![\"Why](\"https:\/\/www.saporedicina.com\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/whylearningchineseishard.jpg\" "\\"Why")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In a previous article, (Why is English so hard for Chinese people?<\/a>), we went over the numerous depressing reasons why Chinese students have such profound difficulty learning English; too many new words and sounds, the concept of tenses, nonsensical rules, an education system stacked against them from the word go, and so on. <\/p>\n It was kind of a bummer. I\u2019d fully understand if you were hoping for a slightly more uplifting part two.<\/p>\n Well\u2026 keep hoping.<\/p>\n Today, we\u2019ll be discussing why Chinese is so difficult; not just for native English speakers, but for pretty much anyone who hasn\u2019t been studying it since birth. This article obviously applies to an infinitely smaller demographic \u2013 you may recall that President Obama declared the goal of having 1,000,000 American students of Mandarin by 2020, while China births roughly ten times that number of soon-to-be English students every year. <\/p>\n That being said, decent Mandarin programs are growing rapidly<\/a> in the West; so let me go ahead and ruin the hopes and dreams of every aspiring student.<\/p>\n Disclaimer<\/em>: I\u2019m just going to say \u201cChinese\u201d from now on. Since at no point in this article will I be discussing Cantonese or Shanghainese or any other languages in China, I hope you will forgive this generalization.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Chinese has something of a reputation for sounding \u2013 to put it charitably \u2013 a little goofy. I know we\u2019re all trying our best to stop being racist jerks, but let\u2019s not let stereotypes and ugly history get in the way of acknowledging facts; Chinese and other tonal languages<\/a> sound objectively weird to native speakers of a non-tonal language, and vice-versa. <\/p>\n I\u2019m not saying it can\u2019t sound beautiful or that you can\u2019t respect it \u2013 calm down, comments section \u2013 but if you\u2019re telling me you didn\u2019t chuckle the first time a Chinese teacher made you chant \u201cm\u0101, m\u00e1, m\u01ce, m\u00e0,\u201d then you are going to Hell, because you are a big fat liar. <\/p>\n There are four tones in Chinese and the best description of them I\u2019ve ever heard is that they\u2019re like an airplane: first tone is taxiing, second tone is taking off, third tone is turbulence, and fourth tone is landing. <\/p>\n The first and fourth tones are easy enough: the first is like singing the word on a single note and the fourth is a downward emphasis. Learning to distinguish between the second and the third tone is where the headache really starts; the second tone is purely an upward sound, like a confused \u201ceh?\u201d whereas the third is a scoop down and then back up. And of course, every tonal version of any given syllable has a different (sometimes radically different) meaning.<\/p>\n Even if you\u2019ve never been to China or taken a Chinese class in your life, you\u2019ve probably heard an anecdote or joke about someone accidentally saying something offensive in Chinese. <\/p>\n Just for example, the syllable for \u201cgrass\u201d (cao) is just a single tone change away from meaning f@#k, and the word for \u201chorse\u201d (ma) is one tone away from meaning \u201cmother.\u201d I\u2019ll just leave that there and let you contemplate how quickly a simple sentence about a horse eating grass could go very, very wrong.<\/p>\n Given that we can\u2019t jump inside other people\u2019s heads just yet, it\u2019s pretty much impossible to fully understand how differently we and Chinese people hear these tones. Thankfully, science can jump inside other people\u2019s heads, and research shows that our brains light up in entirely different ways when processing tonal languages. <\/p>\n In Western languages (again, I\u2019m going to over-generalize), \u201ctones\u201d are just our way of emphasizing and adding emotion, but in Chinese, they have the power to determine meaning. <\/p>\n You may smirk \u2013 and let\u2019s be honest, I certainly do \u2013 when a Chinese person earnestly explains that no, the \u201cm\u01ce\u201d that means \u201chorse\u201d is totally a different sound from the \u201cm\u00e1\u201d that means \u201chemp\u201d, which is in turn entirely different from the \u201cm\u00e0\u201d that means to curse or swear; but to that person\u2019s ears, those words really do sound totally different without them needing any time to think about it. And unfortunately for your linguistic aspirations, nothing short of a childhood immersed in Chinese can program your brain like that.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, your problems are just beginning, because\u2026<\/p>\n Ready for the headache to become a migraine? Sure, those all-important tones differentiate between different meanings\u2026 except when they don\u2019t. The first tone version of the word \u201cshan\u201d, for example, means \u201cmountain\u201d (\u5c71); but it also means \u201cfan\u201d (\u717d) and the \u201csmell of mutton\u201d (\u81bb), because why not? <\/p>\n The reality is, any given conversation in Chinese is going to be chock-full of identical or nearly-identical sounds that could mean a dozen other things but just mean one specific thing in this and only this context. <\/p>\n Concrete daily life example: go order a beer, and the waiter will likely ask if you want a chilled (\u51c9) one. That word is pronounced li\u00e1ng. Second tone. Remember how close second and third tones are? Well, you know what\u2019s pronounced li\u01ceng (third tone)? \u4e24: the word for two of something. <\/p>\n So if you\u2019re asking for three cold beers and the waiter says, oh, do you want li\u00e1ng de (cold ones), you might quite justifiably interpret that as li\u01ceng ge (two of them) and shake your head no. Now you\u2019ve got warm beers, angry friends, and a very confused waiter. <\/p>\n Thanks a bunch, Chinese.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s one of my personal favorites: the word for paper is \u7eb8 and the word for point is \u6307, but they are pronounced exactly the same way: \u201czh\u01d0.\u201d So if you want to tell a student to point at a piece of paper, things get real confusing real fast. If you also want to tell them to only (\u53ea\/zh\u01d0) point (\u6307\/zh\u01d0) at the paper (\u7eb8\/zh\u01d0) and touching the paper is forbidden (\u7981\u6b62\/j\u00ecnzh\u01d0), things can move pretty quickly from *migraine* to *epic clusterf@#k* territory. <\/p>\n Still not convinced? Here, have some more: <\/p>\n Think I\u2019m just cherry-picking the most extreme examples? Think again \u2013 that\u2019s what Chinese\u2019s (admittedly pretty awesome) tongue-twisters are for. Take a gander at this:<\/p>\n \u56db\u662f\u56db\uff0c\u5341\u662f\u5341\uff0c\u5341\u56db\u662f\u5341\u56db\uff0c\u56db\u5341\u662f\u56db\u5341\uff0c\u56db\u5341\u56db\u662f\u56db\u5341\u56db\uff0c\u56db\u5341\u56db\u53ea\u72ee\u5b50\u6b7b\u4e86\u3002<\/p>\n All together, it means: \u201c4 is 4, 10 is 10, 14 is 14, 40 is 40, 44 is 44, 44 lions died.\u201d Here\u2019s how you say it: <\/p>\n \u201cs\u00ec sh\u00ec s\u00ec, sh\u00ed sh\u00ec sh\u00ed, sh\u00eds\u00ec sh\u00ec sh\u00eds\u00ec, s\u00ecsh\u00ed sh\u00ec s\u00ecsh\u00ed, s\u00ecsh\u00eds\u00ec sh\u00ec s\u00ecsh\u00eds\u00ec, s\u00ecsh\u00eds\u00ec zh\u01d0 sh\u012bzi s\u01d0le.\u201d<\/p>\n For bonus migraine points, head to the south of China, where many people don\u2019t really distinguish between \u201cs\u201d and \u201csh,\u201d meaning that an already demonic sentence becomes \u2013 almost literally \u2013 just pure hissing. <\/p>\n So if your cab driver happens to be southern, you\u2019d best hope there aren\u2019t any 4\u2019s in your fare. <\/p>\n I can fill up an entire article or two just ranting about this, and in fact I already have<\/a>.<\/p>\n As usual, let\u2019s get the disclaimer out of the way: Chinese characters are amazing<\/a>. They are works of art on their own \u2013 provided I\u2019m not the one writing them \u2013 and it\u2019s mind-blowing the way all of these pictograms come together to form a working language that over a billion and a half people can use to fluently exchange ideas and information.<\/p>\n The problem is, they kinda don\u2019t. <\/p>\n Rather than go off on the kind of rant to which I so often subject my friends and family, let me break this down as coldly and rationally as possible (no promises). <\/p>\n First off, there\u2019s a different character for every word, including every tonal variant of the same syllable. This means that there are easily over 10,000 characters all sharing the same 412 basic sounds \u2013 1600ish counting different tones. <\/p>\n But, the characters have little to no phonetic connection to the words they represent, meaning that looking at one gives you next to no idea what it sounds like. A Chinese person (or insufferable abroad student) will emphatically tell you that no, the right-side portion of the character quite often tells you what it sounds like; these people are going to an even deeper rung of Hell than the \u201cChinese doesn\u2019t sound funny\u201d folks, because they are using a small truth to tell a big lie. <\/p>\n It is indeed true that certain portions of characters show up repeatedly in words sharing the same syllable: for example, \u9ad8 and \u641e and \u7a3f all use the syllable \u201cgao\u201d, and you\u2019ll notice that they all have that same little tower-looking thing. <\/p>\n But they also use different tones \u2013 and since you no doubt recall from earlier that different tones convey entirely different meanings and in fact are entirely different words, this is not nearly (read: at all) as helpful as one might hope. <\/p>\n Furthermore, those \u201cgao\u201d words are more the exception than the rule; often, the right side of the character gives more of a general hint of pronunciation than an actual syllable, and sometimes it doesn\u2019t give you a damn thing. <\/p>\n As for the meaning, that\u2019s even more hopeless. The left side of the character (the radical) generally gives some small hint as to the meaning, but they\u2019re so broadly applied that there\u2019s little to no chance that you could ever guess what any given character actually means if it\u2019s more complex than a basic elemental building block. <\/p>\n If you take a look at \u628a, \u6253, \u627e, \u63d0, \u62c9, \u62a5, and, you\u2019ll notice they all have the same left-side radical portion that means \u201chand.\u201d But, their respective meanings are \u201chold\/take\u201d, \u201chit\u201d, \u201cseek\u201d, \u201chold\/lift\u201d, \u201cpull\u201d, and \u201creport\u201d. <\/p>\n Yes, all those words can definitely be linked to one\u2019s hand \u2013 but that\u2019s the kind of thing that\u2019s interesting to someone who already knows the word, not someone trying to figure out what the word means. <\/p>\n Becoming competent \u2013 not a master, just fluent at a basic level \u2013 in the Chinese written language is, in essence, a full-time job that ends when you die. If you want to see how profound an impact the difficulty of written Chinese has on real life, look no further than the children:<\/p>\n An average 8-year old from a place that uses an alphabet can, in essence, write down his or her thoughts. They probably don\u2019t have a huge vocabulary or advanced creative writing skills \u2013 but they can communicate with a pencil. <\/p>\n If little Timmy is depressed over the lack of sugary treats in the house, he can stick a note on the fridge that says: \u201cMom, pleez buy candee.\u201d If he wants his teacher to know that his canine companion took a chunk out of his math assignment, he can scribble \u201csorry! dog tryed eat my homewurk\u201d on the side of the page. <\/p>\n If he wants to ask his parents if he can stay a bit longer at a friend\u2019s house, he can text \u201ccan I hav dinnr at johns hause?\u201d All of those sentences are imperfect, yet perfectly understandable means of communicating ideas. <\/p>\n On the flip side, even an exceptionally bright and exceedingly privileged Chinese 8-year old can barely communicate a thing using characters. When teaching, I used to write the Chinese meaning next to difficult English words, thinking that would be a good way to simultaneously improve the kids\u2019 notes and my terrible Chinese handwriting. <\/p>\n This practice came to a screeching halt when I realized that most of the kids couldn\u2019t write most of the Chinese words and would spend the next 5 minutes ignoring me and trying to copy the character from the board. <\/p>\n Excepting the simplest of situations, you simply can\u2019t *guess* and *misspell* a character in a way that would still be safely understandable the way you can with an alphabet-based language; so if someone doesn\u2019t remember how to write a given character, it simply doesn\u2019t get written. (note: the age of smartphones and good pinyin input keyboards is the only reason someone like me is capable of communicating in written Chinese). <\/p>\n We\u2019re not talking crazy obscure words here, either; characters don\u2019t accommodatingly scale up in difficulty as their meanings become more obscure. Candy looks like this: \u7cd6. Mouse: \u9f20. Cheat: \u4f5c\u5f0a. Eagle: \u9e70. Win: \u8d62. <\/p>\n And before you misinterpret this as some kind of judgment of Chinese children or even the Chinese education system, be honest: could you write any of those from memory with a few days or even weeks of practice? How about hundreds of them? Thousands? <\/p>\n Could your 8-year-old? Now imagine trying to START learning this writing system as a (probably hungover) 18-year-old just trying to fulfill your language credit. Not surprisingly, Chinese classes don\u2019t exactly have great retention rates between beginner and intermediate\u2026<\/p>\n Now take your head out of the oven, cause we\u2019re not done just yet. <\/p>\n Before I dive in and start offending everyone (or continue to do so), here are a few basic facts that can be confirmed by any reliable source on Chinese demographics and\/or common sense: <\/p>\n Ok, let\u2019s do this:<\/p>\n Hardly anyone in China will ever believe that you can speak Chinese, sometimes even after hearing you speak Chinese. <\/p>\n As anyone who\u2019s ever studied a second language knows, taking your first steps in actual communication with native speakers can be terrifying for even the most outgoing of people, and \u2013 there\u2019s really no way to sugarcoat this \u2013 China makes those baby steps about as awful as they have the potential to be. <\/p>\n I was lucky enough to study with kindly \u2013 well, understanding \u2013 teachers back in the States, but I can\u2019t tell you how many friends I\u2019ve watched try out their first words of Chinese here in Beijing to sad yet predictable results. <\/p>\n Here\u2019s a typical example:<\/p>\n A: N\u01d0 sh\u00ec n\u01ce gu\u00f3r\u00e9n? Where are you from?<\/p>\n B: W\u01d2 sh\u00ec m\u00e9igu\u00f3r\u00e9.n I\u2019m American (makes the small mistake of 2nd instead of 3rd tone on the mei\u201d syllable in \u201cAmerica,\u201d but completely understandable if you think about it for even a second). <\/p>\n A: Sh\u00e9nme? M\u00e9i gu\u00f3? Sh\u00e9nme gu\u00f3ji\u0101? Sh\u00e9nme y\u00ecsi? Zh\u00e8ge l\u01ceow\u00e0i shu\u014d sh\u00e9nme, w\u01d2 t\u012bng b\u00f9 d\u01d2ng\u2026 What? meiguo? what country? what does that mean? what is the foreigner saying, I don\u2019t understand\u2026<\/p>\n Me: CONTEXT, MOTHERF@#KER. CAN YOU USE IT?<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t limited to terrified beginners, either. I can\u2019t tell you how many conversations I\u2019ve had completely derailed because after five minutes of perfectly adequate communication, I screwed up one word and hit the factory reset level of \u201cWHAT, WHAT IS THE FOREIGNER SAYING?\u201d <\/p>\n If we in America tend to be too condescending about sloooowwwwwwwly and very loudly talking to someone with a heavy accent, the Chinese are at the far opposite end of the spectrum. Ironically, even though everyone assumes you\u2019re incapable of using their language, absolutely no one will give you even the tiniest bit of slack. <\/p>\n It all comes down to your white\/black\/Un-Chinese face, really; a lifetime of almost never hearing your language come out of a different-looking person\u2019s mouth is clearly a powerful primer. <\/p>\n It\u2019s not like there\u2019s some genetic Chinese disposition towards racism \u2013 an idea that would itself be pretty damn racist \u2013 there\u2019s just a lifetime of (lack of) experience that needs be overcome when starting a conversation with a Chinese person you\u2019ve never met. <\/p>\n But even once you have plenty of wonderful Chinese friends who are happy to practice with you, good luck with the folks back home\u2026<\/p>\n If you read the previous article about why English is so hard for Chinese people \u2013 thanks, dedicated reader! \u2013 you already know that one of the biggest stumbling blocks they face is their education system basically setting them up to fail. <\/p>\n Everyone is forced to study English from a young age; yet no one is given an opportunity to practice real-life communication skills.<\/p>\n Our education system, on the other hand, doesn\u2019t set up a damn thing one way or another. Practically every serious student of Chinese I\u2019ve ever met started out the same way: they picked an interesting language credit in high school or college and got sucked in by some combination of genuine enthusiasm and the sunk cost fallacy (i.e. \u201cI\u2019ve already wasted 1000 hours of my life copying \u4e2d\u56fd\u4e2d\u56fd\u4e2d\u56fd\u4e2d\u56fd, I can\u2019t stop now\u201d). <\/p>\n Even in top American schools, the kids who take and stick with Chinese classes just seem kinda weird. I can\u2019t speak for non-English-speaking countries, but when your native language is already dominating the globe, pouring countless hours into learning one of the hardest languages on earth can definitely come across a bit kooky. <\/p>\n By the time I was a senior in college, I could count the number of friends who were serious about Chinese \u2013 not really including myself at that point \u2013 on one hand. If you think I\u2019ve been too hard on China in this article (or all of my articles), let me end on a distinctly pro-China note: they\u2019ve realized that learning the most important language on Earth is, you know, important. <\/p>\n We in the *West* never shut up about how China is on the rise, how China\u2019s going to take over the world, how everything is made in China, how there are billions of Chinese people; despite all that, we still don\u2019t seem to have any collective interest in producing serious numbers of fluent Chinese speakers. <\/p>\n I mean, we use \u201cChinese\u201d as the stand-in word for something utterly incomprehensible, i.e \u201cit\u2019s like you\u2019re speaking Chinese to me.\u201d Even in our biggest-budget movies and TV shows, we can\u2019t get halfway decent-sounding lines of Chinese dialogue coming out of characters who are supposed to be geniuses. <\/p>\n In our schools, a second language is rarely a serious requirement until high school, and you\u2019ll have an easier time finding all-organic cafeterias\/amazing water polo teams\/a dedicated studio art building on your college hunt than you will a decent Chinese program. So if you are going to pursue Chinese seriously, be prepared to take the initiative and spend a whole lot of time feeling like a time-wasting moron (I still do, generally speaking).<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve stuck with me through both parts of this, here\u2019s the overly-generalized bottom line: English is really hard and makes no sense. Chinese is also really hard and makes no sense. The Chinese force everyone to try to learn<\/a> English but have no idea how to get real results. We don\u2019t even try to make anyone learn Chinese<\/a>, and thus get no real results. <\/p>\n But we\u2019re all improving.<\/strong> <\/p>\n \u2026really, really, really slowly. <\/p>\n Photo Credits: In a previous article, (Why is English so hard for Chinese people?), we went over the numerous depressing reasons why Chinese students have such profound difficulty learning English; too many new words and sounds, the concept of tenses, nonsensical rules, an education system stacked against them from the word go, and so on. It was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":13459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[390,66],"class_list":["post-13456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-learning-chinese","tag-learn-chinese-sidebar","tag-learn-chinese"],"yoast_head":"\nProblem 1: You Can\u2019t Handle The Tones<\/h2>\n
Problem 2: Not enough words and sounds means EVERYTHING is contextual (and you don\u2019t have the context)<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n
Problem 3: Phoneticizations and \u201cChinglish\u201d<\/h2>\n
Problems 4-1000: The f@#king writing system<\/h2>\n
Problem 1001: Racism and double standards<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Problem 1002: You\u2019re a lone weirdo<\/h2>\n
![\"Creative](\"https:\/\/www.saporedicina.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/icon\/cc.png\")
<\/a> Flag<\/a> by thepismire<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"