
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992) - SoftwarePatent
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
======
msvan
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
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.

~~~
msvan
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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
This is a pretty unfortunately uninformed comment. But I _especially_ want to
point out this piece:

> Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they
> will say no.

I've seen people from all different countries complain about English spelling.
But not China. No Chinese person has, in my experience, ever even considered
the idea that there's anything to complain about. Rather, they rely on the
spelling of English words as a crutch to get English speakers to understand
them when their accent gets in the way, for example, by saying something like
"Poss. <blank stare from the English speaker> Poss P-A-U-S-E Poss."

And to add to what everyone else is saying, here are some characters using the
丁 component, but not pronounced ding:

打 (da "generic verb", extremely common) 厅 (ting "hall", common) 宁 (ning, used
in names, common) 灯 (deng "lamp", common)

~~~
autarch
My wife is from Taiwan and she complains about English spelling all the time.

~~~
blencdr
She should try French, she won't complain anymore about english spelling ^_^

~~~
jnbiche
French spelling is quite regular. Once you know the system, you know how to
spell almost any word. The only issue is that some letters are not pronounced.

~~~
S4M
Dude no. I am French native speaker, and think that French spelling is way
harder. I am even starting to suspect that the spelling of the French language
was made hard on purpose, so someone who didn't get a proper education would
be spotted easily to his/her bad spelling.

~~~
frooxie
Really? I'd be curious to hear what French words are as bad as the 11
pronunciations of "ough" in English ("Though the tough cough and hiccough
plough him through)". Or, the other way around, there's the /eɪ/ diphthong,
which can be spelled a, a…e, aa, ae, ai, ai...e, aig, aigh, al, ao, au, ay, e
(é), e...e, ea, eg, ei, ei...e, eig, eigh, ee (ée), eh, er, es, et, ey, ez,
ie, oeh, ue, or uet in the words bass, rate, quaalude, reggae, rain, cocaine,
arraign, straight, Ralph, gaol, gauge, pay, ukulele, crepe, steak, thegn,
veil, beige, reign, eight, matinee, eh, dossier, demesne, ballet, obey, chez,
lingerie, boehmite, dengue, sobriquet. Not to mention place names like
Featheringstonehaugh (pronounced "Fan-shaw"). What are the most difficult
things about spelling French?

~~~
thaumasiotes
11 pronunciations of "ough"? I've always heard it as seven:

thought, though, through, tough, trough, plough, and, somewhat questionably,
hiccough.

What are the others supposed to be?

~~~
frooxie
The number depends on the dialect. Wikipedia describes it as "at least six
pronunciations in North American English and over ten in British English",
listing ten of them:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_%28orthography%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_%28orthography%29)

------
peferron
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...

~~~
meric

        just the idea of being illiterate grosses me out
    

I moved from Hong Kong when I was 9. I studied traditional chinese characters
in primary school and cantonese at home. I've forgotten a lot of chinese since
moving here.

Nowadays, there are times when I'm reading a chinese passage and I have no
idea how to pronounce half the words, yet I understand perfectly what they all
mean.

I don't know what you'd call that.

~~~
celebril
There's a certain beauty in the ideograph system: you may not know how to
pronounce the characters, but you could figure out a meaning out of it.

------
bane
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-
comprehe...](http://hunjang.blogspot.com/2005/04/koreans-reading-
comprehension-of.html)

~~~
yongjik
This is getting off-topic, but as a native Korean speaker, I'd say Hanja
("Chinese characters" used in Korean) is overrated. :)

(I do think some amount of Hanja education helps learning more Korean words,
but using them in everyday documents is another matter.)

Some newspapers banished Hanja entirely in 1988, when many old-generation
scholars decried the sorry state of Hanja education and the impending downfall
of the Korean culture.

That didn't happen, and one by one, those newspapers that ran the op-eds of
worried scholars followed suit, a process hastened by the introduction of the
internet. (Writing Chinese characters with a keyboard isn't really an easy
process. Especially when you're speaking Korean: you type Korean first and
then have to convert each word to Chinese, so why bother?)

Nowadays, Korean culture is just as strong as before, Korean dramas are
popular in China, and many official documents are arguably much easier to
understand than in the 80s, partly thanks to the efforts to banish esoteric
jargons that nobody could understand without writing in Hanja (and only poorly
understood even when written in Hanja: think about it, you can't understand
what a telephone is even if you know the Ancient Greek words for "far" and
"voice". You could only have a vague guess.)

On top of that, many of these "esoteric jargons" were direct import from
written Japanese words during the colonization period, so they were never a
proper Korean word outside a small group of people.

~~~
T-R
I can't really speak to the utility of using the characters in practice, but
looking back on when I was studying Japanese and Korean, it frustrates me that
more emphasis wasn't put on the characters, as learning the roots of the words
was incredibly helpful in learning vocabulary, in the same way that learning
Latin roots would be helpful in studying English. It was, though, much more of
an issue in Japanese, where you run into the characters everywhere. Because of
the heavy conversational emphasis in most foreign language classes, I didn't
learn about character composition (radicals), or the phonetic element to
characters until I took a bit of Chinese. When I did finally learn these
things, my reading comprehension got a very significant boost.

I'd maybe argue that the use of Chinese characters in Japanese allows me to
read much faster than if all writing were in Hiragana, particularly since
people tend to identify words more by their shape, but Hangul does this quite
well on its own, so I think maybe there's not as strong of a need for it in
Korean.

~~~
yongjik
One theory I heard was that Japanese has a rather limited set of syllables, so
the ambiguity is greater. In spoken Japanese some of the ambiguity would be
resolved by pitch accent, but accent is not written in Hiragana/Katakana.

On the other hand, Korean has a relatively large number of syllables (so less
ambiguity), and modern Korean spelling system is highly morphophonemic (which
is a fancy way of saying "words that sound the same in a form may still be
written differently, depending on how they sound in other forms"), which also
helps a bit.

For example, the words 낫 (scythe) 낮 (day) 낯 (face) all sound the same when in
isolation (or when followed by a consonant), but sound different when followed
by a vowel.

------
neals
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.

~~~
mech4bg
It's interesting that everyone seems to have the impression that their
language is one of the hardest to learn. Growing up for some reason I
definitely thought it about English. When I lived in Germany they thought it
about German.

What are the difficulties in the Dutch language? I can read a fair bit of
Dutch knowing German and English and it seems reasonably straightforward to
me, but I am definitely not super familiar with it (which is why I ask).

When I was learning German I found it ridiculously hard - but it only took me
about 5 months to become reasonably fluent. In the end I realized it was just
that things were _different_, not especially more difficult - and that certain
things were actually much easier (e.g. verb conjugations, spelling,
pronunciation, more consistent grammar rules).

~~~
gedrap
>>> It's interesting that everyone seems to have the impression that their
language is one of the hardest to learn.

True that. I believe it's because you study your native language at much
greater detail / more advanced less common issues. While for foreign
languages, you usually just study common issues, the every day kind of things.
That gives an impression that it's extremely hard because of all the edge
cases and etc.

------
cobrausn
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
> 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?

~~~
jafaku
As a non-native English speaker, until recently I didn't know ee and i sounded
different, eg: bee and bit. Someone explained to me that there are something
like 30 vowel sounds in English. Y u no 1 letter = 1 sound???

~~~
Turing_Machine
English is actually a mixture of Anglo-Saxon (i.e., "real" English), Norman
French (i.e., French as spoken by Danes), ordinary French, several Celtic
tongues, various Scandinavian languages/dialects, Latin, Greek, German, and
(more recently) everything from Yiddish to Mandarin.

If the word was from a language written in Latin script it often kept its
original spelling even when that was contrary to what passes for English
orthography. It's a big mess, but (usually) it works out.

~~~
logfromblammo
This is exactly why I refer to native English speakers as "sesquilingual".

That word itself is a mongrel of a Latin root, a Latin numeric prefix, and an
English adjective-forming suffix. You still knew what I meant by it. I have
also tried reading news articles in different languages, or understanding what
is going on in a Univision or Telemundo Spanish-language program. It is much
easier than one might think.

I have been able to decipher Italian genealogically-relevant municipal
records, written in the most self-indulgent cursive script I have ever seen,
because English and Italian have a lot of cognates, and bureaucratic record-
keeping is about the same everywhere you go.

Chinese, on the other hand, simply has no entry point. I'm with it right up
until the number symbols go from 3 to 4, and then it just goes into alienese
and never returns.

------
daphneokeefe
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
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"!

~~~
Gorkys
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
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)

------
gaoshan
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
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.

~~~
rmundo
This. If you can sing along to a song, you can definitely figure out tones. It
might take some associating each word with a tiny little snippet of music, but
that is essentially what it is.

Re: figuring out whether your tones or speech is correct, try talking to Siri
or Google voice search. I tried my French on the French Siri and it was
humbling.

~~~
pimlottc
> This. If you can sing along to a song, you can definitely figure out tones.

I think you understate the difficulty of recognizing and reproducing tones.
Quite a few people can't carry a tune to save their life. Even among the
majority who passably can, doing so extremely well - aka having "perfect
pitch" \- is recognized as a rarity.

~~~
crazygringo
First of all, that's not what perfect pitch is -- it is rare, but it has
absolutely nothing to do with how well you can carry a tune.

But secondly, if the entire population of China can do it, then statistically,
you're almost guaranteed to be able to do it too. And the tones in Chinese are
really very, very simple. They're no different from the way you end a question
with your voice moving upwards, or the recognizable "valley girl" pattern.
It's the same idea, just applied to single words instead of whole sentences.

------
T-R
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
> 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
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.

~~~
thedufer
That sounds good in theory, but you've largely missed my point - a language
that worked the way you're describing Chinese would be significantly easier to
read than, say, English. However, the evidence seems to point in the opposite
direction. What explains this apparent discrepancy?

~~~
T-R
Sorry, I just noticed that I didn't really properly respond there. "Reading"
can mean "pronouncing" or "comprehending" \- I'm arguing that overall
comprehension (including both word identification and reading speed) is easier
in languages like Chinese or Japanese than in English. Just from personal
anecdote, I feel that many English speakers learning Japanese that have
trouble with reading comprehension have issues not because of the language
itself, but because they try to study vocabulary as if it's a phonetic
language, as many classes are taught that way - memorization focus is on how
characters or words sound, rather than the meaning of the characters or
radicals they're composed from. The situation may be worse with Chinese if
it's as common as the author implies for students to still have trouble
reading newspapers after 10 years of study.

~~~
thedufer
I hadn't thought about the differences between how one goes about learning
phonetically vs...whatever the optimal way of learning Chinese/Japanese would
be called.

At the college I went to, which had a good Chinese department, as far as I
could tell, classes were taught entirely by native Chinese professors. I would
expect them to teach in a way that works for the language, but as pretty much
everyone there had previously learned a Romance language to some degree (very
typical of the high schools in the area), I wonder if they brought
preconceptions from that experience.

I knew many of the students in the department, and their experience lines up
pretty well with what the author explains (they studied intensively for 4
years and could still only read at any reasonable pace from textbook
passages/speak passably on certain predefined topics).

------
cpher
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?

------
archena
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
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
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
The teachers do encourage speaking, but they also spend an inordinate amount
of time on reading and writing, even in absolute beginner classes.

------
yongjik
(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
> 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
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.

~~~
thedufer
It seems like the more apt comparison would be between Chinese and Russian or
Arabic. New alphabet, little-to-no cognates, but still phonetic. In an all-
languages-are-equal world, an English speaker would have equally difficult
times learning any of those; I wonder how it goes in practice.

------
cburgmer
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.

~~~
stevendaniels
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)

------
pikapikachu
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
> 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.

------
rumcajz
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.

------
jamesdutc
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
> 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
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.")

------
jmzbond
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.

------
jokoon
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.

------
zhemao
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.

------
epsylon
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,_...](http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Gargantua/%C3%89dition_Juste,_1535)

The study of classical texts in general is difficult in any language when
we're talking about timespans of centuries or even millenia.

------
chewxy
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

------
xarien
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.

~~~
archena
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
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-
subject_language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-subject_language)

------
tokenadult
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
Sometimes, the grammar is different too.

English: I go first

Mandarin: 我先走

Cantonese: 我走先

------
grifpete
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.

------
dsego
_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.

------
goatsmilk
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-...](http://lingualbee.blogspot.com.au/2006/08/why-chinese-is-so-damn-
hard.html) and [http://pocketcultures.com/2009/03/23/how-difficult-is-
chines...](http://pocketcultures.com/2009/03/23/how-difficult-is-chinese/)

~~~
dang
Thanks. Changed.

------
erikb
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.

------
byuu
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_D...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-
Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)

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.

~~~
LancerSykera
> Even some native speakers tend to have no idea when to use 'wa' or 'ga'

Glad you said this, so I can stop pounding my head over it. Just today I was
thinking "doko wa kami desu ka? wait, no, doko ga kami desu ka... doko wa...
doko ga... whatever."

Which kami I was thinking about is for me to know and you to guess
incorrectly.

~~~
frooxie
I heard an anecdote about some guy telling his Japanese girlfriend, who had
made him dinner, "Kore wa oishii!". Turns out he should have said "ga", as
"wa" is often used to emphasize contrast, so what the girlfriend heard was
"This was delicious [in contrast to your usual cooking]".

~~~
byuu
That is terrifying D:

And this is why I won't even say a single word of Japanese when I go the local
Japanese restaurant (and yes, they definitely speak it as I can hear them
talking to each other and their Japanese patrons.)

------
be5invis
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.

------
mikeash
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.

~~~
contingencies
Mike has described it correctly.

(My background: 6 months exposure + 2 months of self-taught reading + 6 months
of formal studies + 12 further years exposure, 8 in country. Also recently
married)

Over the last near decade and a half I have met hundreds of foreign learners
of Chinese across the mainland and Taiwan, and the most obvious thing is that
_it is pointless to learn to read before speaking_. Just as children first
learn to speak by imitating their parents and guardians, so too must language
learners learn to recognize and reproduce the sounds of a new language.

Once that's done and some rarified stem of grammar has been acquired by
environment, the absolute joy of making sense of characters in their written
form will propel the learner forward with far more speed and ease than a rote-
learning non-speaker.

The article whinges about romanzation but Pinyin is great. It's only the
stubborn Taiwanese who refuse to use it, as the product of the Communist
enemy! For a truly scary alternative, look at what the French did to the
Vietnamese language.

------
jacobmarble
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
It was even funnier as a Chinese American. Made me feel a bit better about my
lackluster proficiency in my "mother tongue".

------
dmytrish
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.

------
lvturner
[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"?

------
jtsnow
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
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
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.

------
yeukhon
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
> 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
New Zealand? Is there that significant of an overseas Chinese population
there?

------
bayesianhorse
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.

------
exclipy
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.

------
zhemao
The site appears to be down. Here is the cached version.

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html)

~~~
ttflee
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)

------
franzwong
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.

------
cdelsolar
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.

~~~
coupdejarnac
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
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
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. :)

------
sekasi
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
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).

------
Jabbles
A critical response by Benny Lewis:

[http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/](http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/)

------
sarreph
This is why we need Hi-LAB sooner than later...

------
nayefc
The writer is pretty jealous of New York.

------
cpher
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
I love how I get downvoted when the entire thread has derailed.

~~~
Major_Grooves
to be fair your comment was insulting and completely useless.

~~~
cpher
Yes, it was. I apologize.

