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rose~ -

I agree. If my friends ask me whether Chinese is difficult then I say it is only as difficult as
learning any other language, but that learning to write takes a lot of practise. But let's face
it, learning characters isn't intellectually difficult by any stretch of the imagination, it's
just repetitive, time-consuming and boring. It's rote learning that is hardly emphasized anymore
in a modern education.

If my employer ever asks me whether Chinese is difficult I just sigh, shake my head, and say
"yeah".

We need to maintain the fallacy of the super-human difficulty of learning Chinese in order to have
enhanced employability.

I'm not saying it's easy, God (and all my Chinese friends, landlord, teacher and so on) know that
I still suck at Chinese, but that's mainly due to laziness on my part.



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赫杰 -

I guess learning anything is what you make it, it all depends on the individual’s goals and
standards.

Just to add on about the tones, I don't know about you guys but at this stage I really don't mind
them, I mean, you practice it the right way enough and you really wont have to think about it that
much, or maybe you just get so used to minding them that you don't have to think about minding
them so much....and I've just gone cross-eyed

Anyways, and in the times you have to repeat yourself, so what? Just say it the second time slowly
and get all your tones right, I mean Chinese do this all the time, no big deal. Furthermore, I
really enjoy playing those little word/tone games with my friends, to me, it can add some color to
those usually dull conversations, whether it be on purpose or on accident.

For instance, the other day my roommate was feeling bad and his girlfriend asked him to go
somewhere and he said no, and she replied: "你真的不想去吗？" He said: "我不祥" what?
"我不祥" she looked at me and we smiled at each other and I said: "哎，我也不祥", I don't
know, I enjoy simple stupid stuff like that so I don't mind them, of course I guess it would be
annoying to do the same thing with the accountants at the bank while exchanging travelers checks
or something, time and place.

HJ










koreth -

I think what's hard about Chinese changes as you progress. I know it has for me. When I first
started out, tones were completely over my head. Then it was memorizing 字 and 词. Now,
approaching 2000 字 under my belt, I'm at a point where I often can read all or nearly all of the
字 in a newspaper headline, but I often don't know the 词 they form, so it's still a meaningless
jumble to me.

One ongoing frustration, as someone else mentioned, is learning new vocabulary from some text I'm
reading and having no idea whether it's usable in 口语. None of my dictionaries have any
indication. I've lost count of the number of times I've gotten, "I understand you, but we never
say that word," from native speakers, usually preceded by a puzzled expression as they work out
how they'd write what I just said. And sometimes I'll use a word that's only ever used in written
form, such that the native speaker has no idea what I'm saying even though my pronunciation is
fine.

My other frustration is that there are certain words that have a zillion near-synonyms that aren't
interchangeable. For example, 而且 and 并且 -- I had to ask seven different native speakers
before one of them could explain the difference to me. My poor girlfriend tried for a solid
half-hour before concluding with some embarrassment that she didn't actually know the difference,
even though she knew intuitively when to use which. When I asked her to compare those two to
此外 and 不仅如此 and 再说 and 还有 and 另外 and 加上, all she could do was sigh and
shake her head.

Edit: One more frustration, though it's more of an amusement, I suppose: I'm amazed at the number
of times I've had to repeat myself because the person I was talking to didn't expect to hear
Mandarin coming out of my white-boy lips and by the time they realized it, I was already halfway
done with my sentence. It's frustrating because I have no way of telling from their reaction
whether my speaking or their listening is responsible for the lack of comprehension, so I'll often
go into "uh oh, better figure out where I just screwed up my pronunciation" mode even though in
reality I was speaking just fine. Anyone else have that experience? My guess is that people
learning English don't run into it because native English speakers don't have the expectation that
someone of a different race must not speak their language.










heifeng -



Quote:

I have no way of telling from their reaction whether my speaking or their listening is responsible
for the lack of comprehension,

b4 I got my IC card if I went to a subway station and shouted out I wanted one 3 yuan ticket (the
most simple sentence on earth, right) the teller suddenly hands me a couple of tickets and as I'm
totally confused wondering wtf, I look behind me and see some other foreigners. Clearly she just
managed to completely ignore the words coming out of my mouth (plus the total of 3 kuai I had
given her) and assume i was a representative of the laowai pack behind me despite the fact I said
one ticket....yes sometimes people just look at you and don't really listen, but I'll give her the
benefit of the doubt that maybe I didn't quite yell out 1 ticket loud enough and it's windy in the
subway tunnels...On other occasion when I was completely bundled up and wearing my hood and scarf
(the only opportunity you really have to hide your foreign-ess other than lurking around in the
dark) a bus attendent asked me where I was going and scanned my ic card on the bus, during the
course of the trip I took off my hood and was about to get off the bus when the attendent, totally
convinced i didn't swipe my card, ran up to me. I then had to convince her that she did scan it
and and point out where I was sitting. I'm guessing the laowai accent must not have been that
terrible otherwise she would have totally remembered me on a bus since there were only 5 people on
it...

So yes, I think the visual data people receive influences their listening, if they even listen in
the first place...If they don't see you are a foreigner they probably won't even really second
guess that you are Chinese if you are somewhat decent in pronunciation since there are so many
Chinese with non standard putonghua as well....

back to the subject of Chinese being hard or not....It's only hard in that its different from
English (if you are an English, or xxxx language speaker in which the language is not related to
Chinese at all) and you don't have all the cognates so there is less of a 'head start' than you
would have if you studied other languages plus there is a massive amount of vocabulary to describe
things that are very similar. As someone mentioned before with the correct teaching method ( for
example having good overseas teachers that are actually skilled at teaching as opposed to just
research and have actual duiwai teaching experience) learning Chinese would be easier. But
anything, whether it's a language or not, if you psyche someone out about it enough before hand
they are definitely going to believe it is hard. So the whole "is Chinese hard" line of
questioning, much like the whole can you use chopsticks etc etc. line of laowai interrogation, is
just totally uneccesary in general. In the US if someone has decent English skills, I wouldn't
tell them this because I would think it's in insulting to them since they are already good at the
language. If someone is bad at the langauge I would at least try to help them, but for Chinese
learners more often then not you get a big pat on the back no matter what, so I think that the
whole lack in honesty in feedback and low expectations put on foreigners doesn't do anything to
really help anyone make progress in the language. ( I have had some fun experiencese here when
some locals pointed out to me my tone problems, and you know what, I'll never mispronounce 扎 for
炸 again once I get a flat on bike....but If i had someone correct me everyday instead of giving
me a phony thumbs up, I think i would have eliminated many problems long ago)

Is Chinese hard, sure, but not as super hard as people like to think it is. I sometimes think that
English is in fact harder because of the verb tenses, making nouns plural, indefinite pronouns and
other grammar since there are Chinese native speakers after X number of years still saying he for
she adding or omitting 'the' in the wrong places, totally confusing me on when events actually
occured b/c of their jumping back and forth between tenses, and just irratating me in general when
not even making an effort to pronounce the 'th' sound correctly...etc etc, but they can recite
English words as well as a wordlingo website, but that's how it feels like to converse with 'em
too. (And this is why I can never ever teach ESL in Asia because I think I might tramatize too
many students...plus my own questionable English skills ehhe)

I therefore think that it is infact English that is hard and Chinese people are just trying to
psyche us out.....those masterminds...so from now on I'm going to tell everyone Studying Chinese
is very very very easy indeed and infact English is very very hard.

Others can join into Heifeng's psychological warfare strategy, but make sure your Chinese is
decent and just tell everyone Studying Chinese is easy, and divide the time you have been studying
by two whenever anyone asks how long you have been studying!! wahahahaha










carlo -

I think it's nice that a Chinese columnist can publicly admit that Chinese is only a language
after all, and that you don't need to be a genius or a spy to speak the language of your host
country. It's a sign that people are really opening up, in a way. I remember a few months ago at a
crowded conference centre (many foreigners around) I overheard a local young lady saying to her
friend, 'Foreigners look more and more like Chinese these days'. And her friend said, 'We look
like foreigners'. Yeah baby, taht's the idea.










koreth -



Quote:

Is Chinese hard, sure, but not as super hard as people like to think it is. I sometimes think that
English is in fact harder because of the verb tenses, making nouns plural, indefinite pronouns and
other grammar

I think English is widely regarded as a pretty difficult language to learn, so I don't disagree
with you there. Nonetheless -- speaking as someone who has studied Spanish and Russian in the
past, though I've forgotten most of both of them -- Chinese has a few features that I think make
it a much steeper mountain to climb than most other languages.

First of all, you just can't ignore the writing system. In most languages, learning to read helps
you learn how to speak pretty much from day one. You may not get the pronunciation right, but
you'll usually at least be comprehensible to a native speaker if you sound out an unfamiliar word
you've read. In Chinese, until you've amassed a decent vocabulary already, reading is of nearly no
use in increasing your spoken vocabulary. I'm sure you've had the experience, as I have, of
knowing perfectly well what a Chinese word you're reading means, but drawing a complete blank on
what it sounds like. That's a problem most other languages not only don't have, but can't have.
You end up having to memorize two pieces of information for each word, whereas in other languages
(especially ones like Spanish) you can memorize either the written form or the spoken form and get
the other one for free.

Yes, I'm aware that the writing system has advantages! I can often get a general idea of the
meaning of a piece of Japanese text if it uses a lot of kanji, even though I've never studied
Japanese, and that's pretty darned cool. But useful or no, it still makes learning harder. I
suspect many native Chinese speakers who don't think the language is hard have no concept of how
little time schoolchildren in western countries spend learning how to read.

Then there are the tones. I think this is more intimidating than it deserves, since you do get
used to it fairly early on if you're paying attention. But it's still an additional barrier, even
to people who speak other tonal languages -- to my ear, a native Vietnamese speaker's Mandarin
tones are just as mangled as a native English speaker's. (Though admittedly, I only know one
Vietnamese person who speaks any Mandarin.) In English, if you pronounce the correct syllables
with the wrong intonation, it'll sound odd but still be correct; the worst you'll do is change a
statement into a question by accident. In Mandarin, it'll often mean something completely
different or make no sense at all. So that's one more dimension you have to get right in Mandarin
but not most other languages.

And finally, as I mentioned before, there's the wide gulf between the written and spoken forms. I
have a hard time thinking of many things I could write in English that would be incomprehensible
if spoken aloud. Stilted or overly formal, sure, but the poster of "施氏食狮史" on my wall
reminds me that written Mandarin conveys a lot more information per character than spoken Mandarin
does. English has homonyms too, to be sure, but not to anywhere near the degree Mandarin does.

Anyway, that's my take on why it's a hard language. But that's all also what makes it a fun and
challenging language, so don't take any of that as complaining!










wushijiao -



Quote:

In Chinese, until you've amassed a decent vocabulary already, reading is of nearly no use in
increasing your spoken vocabulary. I'm sure you've had the experience, as I have, of knowing
perfectly well what a Chinese word you're reading means, but drawing a complete blank on what it
sounds like. That's a problem most other languages not only don't have, but can't have. You end up
having to memorize two pieces of information for each word, whereas in other languages (especially
ones like Spanish) you can memorize either the written form or the spoken form and get the other
one for free.

I think that’s really well said, Koreth. The flip side is that, once learning vocabulary becomes
you major goal, the bi-syllabic nature of Chinese words works as a handy memory device. A simple
example might be- 海军 (hai3jun1), meaning “navy”. The component part “sea” and
“military”, help make the combination easy to remember. Of course, not all words have
component parts that aid memory. And, of course, European languages have plenty of prefixes and
suffixes and common word bases that can help in the memorization of new words. But, all in all, I
think that compared to memorizing the transcribed random utterances of most languages, memorizing
Chinese words is a bit easier, due to the way words are comprised. I think this is a fairly
significant advantage to learning Chinese, but it often ignored.

As others like HashiriKata and Atitarev have said, with the right motivation and environment,
almost all languages are learnable. Probably the best example of that is the Peace Corps. They
give you only a few weeks of intensive language prep, and then just stick you in some random
village that has no other foreigners, in the middle of a developing country, and they give you
only one job for the first three months make friends with locals and become a positive member of
the community. The result is that after two years, many people who couldn’t get an A in high
school French end up becoming relatively fluent in another language, often one that doesn’t even
have a whole lot of learning materials

As far as Chinese, as heifeng said, it is difficult because English has basically no words that
come from Chinese. So, it there are fewer cognates. It will just take more time to learn Chinese
compared to one of the many promiscuous languages that is related to that ragged mongrel of a
tongue, English.










gato -

Chinese is harder than most other languages. Remember what Xiao Kui said about her experience
learning Spanish compared with Chinese.


Quote:


Originally Posted by Xiao Kui

http://www. /showth...1985#post61985

I´ve been living in Argentina almost a year now and my progress in Spanish has discouraged me.
Why, because I made almost as much progress in one year as I did with 5 years of living in China
and learning Mandarin. I can testify that Mandarin is much more difficult than the romance
languages for native speakers of English.













wushijiao -

If Xiao Kui sees this, I wonder if he would share to what level of Spanish he had before going to
Argentina.

At least in the US, one thing about learning Chinese is that most people start learning in college
or after, compared to European langages, which are usually offered at an earlier time.










atitarev -

I thought it would be good to have Arabic under my belt.

If this is any consolation, I have come to the conclusion that Arabic is much more difficult than
Mandarin Chinese, in many aspects, including the writing systems, although it might surprise you
if you have some superficial idea about Arabic. I only got to about intermediate level in Chinese.
Ask me why if interested, no need to rant here as there aren't many Arabic learners/speakers here.

I have spent a year (on and off) on Arabic and got very frustrated. Chinese Mandarin seems to be a
breeze, at least the process of learning. Well, I discovered a language, which is harder than
Mandarin and since then learning Mandarin seems more enjoyable.












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