English for a few years can usually write with a handwriting style that is almost indistinguishable from that of the average American.

“Very few Americans, on the other hand, ever learn to produce a natural calligraphic hand in Chinese that resembles anything but that of an awkward Chinese third-grader. If there were nothing else hard about Chinese, the task of learning to write characters alone would put it in the rogues’ gallery of hard-to-learn languages.”

With no alphabet, learning to write phonetically is impossible. In fact, Moser poses an interesting comparative question: If you were learning English and just heard the word “president,” what would you do if you wanted to write it down?

“Anyone with a year or two of English experience is going to have a host of clues and spelling rules-of-thumb, albeit imperfect ones, to help them along. The word really couldn’t start with anything but ‘PR,’ and after that a little guesswork aided by visual memory (‘Could a ‘Z’ be in there? That’s an unusual letter, I would have noticed it, I think. Must be an ‘S’...’) should produce something close to the target.”

While spelling English words is rough, you can usually come up with something. Even if you wrote “PREZEDINT,” most people would understand it, just as we’d understand a five-year old writing down the word, “RINAHSORUS.”

But in Chinese, sounds don’t provide phonetic clues on how a character should be written. Moser’s experience suggests that this is even difficult for Chinese people:

“I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write… I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like ‘tin can,’ ‘knee,’ ‘elbow,’...and so on. And when I say ‘forget,’ I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper.”

Moser tells a story about being at lunch with three native Chinese students at Peking University. When he asked them how to write the character for “sneeze,” none of them knew. And these students were Ph.D. candidates in the Chinese Department.

“I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the ‘Harvard of China.’ Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’?”

Little help from dictionaries

How would you look up a French word in a dictionary? Well, it’s pretty easy – even if you don’t understand much French. Russian? That might present a challenge, but once you learned the Cyrillic alphabet, you’d be all set. Chinese? According to Moser, learning how to look up words is the equivalent to an entire semester of study:

“When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball!”

You see, while it’s convenient to view Chinese as a set of characters that each symbolize a word, in actual practice, what we consider a word might require a few characters. With no real word boundaries, it’s as if English were be written something like this:

THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE. FOR A 
CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE 
BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE MATER IAL SIMP LY 
TO A VOID CON TROVERS Y IS A DOWN RIGHT 
DIS GRACE.

While it’s easy for a native speaker to understand this text, it wouldn’t be at all easy to look up the words in a dictionary because the clues as to what really constitutes a word are not immediately clear.

Similar sounds impart varying meaning

Chinese vowel sounds can be subtle and intricate. The sound “BAH” for example may rise, fall, or remain steady, which may completely change the meaning. As Moser describes:

“Every person who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible that shùxué means ‘mathematics,’ while shūxuě means ‘blood transfusion,’ or that guòjiang means ‘you flatter me,’ while guojiàng means ‘fruit paste’?

“But where the real difficulty comes in is when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. You suddenly find yourself straitjacketed – when you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural, the tones come out all wrong.

“For example, if you wish say something like ‘Hey, that’s my water glass you’re drinking out of!’ and you follow your intonational instincts – that is, to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word for ‘my’ – you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.”

I’ve always been interested in Chinese, but don’t think I’ll be trying to learn it anytime soon. English is tough enough.

Moser sums it up this way:

“Someone once said that learning Chinese is ‘a five-year lesson in humility.’ I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.”

Posted by Richard Bloch

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