
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992) - monsieurpng
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
======
solidsnack9000
_...one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can
have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to
write the characters for some relatively common word. ... I have seen highly
literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words
like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"),
"elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say
"forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the
paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally
forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? ... ...often even the
most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and
ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive
character._

It was related to me by a Chinese colleague that some young people in China
mostly use Pinyin and can barely write any characters, since cellphones take
care of turning the Pinyin into characters.

~~~
jimmydef
I think many non-Chinese sensationalize this problem. Yes, forgetting certain
characters is common but not too an overwhelming or overproblematic extent.

What many people like to do is to confuse word difficulty with the difficult
of the concept the word is representing and then generalizing it to all words,
making it seem that Chinese is tougher than it really is. Yes knee is simple
to write in English and it represents an easy concept, but the word (膝盖)
itself is difficult to remember in Chinese. But that doesn't mean that all
easy concepts are difficult to write in Chinese and vice versa. Difficult
concepts may also have simple characters representing them. There's no direct
correlation between these two.

Put it another way, the word "diarrhoea" is a very simple concept and very
easy to write in Chinese. Almost no Chinese will forget how to write it in
Chinese. But ask a native English speaker, and a large percentage will not be
able to get it correct. Does this somehow mean that all English words are as
difficult to write as "diarrhoea"? And then they can throw the same thing back
at you. Can you imagine a well-educated native Chinese speaker totally
forgetting how to write a word like "diarrhoea"?

~~~
Koshkin
Not anymore.

------
emtel
On the topic of learning to remember characters - Japanese students attempting
to learn kanji (very close to traditional chinese characters) often use a book
called "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig. The method devised by the
author for learning the characters is truly ingenious.

He developed this method after moving to japan in the early 80s for a position
at a research institute. In a few months, he developed and applied his method
to learn english meanings (but not japanese readings) for all ~2000 standard-
use kanji. When his colleagues asked him what he'd been spending all his time
on, and he told them that he'd finished learning all the kanji, they didn't
believe him. Not because they didn't believe he'd done it so quickly, but
because they had never seen any foreigner ever learn more than a few hundred.
After demonstrating to their satisfaction that he'd really managed to do it,
he was told "go write a book about how you did it".

I've been working my way through RTK (with the help of anki) for several
months now. The method really does work. I'm at about 1500 out of 2200. It's
getting harder the further I get, but all told I don't think I've spent more
than a hundred hours or so over the course of 4 months.

For chinese learners, he's produced books on remembering Hanzi, simplified and
traditional. I think if Moser had had access to these books, he might have
been a bit less despondent about the task of learning the characters.

~~~
aikinai
It might be somewhat handy to have the rough meanings memorized, but it's a
very long way from there to actually reading and writing Japanese. I never
tried it myself, but I've heard many advanced Japanese learners say they did
it early on and later felt it was mostly pointless.

I read and write Japanese fluently and never studied kanji alone; I learned
them along with the vocabulary they appear in, which is the approach
recommended by the best advanced Japanese schools.

~~~
Tesl
Just wanted to +1 this. I also read Japanese at a high level (JLPT N1) and
I've always learned characters in context of the vocabulary they are in.
Spending months learning 2000 "meanings" for characters isn't a great way to
spend your time in my opinion, the hard part of learning a language is
remembering tens of thousands of words. Kanji is relatively not a big deal.

The exception I suppose is if you really want to be able to write characters
by hand, then the Heisig method has value. If you can live without being able
to handwrite well, then it's hard to justify spending months up front
remembering unhelpful meanings than actually learning the language itself...

~~~
Tor3
The time spent to learn Kanji via RtK is in my experience only a very little
part of the time spent on everything else related to learning Japanese. The
RtK way (and I don't do flashcards) is actually a fun diversion, and I find
that I enjoy drawing the characters. And that's from a guy who can't stand
writing by hand in general.. I started using a typewriter at 14. And I can't
draw pictures to save my life. Unlike the previous time some years back, this
time I'm using a cheap click-to-erase mechanical 'magic' drawing pad. Much
better than the stack of paper I used back then.

------
laurent123456
In China it's also hard to speak with Chinese people because many of them
aren't used to communicate with foreigners. If I speak in French with a non-
French speaker, and they don't understand, I'll try to use different words, or
I'll say the sentence more slowly.

In China, not really - if you don't understand, often they'll repeat the exact
same thing, the exact same way, and again and again. You can end up in a
deadlock as they won't try to use simpler words or speak more slowly. Chinese
people know that their language is hard, but I don't think all of them realise
just how hard it is for foreigners.

Of course as he mentioned in the article, when it's your turn to speak, even
if you know how to say what you want to say, if you don't have all the tones
exactly right, you won't make sense to the other person either.

~~~
colordrops
Based on my 9 years in China learning the language I would have to disagree
with your characterization. I've changed pronunciation and ways of saying
things successfully. I just think it takes longer to get to that point than
other languages.

Language difficulty is relative to your native tongue. Learning English is as
hard for a native Chinese speaker as Chinese is for an English speaker. And
learning Chinese for a Korean speaker is much easier than English.

Chinese is not exceptionally difficult. Over a billion people speak it.

~~~
theaeolist
I think the author of the post makes a compelling argument that what you say
is not true. Just the convenience of dictionary lookup and quasi-phonetic
spelling should make learning English far easier for a native Chinese speaker.

~~~
colordrops
Pronunciation and grammar are much harder in English than Chinese though. Each
language has many facets. The author is missing the forest for the trees.

Chinese grammar is ridiculously simple. There is no tense and no gender.
Subject can be dropped from the sentence. Phonetically, pronunciation is
always the same for a particular character. The language is like Legos, where
you snap together a limited subset of sounds.

Memorizing characters is not the only aspect to the language.

~~~
chillacy
An example is the Chinese word 海军 which an intermediate learner would
recognize as “ocean army” and a beginner learner might recognize as something
to to with water and maybe vehicles. Whereas in English the word Navy gives no
indication to its meaning, only its prononciation.

------
chillacy
Not this again! David Mozer’s article has been posted to death here and
debated to all end. It’s mostly correct but deeply sensationalized to the
point where I believe it’s more damaging than useful for those who haven’t
studied character based languages.

~~~
budadre75
the 'past' link shows that it was first posted 11 years ago.

~~~
ImaCake
That is a fantastic feature I didn't know about. Thanks for pointing it out!

------
hannob
I tried to learn Chinese for a while. I wouldn't say it's exceptionally hard.
I mean learning any foreign language is always hard and involves a lot of
learning, which is why I eventually gave up, because I had no real practical
use out of it and couldn't motivate myself to put regular work into it.

Sure, the characters are hard to remember. It's completely different from
European languages, so you have no "ah that almost sounds like a word I know
in my language". Pronunciation is unusual, but isn't harder than - let's say -
French. The sentence structure and grammar is relatively simple.

------
tiisetso
I attended two semesters of mandarin lessons(4 hours, mon - fri, of lessons
with short breaks) at a university in Beijing. Started from essentially
nothing; recognising 20-30 characters (Hanzi), 9 of which were numbers. I
still haven't taken any HSK (Chinese language competency test) exams but
looking at example papers and study material I'm above HSK 3 but I wouldn't
pass HSK 4 without a month dedicated review.

However, near the end I had learned enough to through the first few minutes of
most conversations with not just ease but joy. I can text in Chinese for most
everyday conversations, can't read a newspaper pretty much at all, poems are
impossible even the ones that look deceptively simple by Li Bai, but I can
follow all spoken words by Mandarin speaking characters in movies produced in
the West.

My two cents is this. Anyone can learn Chinese. But it takes time and effort.
Really, you have to persist for while before breakthroughs happen. I couldn't
differentiate between tones for the first few months unless a native speaker
spoke one syllable at a time very slowly. Now I can pick out tones at normal
speed. However, still doesn't mean I understand.

A Japanese friend I made in my first semester found the characters easy but
pronunciation was still very tough for him. But having one less obstacle is
important. I can know also watch anime and recognise plenty of characters
(Kanji) in the backgrounds but this is still eons from knowing Japanese.

If you want to learn, adopt a growth mindset and don't give up. Like most
things you read on the internet, they are neither as hard as everyone says
(you can learn to read, write, listen, and speak Chinese) nor as easy
(actually the grammar is far from simple. 了 (le) alone causes headaches. And
let's not forget all the references to 4000+ years of Chinese history
expressed in everyday idioms (成语) and so on).

If you want to learn, go to China if you can and try. That year was the most
difficult and rewarding (Do they always come in pairs?) of my short life thus
far.

------
iliaznk
I haven't tried to learn Chinese myself, but a friend of mine who has and
quite successfully so told me that Chinese is surprisingly simple and easy to
learn. The hardest things in it are, of course, hieroglyphs and pronunciation,
but the grammar is relatively simple.

------
xster
Besides the fact that the article is just the author opining his distaste
without applying an equal amount rationalization to any distaste for familiar
European languages.

In fact, Mandarin, like English, Riau Indonesian, Swahili, are among very few
languages that linguists identify as being unusually exoteric and easy because
they're so repeatedly worn down by foreign adults who, due to various uncommon
historical circumstances, had to learn the language imperfectly in their
adulthood, reverse assimilated in the language's native location and had
offsprings who were only exposed to a simplified version of the language and
who still influenced future generations because their foreign parents were in
the control class of society.

The author holds some 19th century views on languages and assumes that
languages have some logical design whereas all languages arbitrarily
grammaticalize and accumulate cruft over time. Some languages are indeed
harder than others, but not because languages had more logical features than
others, but just because the natural accumulation of gunk did not take place
(pidgins, creoles) or were unnaturally reversed (conquests and reverse
assimilation by adults).

For actual hard languages, one has to look at esoteric languages where the
continual grammaticalization process did not stop like Tsez or Navajo.

~~~
jhanschoo
> In fact, Mandarin, like English, Riau Indonesian, Swahili, are among very
> few languages that linguists identify as being unusually exoteric and easy

It would be helpful if you provided a source for that.

Even still, much of that the author is complaining is with regards to the
writing system of Mandarin, not Mandarin itself, while the point you seem to
be making seems to be about the Mandarin language itself. I personally concur
with your assertion that Mandarin is an easy language, but I agree with the
author that the Chinese writing system is a big hurdle for learners. I think
that there is no argument that there would be less to learn to communicate in
Chinese if Chinese correspondence used a more phonetic writing system.

> The author holds some 19th century views on languages and assumes that
> languages have some logical design whereas all languages arbitrarily
> grammaticalize and accumulate cruft over time.

Can you elaborate on where in the article you have received this impression?
The thrust of his argument on why Mandarin is hard seems to be that Chinese
and Western societies have only recently had contact, and hence they lack
familiar language features that might aid the Westerner in their study of
Mandarin.

------
dang
Discussed in 2014:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622432)

------
cribbles
A couple of accounts vouching for the comparative simplicity of spoken
Chinese:

Language Log (2014): [1] "Chinese is the easiest language I ever learned to
speak, but the writing system is by far the hardest I've ever had to grapple
with."

Idlewords (2011) [2]: "Don't fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or
Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few
months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and
meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between
you and the ability to skim a newspaper."

[1]
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11109](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11109)

[2]
[https://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm](https://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm)

------
jmchuster
I've always liked this summary I found on a forum:

> In case you were wondering - western languages to other western languages
> take about 22 weeks (550 hours of intensive study), non-western/non-asian
> languages 44 weeks (1100 hours of intensive study) and asian languages 88
> weeks (2200 hours of intensive study). The other benefit of learning a
> language in one of the other two language families is that if you decide to
> learn another language in the same language family (region 1 2 or 3 as
> described above) it takes only 22 weeks of study.

[1] [http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-
on...](http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-one-have-to-
know)

------
sifoobar
I practiced Chinese once a week for two years, unfortunately never got a
chance to use it since so it's been aging badly. The thing that many seem to
have issues with when it comes to speaking/understanding Chinese is that the
tone carries more meaning than in western languages. In Chinese; the same word
has several, often completely unrelated, meanings; all depending on
intonation. It's a new level of awareness, like learning a new programming
paradigm.

------
solidsnack9000
_One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic:
technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it._

This is such a tired and coarse idiom of American scholarly writers. The other
one is mentioning guns for no reason.

------
askaboutit
Chinese is a great language until you realise without someone constantly
telling you what each character is. You’re never going to understand. The
tones and characters need to go the way of the dodo before I take more
interest.

~~~
chillacy
So you didn’t like the two actual new aspects that aren’t in European
languages? I think those are the most exciting part: new ways of thinking.

------
svilen_dobrev
any language is hard, when you (essentially) want to convert
everyone/everything into your believes/culture/set-of-
understandings/instructions. Instead of humbly accept and admit that there
exist things which u have no idea about, and eventualy try to learn about
them, if ever possible. (And by no idea, i mean no concept about.
Language/culture are ying-and-yan, if u don't know/distinguish what yellow
color is, there's only little to be done).

------
baybal2
Chinese is not hard. I managed to get to basic conversational level in
three/four months.

~~~
shinryuu
It's the written Chinese that is difficult. Since most of society is based
around written text it's an important part of learning a language.

Having studied Japanese for three years full time I know the obstacles. I've
yet to read a full novel. It's too painful. I just started reading one with
the help of my Japanese partner who can fill me in on the reading and meaning
when I try to read.

It would take too long otherwise.

~~~
singularity2001
fortunately the gigantic barrier of the horrible writing system is starting to
crumble down thanks to technology.

You can now search for words using pinjin, voice or drawing (thanks Pleko).

And if you encounter unknown printed(!) signs you can just point your camera
at it (now or soon, what's currently the best app?).

As for calligraphic handwriting this will forever remain elusive. You may
consider it as an utterly useless hobby.

As much as I despise Siri, one things she is surprisingly capable of is
answering: "hey Siri what does sneeze mean in Chinese"

~~~
Tor3
Technology certainly helps for Japanese.. when I hear a word I don't
understand (e.g. from my wife), I enter it as it sounds and the dictionary
gives me a nice (often short) list of translations, with hiragana, katakana,
and kanji. And, due to my RtK studies (see earlier posts) I often get an 'aha'
moment when I see the kanji. If what you described works similarly for Chinese
then yes, it's a real game changer.

~~~
Torgo
The lesson I'm getting from this thread is, if you want to learn a foreign
language, get a foreign bride.

~~~
Tor3
The real lesson is that learning a foreign language is hard.. it needs a lot
of effort. In the general case, at least.

------
lbj
I'm fully cured of any desire to seriously study Chinese.

~~~
solarengineer
I started two weeks ago. I'm doing ok so far. Do give it a try with an open
mind.

The biggest success factor was deciding that it's not gong to be hard, or that
it's only going to be as hard as I consider it to be

~~~
purplethinking
Oh you sweet summer child... I don't want to discourage you, but be prepared
for a slog. Try to really enjoy the process. I've been at it for many years
studying by myself (not in China), and I've come to the conclusion that it's
best to approach the whole thing as my "forever" hobby. Unless you live in
China or you can study full time it's very hard for the average person to
become really fluent in a reasonable time. But maybe I'm below average.

~~~
chillacy
It’s a 4 year journey, enjoy the ride

