Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

No, Chinese Is Still Hard

John Biesnecker has an interesting post in which he declares, in bold print no less, that learning Chinese isn't difficult. Rather, he writes, 'it's a series of small, fun, easy things that you do over and over and over'.

In response, John Pasden says that while learning tones is difficult, once you get over the hump the rest of Chinese isn't too hard.

Both Johns have lived in China for years and have excellent Chinese, and their ideas here have a lot of merit. But I think they are underestimating the difficulty of the language.

As John P does, it's important to define our terms. What do we mean by difficult? John compares the study of Chinese to mastering a video game and juggling, but I think for the sake of simplicity it's best to compare it to learning other languages. Is Chinese difficult compared to, say, Japanese or French or Arabic or Urdu or Greek?

Even then, we still haven't found a good basis of comparison because we haven't considered relative difficulty yet. An Italian would find Spanish much easier than, say, a German. A Japanese person has a significant advantage in learning Chinese over an American due to the Japanese use of Chinese characters. It's a rather banal point, but judging the difficulty of a language depends entirely on perspective.

Since John and John are Americans who write in English about the Chinese language, it's safe to assume that their audience  is comprised mainly of native English speakers interested in Chinese. In that case the only relevant question is whether Chinese is difficult for native English speakers.

The answer to this question I think is unequivocally 'yes'. Again, I would like to point your attention to the David Moser essay I linked to in a prior post.

For an English speaker, Chinese is conceptually difficult. When I began to study characters, every textbook said that Chinese characters are comprised of both a 'meaning' part (called a radical) and a phonetic part. Seems simple enough, right? Yet it took me a surprisingly long time to internalize it. Now, it seems obvious to me that 元 and 远 and 园 and 院 all are 'yuan'. At the time, though, I had to memorize each word independently. At an even more basic level, it took me awhile to realize that each character corresponded to a mono or disyllablic entity and that Chinese words were usually comprised of two or three of these characters. Again, it seems obvious now but understanding this point was a major conceptual breakthrough for me at the time.

I think it goes without saying that an English speaker studying German, Italian, Russian, or Arabic doesn't have to grapple with this process at all.

Most persistent learners of Chinese do reach the point where they understand characters conceptually, and after that point John B is correct: mastering Chinese is simply a matter of time and effort. But no other language I've encountered requires a conceptual leap like Chinese, and that alone is what makes it difficult for English speakers to learn.

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.

Can Do People

Yesterday while attending my first yoga class in well over a year, my teacher kept using the term huiyuan to signify those- not me- who were able to do the positions properly. The term appears to me to be a combination of 会 and 员, literally 'can person'. Yet when checking on Wenlin the term 会员 has only one meaning: member.

Does anyone know whether this is an actual term, or was my teacher simply making words up on the spot? In any case I found it a clever use of the language, and aspire to be a yoga 'can person' myself.

Learning Chinese Riffs

There have been a number of interesting responses to my recent post at Lost Laowai that asks this question: does location within China matter when attempting to learn Mandarin?

My view, unsurprising for a Yunnan resident, is that it does not. There are exceptions, of course- parts of rural Xinjiang or Tibet would present few opportunities to practice the language. Otherwise, even smallish cities in Yunnan- thousands of miles from Beijing- are fine.

To paraphrase what I wrote in the comments of the LL post, the people I know who speak, read, write, and understand Mandarin best are the ones who worked at it the most. While some people have a natural knack for languages that facilitates smooth learning, these people are the exception, not the rule.

Read the whole post- and especially the comments that follow.

Back To Traditional Characters?

Allow me to direct your attention to an excellent Danwei post (via an equally interesting post by James Fallows) detailing a new proposal for China to revert to traditional characters, the writing system abandoned on the mainland in the 1950s.

To summarize: a representative named Pan Qinglin proposed junking simplified characters due to three reasons, two obvious and one that had never occurred to me before.

First, the simplification process occurred too hastily and wasn't done properly, not surprising given that the man behind the change, then-Chairman Mao Zedong, didn't favor deliberation in implementing his policy goals.

Secondly, reverting to traditional characters would be China on equal linguistic footing with Taiwan, a change that wouldn't hurt cross-Straits relations. And as my boss today wryly pointed out, Hong Kong people would have one less reason to look down on their mainland cousins.

But it is the third reason that I find particularly interesting. Because the widespread use of computers and mobile phones in modern Chinese communication, one of the main rationales behind simplified characters - that they are easier to write- has effectively vanished.

Of course, this point shouldn't be of any great surprise, but it still hadn't occurred to me before. I, for one, can type an e-mail in Chinese without much difficulty but struggle to write a one-sentence note on paper for my cleaning lady*. Of the four major skills- reading, writing, speaking, and listening- my writing level lags far, far behind the others. Because I never need to write, why bother doing so? Nobody bothers learning penmanship back in the US anymore, do they?

Implementing traditional characters on the mainland wouldn't be universally popular and probably wouldn't happen due to logistical difficulties, anyway.

As someone who has invested ample time in learning simplified characters, I wouldn't be thrilled to discover one day that they were obsolete. Nevertheless, I can certainly see why purists would applaud the change. As Fallows points out, a good analogy for character simplification would be if, for example, the English word "through" were officially changed to "thru". Ugh.

One final note- I've never believed that simplified characters were any easier to learn, particularly for us foreigners. Learning the character system is what's difficult; once that happens, learning more complex characters doesn't require much additional effort. If learning simplified characters is like running a 14 mile race, traditional characters would be akin to making it to 16.

Neologism City

At a weekend dinner party I attended, two neologisms were coined:

1. slogo- a combination "slogan" and "logo". Think "I'm lovin' it" written on top of McDonald's golden arches.

2. expatronize- a merger of "expatriate" and "patronize". Many long-term laowais regularly expatronize newbies, particularly in pubs. Example:

Newbie: "I just can't get enough of rice noodles! They're delicious!"
LTLW (Long-term laowai): "Just stay here awhile...pffft. You'll see"

Speech Recognition Fun

A friend of mine who is in graduate school in Canada recently said that he sometimes writes papers while driving thanks to speech recognition software he installed on his Macintosh, which he keeps in the passenger seat next to him. What a boon for us procrastinators of the world! Apparently, though, the program isn't 100% accurate though it can be trained to learn the contours of your voice.

Even if it were accurate, though, proofreading would of course be necessary. Otherwise, his term paper might end up like this:

"The rate of growth in the Chinese economy has been affected by, uhh, the global financial crisis, and Hey asshole! You cut me off! Umm, where was I......oh. The decline in demand among Western nations has led the government to consider.....um, yeah...that'll be a Big Mac, large fries, and a medium Coke."

Or maybe it works, who knows?

Good Tone Acquisition Method

As I've said before, I believe mastering tones is the most difficult aspect of learning Chinese. Most people I know- even good speakers- typically don't bother learning them; after awhile you intuitively figure out which tones to use because they "sound right". This mainly only works for the most common words. For example, most Chinese speakers know that å¼€ is first tone, because this is a word we use constantly. But what about less common words?

A friend of mine recently suggested a new way to integrate tones into one's study of Mandarin. Cut and paste an article or story into a Microsoft Word document. Instead of using the numbering system (for example, "kai1" for å¼€), highlight each character with a color, depending on its tone. I tried doing this and it worked well- after a couple of read-throughs I was getting nearly all of the tones correct.

I'm now going to integrate highlighting into the mattschiavenza.com official study guide to Chinese. Here, to reiterate, is the method:

1. Find an article that interests you, whether it be news, culture, literature, technology, or politics. Choose an article that isn't too long, maybe three or so paragraphs. Also, be cognizant of your level. If you're a beginner, don't choose an article that's too difficult. Copy the article and paste it into a Word document, and do the same in a new Wenlin window.

2. Using Wenlin, read the article slowly. When you see an unfamiliar character, click on it and carefully read through Wenlin's notes. It also helps to figure out which other Chinese words include this particular character. You can even open a separate Word doc to use as your vocab list, though I prefer to do this on pen and paper so I can write the character by hand.

3. Again using Wenlin, read the article aloud without worrying about tones. Make sure that you can identify each character that you read. Be wary of characters that look alike and are often confused (人 and 入, for example).

4. Using the highlight function on Word, select colors to represent each of the tones. Highlight the article.

5. Read the article aloud (on Word) using the correct tones. As your accuracy improves, pick up the pace.

6. Translate the article into idiomatic English. This takes a bit of creativity- but it's more important to make it readable than to make it 100% accurate.

7. Write the article by hand.

Yes, this method is tedious, often boring, and not entirely easy, but it does work. Trust me. You only need to do one paragraph per day, and within a week or two your Chinese will be noticeably better. Much better.