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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
Well, in my opinion, English is hard to pronounce (for example, it impossible to know to to pronounce the word 'live' without context) and French is hard to spell.
Since you mention the /eɪ/ diphthong, in French it can be spelled é, ée, et, ed, er, ai, and many others. What is making the French spelling harder, I think, is that many letters are not pronounced, and some words have the same pronunciation with a different spelling (for example: cou - neck - and coup - hit). I can't think of anything in particular, but it all lies in the fact that many letters are not pronounced. I found this website - in French - where you can have fun testing your French spelling: http://timbresdelorthographe.com/
That's a little bit cheating, you're adding silent consonants to the vowel when they're not pronounced at all.
I could say that in Russian the sound [о] can be spelled ол as in солнце, but that would be bullshit. Russian is a largely phonetic language, it's just that consonant clusters get simplified in pronunciation.
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
sure, in English the exceptions are so frequent you cannot possibly forget that you are supposed to learn each word separately. in French you can fall to a few traps, but most of the vocabulary follows complicated yet regular rules.
There is nothing unfortunately uninformed about my comment. There is something unfortunately condescending about your reply.
I am well aware that Chinese radical phonetic components are not as powerful as a phonetic alphabet. I am impliying no such thing. There are however many characters which carry phonetic information, such as my apparently crude example above. I have found this to be very helpful in remembering pronunciations of characters, even if they are only approximations. HN is a tough crowd.
Further, your experiences with Chinese people are not necessarily the same as mine.
> I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters. [...] These are all pronounced "ding" [...] because they all have that T-like phonetic component.
(emphasis mine)
This is, quite clearly, saying that you can get the pronunciation of an unfamiliar character from its written form. But you can't; that's incredibly dangerous and is nearly guaranteed to backfire within 2-3 guesses. You use the particular example of characters with the phonophore 丁 ding1. Okay. What's the most common character incorporating that component? It's 打, which you seem to have conveniently glossed over, and which, despite using 丁 as the phonophore, is pronounced da3. You also give 顶, which really is pronounced ding(3), but which is backwards like 切, making it fairly problematic to guess which component is hinting at the sound. (For a nice summary of that problem, 致 and 到 are both characters in the same style, with a sound hint and a meaning hint side by side. But for 致 zhi4, the phonophore is the 至 (also zhi4) on the left, and for 到 dao4 the phonophore is the 刀 dao1 (in a special form) on the right; the 至 component is telling you the meaning. It's much more common to have the phonophore on the right.)
I agree that the structure of the characters, such as it is, can be very helpful in remembering how to pronounce them. But that doesn't speak to reading unfamiliar characters in any way. Some components are quite prolific as phonophores: 交 jiao, 方 fang, and 青 qing come to mind. You're not advised to assume that a character incorporating them is pronounced jiao （校，效，咬）, fang (旁), or qing (精，猜 [cai1!]), though.
The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write.
Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
I don't know if simplification has broken a great deal of the relationships, but it certainly has broken some.
Here is a specific example:
Traditional Chinese
車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident)
不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but)
Simplified Chinese
车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation)
不过 (same meaning/pronunciation)
Notice the 咼 in the Traditional 過 and 禍. This phonetic component gives you some indication that is is pronounced like "luo, huo, guo, wo".
In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively.
The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
But even in that case the relationships weren't completely broken. While 过 changed, 娲wa, 祸 huo，涡 wo，窝wo，锅 guo，蜗 wo，etc. still share the radical to the right, and 过 is a very common character, you shouldn't need to guess how to read it.
I found that simplified characters are much easier to learn than traditional, it is just that much simpler. Enough of the phonetic relations are still there (and some new phonetic relationships were created, I think), and memorizing the base characters is much easier. On top of that, memorizing the characters still requires a lot of practice writing them, and simplified saves enough time that its definitely worth it. For example, for the character for far: 远（yuan), its traditional is much more complicated: 遠. On top of that, a sound relationship is still there, and it is much simpler.
I studied three and a half years of traditional characters, switched to simplified when I went to China, and then started studying Japanese, which uses a mix. I definitely am glad I studied traditional characters, but I feel at least for me, they are much much harder to learn, but that could be different for different people.
Out of curiosity, have you tried learning both simplified and traditional?
Only traditional. My knowledge of simplified, and the debate in Chinese academia about their real value, actually stems from discussion with Chinese linguistic experts, but I have no personal experience with simplified Chinese myself, except casually.
Not Exactly. Phonetic radicals (like 丁 in 钉) represents the pronounciation in Early and Middle chinese, not modern. For example, 塊 contains 鬼, but their pronounciation in Mandarin are different.
indeed many western writing systems such as English or modern Greek capture an archaic pronunciation, which is basically the reason why they are difficult to learn even if they claim to use phonetic scripts.
Probably the worst western example for this would be French.
Spelling of French is based on the pronunciation of Old French (from ~900 years ago!) and sometimes mixed with spelling based on the original Latin word from which the modern French word derives (from ~2000 years ago).
AFAIK modern Greek orthography is not that bad, if you disregard the madness that polytonic script (which is solely based on how Greek was spoken/written in Antiquity) was used until the 80s.
It's not that easy. 灯 is pronounced "dang", not "ding". 汀 is "ting". Phonetic components only indicate "sounds like". And not all those examples you gave had the same tone.
Having phonetic components makes it easier (if you like cryptic crosswords), but not easy.
I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like).
But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun!
So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier.
Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word.
"Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar".
> Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool.
Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced? Not to mention the phonological rules that must be memorised, like how the ending of words are always devoiced (giving us fun conflicting transliterations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonoff%27s_theorem ).
To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness. I've found Hungarian spelling to be more regular, for example.
You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.
Well technically English has no rules mandating anything, since there is no central institute or authority for the language. Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.
Practically, rules that people 50 years ago would never break are routinely ignored now, there are a bunch of things that are grammatically correct but you wouldn't ever say, etc... If something is done one way practically all the time, it might as well be a "rule", whether it officially is or not. Makes no difference to the person who has to learn it.
But that doesn't mean that the rules for English orthography aren't insane. There are very few English sentences that can be read by sounding out letter after letter individually (no matter what sound you choose as the basis for each letter.)
There are rules. If you do not follow them, everybody speaking Russian would understand you, but you'll sound like a foreigner who learned Russian via books and had not enough exposure to real spoken language.
Hungarian is thankfully very regular when it comes to pronunciation, though the vowel harmony rules take some getting used to (but are very beautiful once you learn them). I also really enjoy the agglutinative aspects of the language and use of "post-positions" rather than prepositions.
My parents were both linguists in the military in the 80s, so when I had gotten to around 8 years old or so, they started trying to teach me Russian. Needless to say, it didn't stick, but I've recently been trying it again.
I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/...
And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed.
The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
Russian writing is seriously un-phonetic. Or, more precisely, Russian pronunciation very often departs from writing. Unstressed vowels are commonly interchanged, voiced and unvoiced consonants too, and rules for correctly writing ь and ъ are so badly known that mistakes can be commonly seen in materials coming from mass media and government offices.
for real. I briefly worked at a Russian news agency, where one guy's entire job was keeping track of the correct transliterations for people and places. I imagine the internet makes it somewhat easier now, but it's still a nightmare.
Seconded. I started learning Mandarin some years ago. The written language remained opaque for a very long time since you need to learn a rather long list of hanzi before you can read anything interesting. And there's little guarantee you'll be able to pronounce any of it anyway.
Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.
Well, when it comes to Arabic, the short vowels should be written out as accents of sorts. However, they are quite often missing in actual written text. However, even as a native Arabic speaker I will struggle with text written like that and it will take me a while to read it. That's because most Arabs(at least the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptians I've mostly been exposed to) do not speak the written Arabic. Rather, we speak a colloquial language that will differ from one region to another. These are visibly descended from the formal, written, Arabic but they are not at all the same language. They have many different words, a completely different grammar, and very different pronunciation. So as far as most Arabs I know, the written Arabic is pretty much yet another foreign language they learn rather than their native language. The similarity between the written and spoken is similar to the difference between say Latin and languages that were descended from it(such as French).
I actually thought his article was pretty terrible. It's a fun, casual read for a rant, but I wouldn't hold it as much evidence of anything.
"If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) "
Ha, German people told me the same thing about German when I was in Germany. Guess it depends who you ask. Grammatically, I think Mandarin is pretty simple. Pronouncing it and writing it is another story. Grammatically, I think Japanese is tougher than Chinese, writing is just as hard when using Chinese characters (maybe harder, because many kanji have different, dissimilar readings), but easier when using the kana, and the pronunciation is easy as can be. On another tangent, having sampled various metropolises, I think NY is actually very livable.
English, my native language, has plenty of bonkers exceptions.
Of course, every language has bonkers exceptions. But Chinese is actually quite bad. For example, if I tell you "mao mi", and you had never seen the characters before, you have about no chance to figure it out. Conversely, if I show you the characters, but you've never seen them before, you have absolutely no clue what character it is.
Sure, there are radicals. Don't count on them to tell you anything remotely useful. Sure, some characters do tell a proper story with their radicals, but it's laughable to count on them to tell you anything.
It's not properly hard until the verb system has all the necessities to fluently express every time-travel scenario. Also known as HG-hard. Most languages can only describe time-travel scenarios using related concepts - this is called HG-complete.
well, I guess some grammar is crucial to intelligibility, not necessarily the prescriptive grammar. When a lot of people make the same mistakes, they share a new code, new intelligibility expectations, a new grammar.
I think many people forget that when talking about how the newest generation mistreat their language, or whether foreigner's mistakes can be understood.
heck, sometimes it's funny when a native speaker tells me that I speak X very well (I don't), just because I use some prescriptive form correctly.
As someone who is french and has spent a year in Beijing learning chinese, I have to agree on what you said. French grammar must be the worst, I haven't run into a more difficult language at the moment, and I found chinese quite easy to learn.
It's easier to learn a language that uses a latin alphabet of course, but chinese has almost no grammar, it's so easy to build sentences in the language!
I don't think it's fair to say that chinese is a difficult language to learn when compared to other languages.
But yeah now we have pleco, nciku, sergemelnyks, mgdb...
Shameless plug: I just released Eight Brains as an iPhone Chinese dictionary targeted at new Chinese learners.
I do like the simplicity of the grammar, no conjugating, no adj/verb agreement, just naked words. But the simplicity it is compensated for with a variety of grammatical constructions: 要...了, 是...的, 挺...的, etc. (Simple grammar is summarized in the above-mentioned dictionary :)
I have discussed that article with David Moser and he highlights more or less the same differences between learning then and now as you do. He has also started writing an article about this (and some other things), but it isn't quite ready yet (although the draft looks very promising).
There are definitely huge differences between learning now and before the advent of smart phones (OCR, handwriting input, pop-up dictionaries). The number of free resources available online is also incredible! I try to contribute and write articles about learning Chinese (thanks for the mention) on http://www.hackingchinese.com
I think learning Chinese has been interesting at all levels, but for completely different reasons. In the beginning, I thought it was exotic and a bit cool, on the intermediate level, I found it fascinating to be able to start actually communicating with people and on the advanced level I've found that mastering Chinese really is a lifetime project. Naturally, I spend more and more time teaching and writing about Chinese, but I have a lot to learn myself and keep studying as much as I can.
I talked with Professor Moser before and his article happened to come up (it always seems to). He agrees with you about Chinese becoming more approachable.
Brendan O'Kane, a translator, said it pretty well: learning Chinese use to be a vocation, something you'd do for your entire life. That's no longer true, which is a good thing.
This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473
As someone who's been learning a bit of Mandarin the past few months, I agree—the essay hits on all the points as to why learning Chinese is challenging, but is unrelentingly pessimistic about it in a way that I think is unjustified.
In particular, it hits on the two biggest barriers to learning Chinese that I've noticed in my recent experience—the writing system, and the linguistic and cultural distance between the East and West. What it doesn't talk about is how, these days, things are much easier, especially with today's technology.
At about the same time I started learning Chinese, I finally bought myself a modern smartphone, and I've been thoroughly impressed at the features it has for Chinese. Using the phone's built-in pinyin keyboard, I don't have to remember how to draw out a character—I just need to know how to write the pinyin (which is a phonetic romanization of the character), and how to recognize it well enough to pick it out of a list. No more problems with writing notes. Using the drawing input mode, where I actually draw out the character on the touchscreen, renders his complaints about dictionary lookup moot, since I can just sketch the character and feed it into an online dictionary. Hell, recently I discovered the iPhone actually has voice recognition for Mandarin—if I know how to say a word but not write it, I can look up the written character by just saying it in a sentence into the microphone. And if I have the opposite problem, where I know the character but not the pronunciation, I just feed it into MDBG [3] or even Google Translate—Google's translations are not very accurate, but it'll give me the phonetic pinyin and let me listen to the Chinese text-to-speech as well.
And the issues with linguistic and cultural distance? That's harder to get around—you still have to make an effort to pick that stuff up. But these days, you have the internet. You might not know what something means, but you have at your fingertips a repository of all human knowledge and culture, from all around the world. For example: the audiobooks I've been learning from had a note about how you should never give a Chinese man a green hat, since that may imply you're sleeping with his wife. It didn't elaborate on that at all, but a quick Google search later and I found a blog post that explains (in English, no less) how that saying has its origins in an old folk tale.[0]
It's definitely harder than learning practically any other language. Tones can be tricky to get used to, learning the writing system at the same time is like learning two languages at once, one spoken, one written, and an unfamiliar character can be a showstopper for comprehension if you don't have a smartphone or dictionary handy. But it's doable, and some things in the language are actually easier than in Western languages—the grammar, for example, is much simpler, and you don't have to worry about conjugations, or even verb tense as much. Through a combination of Pimsleur audiobooks [1] that I checked out of the library for spoken Mandarin, Memrise [2] spaced repetition software for learning vocabulary and characters, MDBG [3] for looking up translations, and Google Translate for other, random stuff, I've been able to learn pretty well even with the limited time I spare to it. I'm not quite at the level where I can be conversational yet, but I can understand and speak enough that I feel I'd be able to stumble my way around adequately were I to travel to Shanghai tomorrow.
As a native Chinese speaker I read that article years ago when my English was just enough to read long articles like that. I found it so damn funny and with a great sense of humor (maybe a Chinese sense of humor). I don't understand why people think it's "unrelentingly pessimistic" that is "unjustified". I even recommended this to my friend who studies linguistics and teaches Chinese to foreigners.
I'm from Peking University and I don't really know "how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 'to sneeze'" either. I think it's a general problem in the era of computer and internet, as people input Chinese with pinyin, not with pen and ink. It's going to be interesting to see how Chinese evolve with modern technology.
Jump in a Beijing taxi and show the taxi driver the pinyin for the address you wish to go to instead of the Chinese characters. Report back on how well it works out for you.
Disregarding your question, which others have answered plenty well already, I find it funny that you refer to them as hieroglyphics, since actual Egyptian hieroglyphics ended up being discovered to be phonetic as well!
Some of the characters do actually encode sounds, typically in the right side of the character. However, the encoding is more like a memory aid than it is phonetical. 中 (zhong1), 钟 (zhong1), 种 (zhong3/zhong4); 艮 (gen3), 跟 (gen1) 根 (gen1), but 很 (hen3). And it doesn't always work: 立 (li4), 位 (wei4), 拉 (la1).
They are not hieroglyphs, you will see no pinyin publicaly in China. Many ignorant americans come to China having studied Pinyin and they fall flat on their face.
pretty close, except 神马 actually means Godly Horse, 神么actually means God? Not really funny when I explain it out, it's the typo and pronunciation variance that's kinda funny.
Well, since most audience here are non-Chinese speaking people, how about let's be clear. So in this context, "神马／神么" are Mandarin words, and I believe that people in HK speak Cantonese and don't usually use these Mandarin words.
On the other hand, IMHO, just IMHO, "God" being translated into Chinese(Cantonese) as "神" is not thoughtful as it introduces confusion.
I've been using pimsleur as well, was able to find a pdf transcript to use alongside, which i found helpful. Also, anki (SRS flashcard system) works really well. I found a language coach at italki.com that sends me lists of words in a word doc and spoken into mp3, which i convert into flashcard using this method: http://www.zhtoolkit.com/posts/2011/05/creating-audio-flashc... (a lot of work the first time, about 5 minutes for 30 words the times after that).
> Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates.
I'm quite glad that the Chinese of the late 19th/early 20th century often took the Japanese approach of coining semantically meaningful neologisms, rather than trying to transliterate everything.
Wait, the Japanese didn't just transliterate everything? I remember talking with a friend who was learning Japanese and a lot of the words were taken straight from English, like "antena" or "furaipan" (frying pan).
In modern (broadly speaking, postwar) Japanese, yes. However, during the Meiji era vast numbers of neologisms were minted from Chinese roots, and funnily enough, quite a few of them were imported straight back into Chinese! These include some amazingly common words like 文化 "culture", 革命 "revolution", 歴史 "history", etc.
Fascinating. Do you know why Japanese moved towards using words transliterated from English in the postwar period? Was it a consequence of the American occupation?
The American occupation is not the primary cause of E->J or J->E linguistic flow. There exist many transliterated words from English and other languages in the pre-war era (e.g. albrech, from German for "work", became arubaito, for part-time job). There are large numbers of English-origin words or coinages dating to before, during, and after the war, with measurable acceleration after the Period of Rapid Economic Growth.
Incidentally, my tiptoe-around-this-when-in-Japan-because-it-incenses-nationalists opinion as a linguist is that modern Japanese incorporates by reference large portions of English. "Happy" is, for example, a word in modern Japanese. Not the transliteration -- though that is a word, too -- but "happy", itself, written exactly like that. "Happy" is comprehensible to substantially all speakers of the language and appears in many document corpora so frequently that it cannot be excluded from the Japanese language by any rational criterion. There's another few thousand words which superficially resemble English in modern Japanese. (There are also, of course, minimally a few dozen Japanese loanwords in English.)
Cause, no, but definitely the turning point in the tide. Before and during the nationalist fervor of the war, there was a bit of a movement to purge Japanese of foreign loans (敵性語 "enemy language"), similar to sauerkraut turning into "liberty cabbage" etc in the US. Once the war ended, this was swiftly reversed and the floodgates to importing foreign terminology wholesale (re)opened.
China wasn't an "enemy", the Japanese had already conquered large swathes of it. The US and Britain were.
And yes, you can write "pure" yamatokotoba if you try hard enough (see eg. Shinto prayers), but the end result is as contrived as trying to write English without Latin, Greek or French loans.
Uncleftish Beholding (1989) is a short text written by Poul Anderson. It is written using almost exclusively words of Germanic origin, and was intended to illustrate what the English language might look like if it had not received its considerable number of loanwords from other languages, particularly Latin, Greek and French.
The Japanese loanwords in english that are not japanese cultural terms (like sushi, harakiri, etc.) or botanical (shiitake, kudzu) are few. The ones I can think of are: Honcho. Hunky-Dory (of apocryphally valid etymology). Kaizen. Tycoon. Tsunami. Bokeh. I'm glad that Karoshi hasn't made it into english yet.
I don't know if you got caught by autocorrect or something, but the German word for "work" is Arbeit. (Which would indeed transliterate into arubaito.)
Probably because America became a worldwide technological (and cultural) force. In Japanese, importing from the Europeans began in the 16th century, from the Portugese (Tabaco, Pan). It's much easier to import loanwords into a language that already has a tradition of bringing words into the language (wholesale, in the case of chinese->japanese) than one that is used to sandbagging the language against outside influence. Witness the difference between French and English (to the extreme case of French-Canadian, where they even made Arret signs, even though Stop is a perfectly good French imperative, and stop signs in france say "stop").
I don't have any references for you, but I can think of a few off the top of my head. As an example, a lot of technological words are compounds containing the 电 (diàn) character, meaning "electricity":
电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television
电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie
电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer
Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be:
火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train
Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.
The literalness of these words may look strange to native English speakers, but they're not too different from their own language, or from other highly literal languages.
"Television" to borrow from the list above is a literal word in English ... if you happen to know Latin, as it's comprised of the words for "far" or "distant" and "seeing". The German (one of those pesky literal languages I had in mind) is "Ferhnsehen", combining the words for "distant" and "seeing". I remember hearing the word "Mehrheit" in a German broadcast, not knowing it, but thinking "Hrm.... 'moreness' -- that probably means "majority" or something like that. It does.
"Movie" is a shortening of "moving picture". Earlier in the technology development path were shadow lanterns and similar slide or silhouette projectors.
"Computers" (a term transferred from those who computed to the machines they used" are also know as "electronic brains" or "thinking machines".
Trains were often called "iron horses", a term sometimes applied to motorcycles (motor + bicycle -> two wheels) today.
The literalness of English is obscured by the many different language roots and influences from which its words are derived: Old German, Celtic, Norse, French, Latin, Greek....
Another example which I found fascinating was the contribution of Arabic to Spanish. The Alhambra comes from the Arabic "Al Hambra", or "the red", for the read clay of the region. From a time when the Arabic Moors controlled much of present-day Spain.
Another fascinating bit of linguistic lore I only learned recently: the Basque language, unrelated to any others in Europe, may be a relic of the Cro-Magnon people. This was an earlier race of humans who occupied parts of Europe and North Africa ~40,000 years ago. Further linguistic analysis (and genetics) have shown relationships with language fragments in North Africa:
Generally, modern Cro-Magnon people can be found in certain parts of Western Europe, North Africa and some of the Atlantic Islands today. Physical anthropologists agree that Cro-Magnon is represented in modern times by the Berber and Tuareg peoples of North Africa, the all but extinct Guanches of the Canary Isles, the Basques of northern Spain, the Aquitanians living in the Dordogne Valley and the Bretons of Brittany; and until lately, those living on the Isle d'Oleron. (Howells, 1967; Lundman, 1977; Hiernaux, 1975, et al.)—this indicated by obviously Cro-Magnoid skulls.
There are other cases of language showing the dispersal and/or subjugation of tribes elsewhere: Jared Diamond includes linguistic evidence showing the sweep of tribes through Africa, and later of words introduced via colonization. Pre-Han populations in China and Taiwan leave traces through language, as do the Roma people, who migrated from present-day India to southeaster Europe.
Yes, I agree. The comparison I like to use as an example is to the word "airport"—it's a port for things in the air, even if you don't think of it that way. It's the kind of thing that language learners and non-native speakers pick up on easier than native speakers, I think, since native speakers are so much more used to these words.
You'll also often find that a regional port authority is responsible for both seaports and airports in a given region.
And while the structure of an airport terminal isn't quite the same as a set of finger quays for a port, there's a certain similarity between the two structures. Both are interfaces, designed for craft to approach closely and transfer cargos to/from the port. They're characterized by a highly crenelated boundary to allow for maximal surface area and transfer region.
Oh, I know they use such compounds, but I meant more like the history of the idea forming in the 19th/20th century, and China moving towards the Japanese model of doing so as the commenter claimed.
I'm a Chinese. According to my knowledge, most modern compound words are directly taken from Japanese (since we share lots of characters), who borrowed those words from classical Chinese. Many words like 选举 政治 数学 etc. are actually from classical Chinese articles.
Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words.
Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me.
That sounds about right. We abbreviate whatever we can if ideas become awkward.
For example, in the US military, there are a lot of concepts that are clumsy to say - for example, it's pretty silly to refer to the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization Program seventy times when you're talking about why you need to change a safety protocol, so you just refer to it as the NATOPS. All of these concepts get abbreviated - Physical Fitness Test becomes PFT, Non-Judicial Punishment becomes NJP, Then people turn these into verbs, (Bill got NJP'd yesterday) and those get abbreviated as well, and pretty soon you end up with a totally new language that no one else can understand. I told this story to my girlfriend without even knowing that I was doing it:
"[Name] got caught pencil-whipping a PM on the radar. Top wanted to fix him with "EMI," but the OIC wanted him to burn, so it went to the CO for NJP. The CO is a pilot, so he maxed him out - took his pay, 45/45, reduction to PFC. Then, the SMaj told him he looked fat, so he got sent over to the S3 to weigh in. He's over, and he didn't tape out, so now he's on BCP, too! He's gonna get adsep'd if he keeps going the way he is."
My girlfriend started laughing at me, told me to repeat it, and laughed again. I realized that I was basically speaking another language, and then quickly realized that a bunch of the things I was talking about were alien to her anyway! This 90-second story became a thirty-minute discussion of what exactly "taping out" is, why Extra Military Instruction is a sarcastic term for "told to weed the desert for twelve hours," and what's so bad about the Body Composition Program. All of these concepts have been put into my brain from years of living with them, and describing them to someone else is often really difficult.
The tech world does the exact same thing. So does medicine, laboratory science, theater, band... We all have our own languages, created by common experiences and a need to communicate them to other people.
Exactly! Imagine to put those military people on an island and let them evolve more than 4000 years, then their vocabulary will be very different from nowadays American English.
Compound words in Chinese is something like that. But the good news is: each character in Chinese has its own meaning. So you can sort of guess what's the meaning of words if you know the meaning(s) of the characters.
However, except those compound words, there are lot of common expressions, which we call them 成语, which uses historical stories, poetries and you may never know what people are talking about if they use such expressions (people use them a lot and it is considered as a sign of higher education if they can use those expressions correctly and frequently.)
The problem with Chinese characters is that they are idiosyncratic. For example, I orally tell you "mao mi": how do you write it? If you've never seen it before, your chances of figuring this out is very sad.
You claim that 90% of Chinese writing are phonographs. Perhaps this is true to the most technical sense, but to most students this is useless. Try taking that 90% claim into a Chinese language test at university. The teacher will laugh at you as you arrogantly think you can decipher the phonetics of characters just because you know the "radicals". There is absolutely no reliable system for translating radicals to character phonetics, because it's all just so messy and hit and miss.
I once did a little project where I looked for phonetic components of about 20,000 characters. More than 90% had a phonetic component, but most of those characters are extremely rare.
In the first 300 characters a learner would study, there were about 5 characters with phonetic components. Phonetics don't really start to make a difference until about 2000 characters in.
"Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months"
That is impressive. I took two years of Chinese in college and did not get anywhere close to that ability. How many hours a day did you practice Chinese during that 10 months?
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.