Chinese the most Difficult… (and 3)
Written by Julen Madariaga on November 24th, 2009In the first two posts of this series, we saw that Chinese is the last language in the World to maintain a complete set of independent vocabulary roots and a non-phonetic script to represent them, what we might call a separate Word System. For this reason I argued that Chinese may be the most difficult language to obtain full fluency, regardless of the linguistic background of the student.
But there are more interesting implications than the mere difficulty of the language, in particular cultural and political ones. Because the refusal to use loans and phonetic script is the result of conscious decisions. There is nothing in the language itself that forbids import of foreign words or use of an alphabet, indeed, there are already some exceptions of direct loans in current use that are written in latin letters, such as DVD or KTV.
Chinese has a parallel Word System diverging from the rest of the World, and the government has an active role in the maintenance of this system. However, this policy is not unilaterally imposed from above. It is certainly encouraged by the education system, but Chinese speakers seem to follow it naturally and often prefer Chinese roots even when not supervised. This is in contrast with the situation in many countries where the system tries to protect local terms, only to find that people still prefer “email” to “courier electronique”.
Anyone living in China long enough realizes how aware Chinese are of their long history and their status as a different civilization. This discourse is irritating for Westerners, because it reminds too much of ultra-nationalistic creeds back home. But it has one essential difference with those creeds: in the case of China, it is true. As we said before, China is justified to see itself as a cradle of civilization, and it is the only such culture that has survived practically independent from World mainstream till modern times. This cultural awareness is the main reason for the preservation of the language as we know it, surviving different regimes and even periods of chaos.
When we study Chinese we are not merely learning another language, we are learning the words of a parallel World, the last independent system of vocabulary and writing that humanity still has. It is the most similar experience available on Earth to learning the language of another planet. If Chinese is really so hard to learn, this should provide enough motivation for anyone to try it.
Political considerations
Mandarin is not in itself a very difficult language, what makes it hard is its complex Word System, which is for the most part not essential (that is, the language could still exist with loans and an alphabet). This System makes it hard for foreigners and Chinese to communicate, and it is a serious obstacle in the education of the Chinese. In the last century, development has been the main priority of China in order to recover her past glory, and inefficient relics have been torn down without blinking, just like the Walls of Beijing. Chinese words and characters are the last of those obstructive monuments to remain, and by far the oldest of all. It is a miracle that they have survived till today.
The invention of convenient methods to input characters on a keyboard has made the future of the characters seem more secure, but their permanence is by no means ensured. Many famous linguists have argued for the use of pinyin as main written language and elimination of the characters from daily life, not least of them Lu Xun, or the late John de Francis. Much as I admire these men and their work, I am completely opposed to their position as a matter of principles. I don’t suppose anyone will believe me in this age of economists, even less in the China of the new philosophies, but I have this to say: Efficiency is not a supreme value. In fact, it is not even a value in itself, but just a means. And a sad means it would be to recover the greatness of China, if there were nothing left to recover.
I think it is clear to most Chinese today that their Word System is too precious to abandon it for the sake of efficiency. However, some reasonable concessions can be made which might ensure the very survival of the System in the long term. In particular, the acceptance of foreign loans for new technical words might facilitate the access of Chinese to foreign research and the incorporation of foreign talents when the real Chinese brain-drain starts in earnest. The complete acceptance of latin script to represent phonetically foreign Proper Nouns (which is already used informally) would also be a step towards efficiency without sacrificing the heart of the system, and would be of great help for all the Chinese trying to learn English.
Apart from the practical issues considered, no less important is the mentality underlying the Chinese Word System. The growing common vocabulary in all the languages in the World represents the recognition by most cultures that there is a large part of common human culture, and that, since this part is only going to become larger with the progress of technology, the sensible solution is to adopt a common language to communicate it. By deciding to stay apart from this system, the linguistic choice of China represents a stance opposed to the rest of the World, and in a certain way it perpetuates the traditional isolation of the Middle Kingdom even in the age of Global interconnection. The insularity of the Chinese internet community and the misunderstandings between cultures that have arisen from it are, to some extent, a consequence of this choice.
The part played by the language in China’s relations with the World is probably not of the first importance. But even today this part is not negligible, and with the advances in communications, nobody knows how vital it will become in the future. Ultimately, it is only up to the Chinese to decide what language they want for themselves. We can only wait and see, and hope that they find a way to stay connected with us, while preserving their unique heritage of Words.
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“Ultimately, it is only up to the Chinese to decide which language they want for themselves.”
i’d say, ahem, i expect more than that, because it almost sounds like:
Ultimately, it is only up to the Chinese to decide which political system they want for themselves.
except i just don’t get the connection here, maybe because of your effort to keep it simple
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Well, I am not sure I understand what you mean, I am not speaking of the political system at all, except in connection with the language. Your phrase: “Ultimately, it is only up to the Chinese to decide which political system they want for themselves” may be very true, but it is out of the scope of this post, why should I write it there?
I am afraid the post is not clear enough, must be the use of the word “system” to refer to vocabulary. I will edit a bit.
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safarinew Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
I guess you mean ‘political’ in a broad sense then, out of scope, definitely, but i expected you were going to ‘scope’ that somehow, becase, i thought about that too,i.e.political influences from a linguistic angle.
About ‘Word System’,it’s alse been in my thinking that why Chinese language can ‘loan’and ‘absorb’ so much instead of just ‘borrow’ from foreign languages like Japanese…I’ve studied Japanese for almost 2 years, i know it’ll be easier. Maybe it really is an “Attitude” or “Mentality” thing, i don’t know.But one thing i’m almost sure is that the danger of allerged isolation trend in a globlized world, if any,lies not in the language itself or anywhere near it, but somewhere else.
And i can honestly say, Chinese people don’t get to decide their languages, i mean, who do that? I’ve certaily forgot how i managed through the stikes and lines of these 2000+ charaters,but i’ll observe carefully when i have a chance. Like the observers in “Fringe”, then write it down…
why no alphabet
why no alphabet
why no alphabet…
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Uln Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Hey, I never said the “Chinese people”, but “the Chinese”. Of course, not everyone has the same power of decision. Mao, Qian Long or the body of Qing high level officials had much more influence in this than a simple laobaixing. But as a whole, it can be said that it is a decision of the Chinese.
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safarinew Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Thanks for reply.Glad.Still…
I simply don’t understand the concept of ‘deciding language’.Could you give an example of that, a person in power or a laobaixing? and”by deciding to stay apart from this system” eh, how so? and towards the ‘efficiency’ argument, what about twitter?Do you agree 140 汉字> 140 words?i’ve seen some english and some chinese papers,besides (yuo konw waht i’m tlaknig aobut), i still find reading chinese articles alot faster than english as a result of being,a more graphic language.I wonder what’s your experience, me being native you being not.:)
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Uln Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Hi safari. The most obvious example: Mao Zedong and the introduction of simplified characters in 56. Another obvious one is the Qin emperor. But those are only the 2 most well known examples, millions of other anonymous Chinese participated in the long process of “deciding” on the Chinese language.
Regarding the efficiency of characters, Twitter, and all that. It is a very interesting topic, and I will write about that soon. But it is a bit different to this post. And in any case, whatever the efficiency of the characters (for example to display more information per cm2 of paper) are completely offset by the difficulty of learning them and all the other aspects mentioned above.
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safarinew Reply:
November 26th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Indeed. Your examples are there.But besides that watershed moment in the history of chinese language, i bet no one is to be anywhere now deciding anything nowadays.It seems pretty developed, functional, and modern to me…Newsflash:months ago some linguist suggest recovering fantizi(sth like that) ended up mocked.
Twitter thing, you are right.The convenience of recording offset by the difficulty.(Or did it?yes,, it did i guess,yes, definitely, i usually type 拼音，so that’s like , 1 字= 3 or more letters, so that’s the catch!)
Another note, in the book i mentioned above, the writers mocks how japanese “kiss the cold ass of english with a hot face”(didn’t know origin) by loaning alot words from it without digesting.I laughed.I don’t have a problem if chinese does the same thing.(or did I?..)And I noticed news words popping up where i was in college, like “销品茂“ as never before, do you know what’s that?
Nice post, always browsing with a joy
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Don’t you think the reason so many large languages use the same word system is because they’re all European and/or influenced by Europe? I’m wondering what would have happened if there had been another civilization which had had its own scientific revolution in roughly the same time.
I’m curious about how this is handled in the Arabic world and Israel, which despite the tense situation has apparently exchanged quite a bit of loan words (especially modern Hebrew, from what I’ve heard, is peppered with Arabic slang and Arabic technical loanwords). I’m not sure exactly how this works, but I would be surprised if they mostly have the same roots as most Western languages given the nature of their writing system which prefers three-consonant roots. We also have the Sanskrit influence on the Indian languages to take into account as well.
Anyway, I think the concept of Word System is great! It’s a very systematic approach to the problem with learning languages that do not share obvious cognates*. It could be used to measure how intimidating language B is to study if your mother tongue is language A . The discrepancy between the written and spoken languages is also a factor.
* An example of a non-obvious cognate is chakra/cycle/wheel from the Indo-European languages.
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Uln Reply:
November 25th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
“Don’t you think the reason so many large languages use the same word system is because they’re all European and/or influenced by Europe”
Yes, that is the reason. Except that the influence is not strictly European, it is a culture that has mixed many different origins like: Phoenician, Jewish, Sumerian, Arab, Greek, Roman, and European, which is what I call “World mainstream culture” in the post.
Obviously, nowadays the European part of it is the most prominent, but we wouldn’t be what we are without all those bases (for example, without the Phoenician alphabet or the Jewish religion, etc.)
We are all one civilization, and contrary to what Huntigton said, the Arabs are as part of it as Europe and America.
Strictly speaking, the only other original civilization in existence is China.
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Btw, I just found a great example of Icelandic to show what it might look like when a Western language shuns loanwords:
“Bandaríski kvikmyndaleikstjórinn David Lynch var nýverið staddur hér á landi til að halda námskeið í innhverfri íhugun. Hann sagði Agli Helgasyni frá reynslu sinni af hugleiðslu, kvikmyndum sínum og skoðunum á lífinu almennt (…)”
In translation: “The American film director David Lynch was recently in the country to hold a seminar about transcendental meditation. He described his meditation experiences, movies and views on life in general to Agli Helgasyni.”
There are some cognates in there, like land (country), halda (hold) and líf (live). I’ve studied Icelandic for a while, but I’m completely stumped on sentences like these.
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“Because the refusal to use loans and phonetic script is the result of conscious decisions. There is nothing in the language itself that forbids import of foreign words or use of an alphabet”
Language is an organic whole. If we devise a separate orthographic system for technical terms while maintaining the current system for non-technical communication, it may add to the difficulty of learning for native speakers. Plus, it just is not elegant. Pinyin/alphabets cannot be seamlessly/elegantly integrated into a sentence written in Chinese characters. It may pose processing difficulties for listeners/readers. This means that words like DVD, CPU will remain an extreme minority in Chinese vocabulary.
In academic papers, new technical terms are introduced in Chinese characters, followed by its English translation in brackets.
ULN: Good point. But I don’t agree with the elegance idea. Elegance is very subjectve and people can become used to it quickly. Besides, it would only be used in newspapers and everyday text, not in poetry! Although in research it might be used already, in common texts like newspapers it is not. This means that the average Chinese person learns 小罗, and he will have trouble to communicate with Westerners saying Ronaldinho.
Ultimately, the decision on how to render foreign technical terms in Chinese rests on how easy/difficult it is for *native* speakers to learn those terms thus rendered. Chinese is not a phonetically based language; it is mainly a semantically based one - this is an intrinsic linguistic property, not an external decision/imposition. Hence, it will make things difficult for Chinese speakers, if technical terms are translated phonetically, with characters or alphabets. Using the examples that were already mentioned, I cannot imagine having the following terms in Chinese: “a ku si ti ke si”, “en tuo mo luo ji”, “ai ti mo luo ji”. The meanings of these phrases will not be transparent to native speakers of Chinese, hence increasing learning difficulty for them. However, they will easily understand “yinxiang xiaoguo” (effects of sounds), “kunchong xue” (study of insects), and “ciyuan xue” (study of word origins). Understandably, Western speakers might find the former translations more transparent to them. However, languages do not evolve with the consideration of making things easier for foreigners (Why didn’t Spanish and French get rid of noun genders?). That just is not the way things work. It is not a deliberate (politically or culturally motivated) attempt to preserve the system - it is just a reflection of inherent linguistic properties.
ULN: This is simply not true. Japanese and Koreans have similar problems in that they lack many of the Western syllables, particularly consonant groups. Japanese is even worse, since it only has 60odd distinct syllables compared with the 300+ untoned Chinese ones. A-Ku-si-ti is not at all unthinkable, no more than “A-ko-su-ti-ku” is for the Japanese, and has the same syllables as 音响效果 in Chinese. Japanese took the decision to do this CONSCIOUSLY, they could have continued to go with Chinese roots which adapt easier to their language, but they decided to go with World mainstream way instead for practical reasons. Same with every other language except Chinese.
Having said this, I have to agree that 声学、音响效果 IS more beautiful than Akusiti. But my whole post is about compromise and about sacrificing the little bits to save the whole
And the scientific community in China are already beginning to use English to give lectures, present conference papers and publish articles. So I doubt they would be disadvantaged, not for the reason that you are mentioning anyway.
ULN: Which means there will be an even larger disconnect between the English speaking elite and the plain people condemned to ignorance
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音響効果 is standard japanese. アコスティック is used more professinally as accoustics but then again Japanese is all about choice.
Japanese use chinese stems everytime they can, they’re used to it and looks better. Don’t forget 80% of chinese translations of western concepts were coined by the Japanese in the Meiji period.
English stems are used when Chinese translations just don’t sound right, or to sound flashy and modern. Like Murakami Haruki saying ペニス for penis in his novels.
Korean though has a BIG trouble with homophones, so they are replacing chinese stems with english ones.
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Japanese is in some ways the exception in my post, because it is in the middle between the Chinese Word System and the Western one (Meiji words were created by Japanese, but using Chinese roots)
In any case, my point in the previous comment is that Japanese, Korean and many other languages that are not phonetically compatible with English take thousands of loans and it is no big deal.
I mean, think of it, it is not like “antropomorphic” sounded very English when it was first adopted. Anyone can tell it is a loan and it just sounds foreign to Germanic or Latin ears. And yet, English language has adopted this term and many others from all over the World, and that is how it has become the richest and fastest growing language on Earth. Can anyone still argue that taking foreign loans, even if they sound weird, is bad for a language???
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Hi Uln,
Thanks for responding to my comment above.
I did not mention the hypothetical translation of “acoustics” to show that it is a phonetically impossible word in Chinese. It certainly is, as far as conforming to the sound properties of Chinese is concerned. But the point was that the Chinese script is intended to reflect meaning, rather than sound. Therefore, a purely phonetically based translation of foreign terms is not consistent with this important property of the language and certainly is not consistent with the way native speakers of Chinese process/understand the language.
On the other hand, the other two Asian languages you mentioned - Korean and Japanese already use scripts that transparently reflect sounds (Not knowing these two languages, I may not be entirely correct in this). Hence, it makes it possible/reasonable to render foreign terms phonetically, since doing so is within the reasonable boundaries set by the properties of the language. Whether Korean and Japanese follow the English phonetic rules (in terms of syllable structures) is irrelevant.
Likewise for your “antropomorphic” example in English. No matter how un-Germanic it may have sounded, the linguistic property of English being an alphabet-based and phonetically transparent (in relative terms) language made it possible/reasonable to adopt that word this way. The few Chinese origin words in English were also adopted purely phonetically - typhoon, lychee, etc.
The point is then that adopting foreign terms cannot be done without regard to the inherent properties of the language the terms are being translated into.
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@yinbin: I agree, and that is precisely one of the points of my post: The difficulty to adopt foreign loans in Chinese is closely tied to the use of characters, and both phenomenons are tied to the old culture of China. That is why I used the term “Word System” to group the 2 of them together.
But there is nothing in the Chinese Spoken language that forbids taking loans, as we already see in exceptions like “Nicotine”. Of course, these loans will get deformed and sound different when adopted, but this happens with every language, for example Lychee is a poor approximation of 荔枝.
I think the main difference in our points of view is that what you call “inherent properties” of the language are not so. The Word System is not inherent, but artificially created over the centuries, mostly by a class of imperial bureaucrats. The great majority of Chinese speakers in history never knew how to use characters, so if characters were inherent, it would be as much as to say that most Chinese could not speak Chinese!
So here is my point: the characters are inherent to Chinese culture BUT they are not inherent to the Chinese language.
A human language is before anything else a spoken means of communication, and the scripts (including Chinese characters, Braille, etc.) are nothing but ways to represent that language, they are additions that people artificially invented to record it.
Characters have no doubt had a deep influence in the development of the spoken Chinese, but they are not Inherent in the sense that the language can exist (and most of the time has existed) very well without them.
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I just discussed the Arabic question with a person who’s studying it, and he said that there is a mixture of loanwords and native roots, so it lies somewhere halfway between Japanese and Chinese/Icelandic, and thus not as difficult as Chinese in this sense but not as easy to grasp as any Latin language. Of course there are some shared words since English has its fair share of Arabic loanwords.
As for ways in which characters are not inherent to the Chinese (spoken) language, I like the example 窟窿 which is originally 孔. It got separated in speech but both versions survived because of the script. This development is more pronounced in some dialects like Jin, but Mandarin has its fair share.
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WKL, the example of 窟窿 is very interesting, and I see where you are aiming with the traditional disconnect in Chinese between the spoken language and the written Classic Chinese.
But just to clarify, my previous comment was NOT about that. When I say the written script is not inherent to the language, I am not speaking exclusively of Chinese, this statement is valid for English or any other language.
All written languages are just different ways to transcribe spoken language on paper, they are not languages in themselves (even if popularly we call them so). Written English is no more a language than a tape-recorder, both are just means to record a language.
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Thank you for sharing this. Chinese is indeed a hard language to learn, and with all the dialects from different regions! Your blog on China is fun to read. Have you thought about writing for Asia Chronicle? The site contains in-depth analyses on the issues facing China and other Asian nations as well. Worth a read I think. http://www.asiachroniclenews.com
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Guys Chinese is a HUGE language family. If you wanna choose examples of divergence between the spoken language and the state-defined standard language you’ll never end. 窟窿 means little, what about 今儿个 or 擦黑儿 or 哇单 or 哥们 or whatever.
But that’s not the point, Putonghua exists, its carefully defined, and everyone’s supposed to know it. It takes very much of its vocabulary from Classical Chinese, and you’re supposed to know that too if you want to sound educated. If you want to sound local you can study the local dialect of your choice (Beijing is the most respected) but thats up to your talent and interest.
Most of the vocabulary in romance languages was imported by the church in the Low Middle Ages wholesale from Latin, and now people don’t even know that. Of course you could argue Chinese classicism is a bit deeper than European, but not that much. All standard languages are artificial to one extent; even low-lives and prostitutes use latin church vocabulary or classical chinese or whatever.
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Yes, in many ways there is a strong parallel between Latin and Classic Chinese, and by extension between the Romans and the Qin/Han empire. This has been noted many times before.
But back to the language loans: you are right, loans are an essential part in the evolution of most languages. They only sound weird when they are pronounced in a foreign accent, but once they are adopted they become as 地道（authentic）as anything else. The majority of Chinese don’t even realize that 咖啡 (coffee) or 社会 (society) are loans, just as English don’t realize for typhoon.
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ULN - I personally much prefer the Chinese way of creating Chinese terms for common technical items to that currently used here in Japan, where foreign words are transcribed into the katakana script and spoken as if they were Japanese. Like as not, any use of Latin script to write technical terms in Chinese would lead to the same result - they would still be said as if they were Chinese words with Chinese pronunciation and be difficult for the foreign listener to understand without carrying the immediate meaning which anyone schooled in technical terms in a European language would be able to derive from them. Japanese has become a hash, even rice is referred to using the English word ‘rice’ transcribed in katakana (“Raisu”).
Whilst I’m at it I’ve always thought the Chinese language to be actually quite a joy to learn, first and foremost because it has incredibly simple grammar. Unfortunately for me Japanese comes with complete with the usual compliment of irregulars, conjugation and everything else which made high-school French such a snooze-fest!
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A thought provoking discussion.
I’m a student of mandarin living in Australia. The scale of the difficulty of learning the language is quite impressive and never more evident than when I took a year of night classes. The classes got smaller and smaller and eventually they didn’t have enough to continue. The reason, I think, isn’t just difficulty it’s because of a lack of perception of any real progress. That’s something I feel quite intently.
My eyebrows raised at Uln’s earlier claim that one needed three rather tall orders to acquire functional Mandarin. Bag loads of talent and motivation, years of full-time study and then a decade of full immersion.
I don’t really accept that. I can’t accept that, how could I? In fact I’ve made the decision to pack in my very nicely paying job and go back to university full time to study Chinese (and other stuff). I am, however, under zero illusions that the Chinese language component will serve me well enough, I’ll put at least as much effort into it outside of classes and assignments as I do now.
Why do it? Why beat your head against such an incredible obstacle of learning because lord knows there’s not really any good career reason for that. I could become a doctor more easily than I could learn Chinese. Conversely our country has thousands of native Mandarin speaking Australian citizens. So what real value in having a white guy that speaks Chinese?
Well, I’ve only really got one explanation. I like hard things and this literally is the hardest thing I can think of doing intellectually. Furthermore I have an interest in the region, culture, politics and some other motivations around the believe that Australia needs to better understand China and how it can help our industry.
Thankfully, mercifully, learning Chinese is actually fun. In particular I’m utterly captivated by chengyu. The language is so different that I find myself seeing a different way of looking at things, Chinese seems to encapsulate more than a language.
I don’t have supernatural talent (but to be fair I’m a career communicator), I don’t have a knack for learning languages, and I don’t really think I’m inclined to live in China for ten years either. Or probably ever. So really what you’re saying is I have no chance of speaking functional Chinese.
Well, I see that as a challenge. So one day, some years down the track, lets meet up and you can judge for yourself.
The only basis I have for this bold optimism is that I think you’ve overlooked one important aid to learning. The sheer invigorating capacity of finding an endeavor genuinely fascinating. It’s not much, maybe, but I’m clinging to it just the same.
P.S. Lets really up the anti and slap down a wager of one beer. Got to give me something to think about eh?
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LOL, it is good to see people so motivated. I think you are right, motivation is one of the most important factors, and you should not be discouraged by my posts, you may prove me wrong..
PS. Let me know when you plan to come to China to pay me that beer…
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