Back in the 80s, I asked Suzanne, a French student in her 70s doing a part-time BA degree in Chinese, why she'd chosen Chinese and not some other European language. Her answer: "Some other European language??! I'll master it in five years, and then what do I do with my time?!? I've chosen Chinese because it is a life-long pursuit." Maybe the term caveat emptor was coined with learning Chinese in mind?
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I would be interested in knowing if you think this is a relative fact, or if Chinese is just more difficult than European languages in absolute terms. In other words, would a similar statement be likely by a Chinese ("I could learn another Asian language in 5 years, but a European language is a life-long pursuit")?
ReplyDeleteI think you are in a good position to answer this because Chinese is your mother tongue and English is your first language (did I get that right?)
The Chinese have their own difficulties learning English, which I will use as an example, for I don’t know any European languages.
ReplyDeleteI need to provide a caveat here: these are my own observations and don’t necessarily represent the views/experiences of all Chinese speakers learning a Western language. Also, I’m not purporting to be an expert on the difficulties encountered by Chinese people in their learning of a European language.
Difficulty A: articles. This is a problem shared by Slavic speakers, I understand, and presents an ongoing hurdle.
Difficulty B: plurals. What is confusing is the inconsistency (or perversion) in having singular nouns with verbs ending in “s”, but not for plural nouns (e.g., the girl shops, the girls shop). Why not just “the girl shop” and “the girls shops”—“s” for both or neither.
Difficulty C: finals. I have heard Chinese people saying: “Chinee langui” because their own language doesn’t have “s” endings or soft “g” endings, just to use two examples. A Japanese friend’s tongue got into quite a twist when he tried to say “sixth thousand” (person or something), and it came out almost spoonerismly, as “thicks sao-thern”. Cantonese has glottal stops (p, t, k), but only glottal, not explicitly articulated. I also heard someone (who shall remain unidentified even by nationality) saying, “No, you can’t do that. They’ll fine out, then they’ll fine you.” She’d meant to say, “They’ll find out, then they’ll fine you.” Notice the lack of the soft “d” ending for “find”.
Is Chinese more difficult than European languages in absolute terms? My immediate thought would be: yes -- the script, for one; the tones, for another. More later maybe, when I have time to ponder further.
ReplyDeleteHaving studied Russian before and now attempting to learn some Chinese, I can say that Chinese is more difficult for me to pronounce, and of course more difficult to write, but I think the Russian grammar is more difficult. Chinese does not seem to have very complex verb forms and it doesn't have declensions like in Russian (or German or Latin). Also, in Russian each noun must be either masculine, or feminine, or neutral, and all adjectives must be modified according to the gender of the noun. This is actually the same in Italian, except that there are no neutral nouns.
ReplyDeleteBut having said all that, for me learning complex grammar is something I can imagine being able to do, with enough time and good will, and the same for learning to read or write Chinese characters. But learning to pronounce Chinese is at higher level of difficulty, the type of thing I cannot imagine ever being able to do.
My personal feeling is that the aspect that makes Chinese so difficult for European learners is the lack of commonality between the languages. For an English speaker trying to learn a language like French for instance(not that I actually know much French), you already know quite a few words of the language because they are used as loan words in English. Also the alphabet the same although the pronunciation is a little different.
ReplyDeleteMy impression from what I learned from Korean and what other people have said is that it is much easier to learn another language in the Chinese/Japanese/Korean group if you already know one because of some of the common roots. The Chinese Characters were common to all of these languages historically, and, even in Korea where they seldom use the Chinese Characters any more, a huge amount of their vocabulary comes from Chinese words.
As for my experience learning Chinese, I think still the hardest problem is being able to hear and pronounce the tones correctly - since our brains have been trained to ignore these differences, but I think it will come over time. Some aspects are much easier than Korean for instance.
Though Korean doesn't have different tones, I still struggled to hear the differences in their sounds. Pinyin is a lot more consistent than the Korean Romanization standards (which have been revised several times and lead to many places being written with alternative spellings - eg. Kangnam, Gangnam - a district in Seoul). It is also much easier to distinguish Chinese words due to the lack of conjugation of verbs (both in spoken and written forms). In Korean, for instance, the dictionary will give the verb to eat as Mokda* - but you'll almost never hear that spoken because it will at minimum have one of the polite endings conjugated - e.g. Mogaseeyo or future tense or other conjugations. In contrast the Chinese word is always 吃（chi) .
The Chinese script, although much more time consuming to learn than an alphabet, is not so difficult if you consider it in terms of actually learning the vocabulary - since if you don't know the word (ajoaika**) you're no better off than if you saw some Chinese character that you don't know - in both cases you would be fumbling through a dictionary - ok it is a little easier to use a dictionary with an alphabet - but once you've learnt the way chinese dictionaries work it isn't impossible. Also technology is really helping these days, as I can fairly effectively look up characters i don't know by inputting the strokes into my dictionary on my mobile phone (also handwriting recognition is available for you to draw the strokes - and even photo recognition on some devices)
In contrast I found, in many cases, that I could not even look up Korean words I did not know because of the conjugations - and the dictionary only had the root word.
*because the romanization is quite imprecise, I quickly stopped using the roman alphabet forms and only using the Korean alphabet - so my transcriptions here may be a little off - but hopefully enough to get the idea
** ajoaika - turns out to be a Finnish word, but that is not the point - i just wanted a word that most readers would not recognise :)
Wow, Kevin, your comments should be enough for Valerio to mull over -- for another week or two...
ReplyDeleteA lot longer, though, for me, as you've raised so many interesting points to respond to.