Why Chinese is So Damn Hard
Yesterday I found a wonderful essay by Sinologist David Moser about the travails of learning Chinese. If you have fifteen minutes, and even have the slightest interest in the language, I encourage you to read it. In addition to being informative and interesting, it's also riotously funny in parts.
A word of encouragement for would-be learners of the language who might feel disheartened after reading this piece: Moser wrote this in 1991, years before technology made the process of studying Chinese much easier. When I began studying Chinese seriously in 2007, I employed Wenlin, Pleco, Nciku, Google Translate, and Chinese Pod to help me along. Without those tools, I wonder whether I'd have had the gumption to persevere.
In addition, opportunities to learn the language have multiplied. In the West, Chinese has found its way into the curricula of an increasing number of schools. In China, too, the number of Chinese language schools tailoring their material towards foreigners has similarly skyrocketed. For years in Kunming, for example, the only two schools offering Chinese classes to foreigners were Yunnan University and Yunnan Normal University. Now, I can think of a near dozen off the top of my head that do the same, and I'm sure the actual list is much longer.
Still, nobody I know got good at Chinese without hours of writing characters in books, of sounding out proper tones, and of making mistake after mistake after mistake. There are no short cuts in Chinese, boys and girls.
November 8th, 2010 - 09:04
Thank you.
(That’s all I have to comment here…)