Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992) | Hacker News Reader

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)

pinyin.info

55 pointsmonsieurpng49 comments

...one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. ... I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? ... ...often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character.

It was related to me by a Chinese colleague that some young people in China mostly use Pinyin and can barely write any characters, since cellphones take care of turning the Pinyin into characters.

"It was related to me by a Chinese colleague that some young people in China mostly use Pinyin and can barely write any characters, since cellphones take care of turning the Pinyin into characters."

Very true! Which means technology now also makes it a lot easier for people who don't want to bother learning to write Chinese characters. It is FAR easier to recognize them in reading than to remember how to write them.

I think many non-Chinese sensationalize this problem. Yes, forgetting certain characters is common but not too an overwhelming or overproblematic extent.

What many people like to do is to confuse word difficulty with the difficult of the concept the word is representing and then generalizing it to all words, making it seem that Chinese is tougher than it really is. Yes knee is simple to write in English and it represents an easy concept, but the word (膝盖) itself is difficult to remember in Chinese. But that doesn't mean that all easy concepts are difficult to write in Chinese and vice versa. Difficult concepts may also have simple characters representing them. There's no direct correlation between these two.

Put it another way, the word "diarrhoea" is a very simple concept and very easy to write in Chinese. Almost no Chinese will forget how to write it in Chinese. But ask a native English speaker, and a large percentage will not be able to get it correct. Does this somehow mean that all English words are as difficult to write as "diarrhoea"? And then they can throw the same thing back at you. Can you imagine a well-educated native Chinese speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "diarrhoea"?

Not anymore.

On the topic of learning to remember characters - Japanese students attempting to learn kanji (very close to traditional chinese characters) often use a book called "Remembering the Kanji" by James Heisig. The method devised by the author for learning the characters is truly ingenious.

He developed this method after moving to japan in the early 80s for a position at a research institute. In a few months, he developed and applied his method to learn english meanings (but not japanese readings) for all ~2000 standard-use kanji. When his colleagues asked him what he'd been spending all his time on, and he told them that he'd finished learning all the kanji, they didn't believe him. Not because they didn't believe he'd done it so quickly, but because they had never seen any foreigner ever learn more than a few hundred. After demonstrating to their satisfaction that he'd really managed to do it, he was told "go write a book about how you did it".

I've been working my way through RTK (with the help of anki) for several months now. The method really does work. I'm at about 1500 out of 2200. It's getting harder the further I get, but all told I don't think I've spent more than a hundred hours or so over the course of 4 months.

For chinese learners, he's produced books on remembering Hanzi, simplified and traditional. I think if Moser had had access to these books, he might have been a bit less despondent about the task of learning the characters.

"Remembering the Kanji" does work. I'm re-visiting it right now. I used it many years ago (when I was younger and my memory was a bit better..), and at that time I managed to, with relatively little effort, learn between ten and twenty new Kanji every day. I spent maybe half an hour every day, or at least never as much as a full hour. The trick isn't really flash cards - because it's not really about imprinting them to memory. The trick is to create a working association, something that calls forward not only the meaning when you see the Kanji, but also tells you how to write it when you think about the meaning. With the right association it'll stick after one try, or, at worst, after two or three.

When I started visiting Japan a couple of years later I found that when I ran into a Kanji I knew, on some sign or whatever, it immediately transferred to learning the sound where it was used, and remembering the meaning of words with Kanji I knew (e.g. parking lot entrances and exits, to name a couple of simple ones).

But for various reasons I stopped working with the Heisig book after I knew less than two hundred of them, so I've started it up again. As I'm older now I've noticed that it's a slower process than before, and I have to work a bit more to get working associations. The net result is that I can't do as many Kanji per day as the previous time, and sometimes I run into bumps where I don't get the associations really working, and then I have to work on that for a while before I can continue. So there may be a week with no progress.

When that's said - I'm not sure this would be that useful for Chinese characters. The set of characters to learn is just so much larger. The reason for using the Heisig method to remember the Kanji is simply because you can learn all of them (as used in Japanese) in a relatively short time, and it turns out that when you already know them it's a much shorter step to learn them for real (as in when you start learning to read and write Japanese). And Heisig himself mentioned that, he noticed that Chinese students of Japanese learned to read and write Kanji much faster, because they already knew the meaning. Even though the languages are totally different. And, as I know a Chinese who is now learning Japanese, I've seen the same first-hand.

I'm not sure what you're seeing is an effect of being older. Learning the first 200 kanji in RTK is easy. So easy it feels like magic.

Things get much, much harder by the time you get to 1000. You start to have very similar overlapping words (e.g. Earnings and Profit and Assets and Savings), primitives that share the same name as an graphically-unrelated kanji, kanji that are made up of a grab bag of completely random primities, e.g. Dissolve, which is made of ceiling, mouth, hood, human legs, spike, insect.

I'm also skeptical of the idea of learning these things permanently on your first try, as Heisig claims. He even used flashcards himself, and describes how to review with them properly. There are certainly some characters that I have such vivid stories for that they stick easily, but coming up with 20 such vivid stories per day seems impossible.

It might be somewhat handy to have the rough meanings memorized, but it's a very long way from there to actually reading and writing Japanese. I never tried it myself, but I've heard many advanced Japanese learners say they did it early on and later felt it was mostly pointless.

I read and write Japanese fluently and never studied kanji alone; I learned them along with the vocabulary they appear in, which is the approach recommended by the best advanced Japanese schools.

Just wanted to +1 this. I also read Japanese at a high level (JLPT N1) and I've always learned characters in context of the vocabulary they are in. Spending months learning 2000 "meanings" for characters isn't a great way to spend your time in my opinion, the hard part of learning a language is remembering tens of thousands of words. Kanji is relatively not a big deal.

The exception I suppose is if you really want to be able to write characters by hand, then the Heisig method has value. If you can live without being able to handwrite well, then it's hard to justify spending months up front remembering unhelpful meanings than actually learning the language itself...

The time spent to learn Kanji via RtK is in my experience only a very little part of the time spent on everything else related to learning Japanese. The RtK way (and I don't do flashcards) is actually a fun diversion, and I find that I enjoy drawing the characters. And that's from a guy who can't stand writing by hand in general.. I started using a typewriter at 14. And I can't draw pictures to save my life. Unlike the previous time some years back, this time I'm using a cheap click-to-erase mechanical 'magic' drawing pad. Much better than the stack of paper I used back then.

Funny enough "learning characters/words in the context of the vocabulary they are in" is exactly what NLP machine learning models use to learn "rich" word/text representations based on the "distribution hypothesis" which states that the choice of words in the same context share a common meaning.

This is certainly true - I thought about emphasizing this point but didn't want to make my comment longer.

The approach is interesting, but I'm not sure it works for everybody. I tried the Heisig method, but I found that while I could get good at flashcards, they didn't really stick.

Probably helps if you are also exposed to Kanji on a daily basis in their true context.

In China it's also hard to speak with Chinese people because many of them aren't used to communicate with foreigners. If I speak in French with a non-French speaker, and they don't understand, I'll try to use different words, or I'll say the sentence more slowly.

In China, not really - if you don't understand, often they'll repeat the exact same thing, the exact same way, and again and again. You can end up in a deadlock as they won't try to use simpler words or speak more slowly. Chinese people know that their language is hard, but I don't think all of them realise just how hard it is for foreigners.

Of course as he mentioned in the article, when it's your turn to speak, even if you know how to say what you want to say, if you don't have all the tones exactly right, you won't make sense to the other person either.

Based on my 9 years in China learning the language I would have to disagree with your characterization. I've changed pronunciation and ways of saying things successfully. I just think it takes longer to get to that point than other languages.

Language difficulty is relative to your native tongue. Learning English is as hard for a native Chinese speaker as Chinese is for an English speaker. And learning Chinese for a Korean speaker is much easier than English.

Chinese is not exceptionally difficult. Over a billion people speak it.

I think the author of the post makes a compelling argument that what you say is not true. Just the convenience of dictionary lookup and quasi-phonetic spelling should make learning English far easier for a native Chinese speaker.

Pronunciation and grammar are much harder in English than Chinese though. Each language has many facets. The author is missing the forest for the trees.

Chinese grammar is ridiculously simple. There is no tense and no gender. Subject can be dropped from the sentence. Phonetically, pronunciation is always the same for a particular character. The language is like Legos, where you snap together a limited subset of sounds.

Memorizing characters is not the only aspect to the language.

An example is the Chinese word 海军 which an intermediate learner would recognize as “ocean army” and a beginner learner might recognize as something to to with water and maybe vehicles. Whereas in English the word Navy gives no indication to its meaning, only its prononciation.

Not really, memorising is nearly everything in language. If you don't even know the terms to communicate what can you do at all? What's easier? - Memorising English Grammar (even if you forgot an "s" somewhere everybody will still understand you) or memorising 3000+ characters? Sure, Chinese characters are beautiful (pretty much why I started learning Chinese) but they just aren't practical to communicate. Pinyin is just weird and became the main phonetic transcript probably (as many things in China) for political reasons rather than practical ones.

Yes with practice things get easier and the language is not impossible to learn. However I think it is an exceptionally difficult language.

Chinese people doesn't believe "foreigners" can speak Chinese. That's it. He is right, I don't care if you been over there for twenty years.

What do you think about Dashan?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POzdgjdlKwo

Not this again! David Mozer’s article has been posted to death here and debated to all end. It’s mostly correct but deeply sensationalized to the point where I believe it’s more damaging than useful for those who haven’t studied character based languages.

the 'past' link shows that it was first posted 11 years ago.

That is a fantastic feature I didn't know about. Thanks for pointing it out!

I tried to learn Chinese for a while. I wouldn't say it's exceptionally hard. I mean learning any foreign language is always hard and involves a lot of learning, which is why I eventually gave up, because I had no real practical use out of it and couldn't motivate myself to put regular work into it.

Sure, the characters are hard to remember. It's completely different from European languages, so you have no "ah that almost sounds like a word I know in my language". Pronunciation is unusual, but isn't harder than - let's say - French. The sentence structure and grammar is relatively simple.

I attended two semesters of mandarin lessons(4 hours, mon - fri, of lessons with short breaks) at a university in Beijing. Started from essentially nothing; recognising 20-30 characters (Hanzi), 9 of which were numbers. I still haven't taken any HSK (Chinese language competency test) exams but looking at example papers and study material I'm above HSK 3 but I wouldn't pass HSK 4 without a month dedicated review.

However, near the end I had learned enough to through the first few minutes of most conversations with not just ease but joy. I can text in Chinese for most everyday conversations, can't read a newspaper pretty much at all, poems are impossible even the ones that look deceptively simple by Li Bai, but I can follow all spoken words by Mandarin speaking characters in movies produced in the West.

My two cents is this. Anyone can learn Chinese. But it takes time and effort. Really, you have to persist for while before breakthroughs happen. I couldn't differentiate between tones for the first few months unless a native speaker spoke one syllable at a time very slowly. Now I can pick out tones at normal speed. However, still doesn't mean I understand.

A Japanese friend I made in my first semester found the characters easy but pronunciation was still very tough for him. But having one less obstacle is important. I can know also watch anime and recognise plenty of characters (Kanji) in the backgrounds but this is still eons from knowing Japanese.

If you want to learn, adopt a growth mindset and don't give up. Like most things you read on the internet, they are neither as hard as everyone says (you can learn to read, write, listen, and speak Chinese) nor as easy (actually the grammar is far from simple. 了 (le) alone causes headaches. And let's not forget all the references to 4000+ years of Chinese history expressed in everyday idioms (成语) and so on).

If you want to learn, go to China if you can and try. That year was the most difficult and rewarding (Do they always come in pairs?) of my short life thus far.

I haven't tried to learn Chinese myself, but a friend of mine who has and quite successfully so told me that Chinese is surprisingly simple and easy to learn. The hardest things in it are, of course, hieroglyphs and pronunciation, but the grammar is relatively simple.

Besides the fact that the article is just the author opining his distaste without applying an equal amount rationalization to any distaste for familiar European languages.

In fact, Mandarin, like English, Riau Indonesian, Swahili, are among very few languages that linguists identify as being unusually exoteric and easy because they're so repeatedly worn down by foreign adults who, due to various uncommon historical circumstances, had to learn the language imperfectly in their adulthood, reverse assimilated in the language's native location and had offsprings who were only exposed to a simplified version of the language and who still influenced future generations because their foreign parents were in the control class of society.

The author holds some 19th century views on languages and assumes that languages have some logical design whereas all languages arbitrarily grammaticalize and accumulate cruft over time. Some languages are indeed harder than others, but not because languages had more logical features than others, but just because the natural accumulation of gunk did not take place (pidgins, creoles) or were unnaturally reversed (conquests and reverse assimilation by adults).

For actual hard languages, one has to look at esoteric languages where the continual grammaticalization process did not stop like Tsez or Navajo.

> In fact, Mandarin, like English, Riau Indonesian, Swahili, are among very few languages that linguists identify as being unusually exoteric and easy

It would be helpful if you provided a source for that.

Even still, much of that the author is complaining is with regards to the writing system of Mandarin, not Mandarin itself, while the point you seem to be making seems to be about the Mandarin language itself. I personally concur with your assertion that Mandarin is an easy language, but I agree with the author that the Chinese writing system is a big hurdle for learners. I think that there is no argument that there would be less to learn to communicate in Chinese if Chinese correspondence used a more phonetic writing system.

> The author holds some 19th century views on languages and assumes that languages have some logical design whereas all languages arbitrarily grammaticalize and accumulate cruft over time.

Can you elaborate on where in the article you have received this impression? The thrust of his argument on why Mandarin is hard seems to be that Chinese and Western societies have only recently had contact, and hence they lack familiar language features that might aid the Westerner in their study of Mandarin.

Discussed in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622432

A couple of accounts vouching for the comparative simplicity of spoken Chinese:

Language Log (2014): [1] "Chinese is the easiest language I ever learned to speak, but the writing system is by far the hardest I've ever had to grapple with."

Idlewords (2011) [2]: "Don't fall for the bait and switch with Chinese or Japanese! They might tempt you with an exotic writing system, but after a few months you find out that the underlying language is pretty vanilla, and meanwhile there is a stack of three thousand flash cards standing in between you and the ability to skim a newspaper."

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11109

[2] https://idlewords.com/2011/08/why_arabic_is_terrific.htm

I've always liked this summary I found on a forum:

> In case you were wondering - western languages to other western languages take about 22 weeks (550 hours of intensive study), non-western/non-asian languages 44 weeks (1100 hours of intensive study) and asian languages 88 weeks (2200 hours of intensive study). The other benefit of learning a language in one of the other two language families is that if you decide to learn another language in the same language family (region 1 2 or 3 as described above) it takes only 22 weeks of study.

[1] http://yesjapan.com/YJ6/question/1394/how-many-kanji-does-on...

I practiced Chinese once a week for two years, unfortunately never got a chance to use it since so it's been aging badly. The thing that many seem to have issues with when it comes to speaking/understanding Chinese is that the tone carries more meaning than in western languages. In Chinese; the same word has several, often completely unrelated, meanings; all depending on intonation. It's a new level of awareness, like learning a new programming paradigm.

One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it.

This is such a tired and coarse idiom of American scholarly writers. The other one is mentioning guns for no reason.

Chinese is a great language until you realise without someone constantly telling you what each character is. You’re never going to understand. The tones and characters need to go the way of the dodo before I take more interest.

So you didn’t like the two actual new aspects that aren’t in European languages? I think those are the most exciting part: new ways of thinking.

any language is hard, when you (essentially) want to convert everyone/everything into your believes/culture/set-of-understandings/instructions. Instead of humbly accept and admit that there exist things which u have no idea about, and eventualy try to learn about them, if ever possible. (And by no idea, i mean no concept about. Language/culture are ying-and-yan, if u don't know/distinguish what yellow color is, there's only little to be done).

Chinese is not hard. I managed to get to basic conversational level in three/four months.

It's the written Chinese that is difficult. Since most of society is based around written text it's an important part of learning a language.

Having studied Japanese for three years full time I know the obstacles. I've yet to read a full novel. It's too painful. I just started reading one with the help of my Japanese partner who can fill me in on the reading and meaning when I try to read.

It would take too long otherwise.

fortunately the gigantic barrier of the horrible writing system is starting to crumble down thanks to technology.

You can now search for words using pinjin, voice or drawing (thanks Pleko).

And if you encounter unknown printed(!) signs you can just point your camera at it (now or soon, what's currently the best app?).

As for calligraphic handwriting this will forever remain elusive. You may consider it as an utterly useless hobby.

As much as I despise Siri, one things she is surprisingly capable of is answering: "hey Siri what does sneeze mean in Chinese"

Technology certainly helps for Japanese.. when I hear a word I don't understand (e.g. from my wife), I enter it as it sounds and the dictionary gives me a nice (often short) list of translations, with hiragana, katakana, and kanji. And, due to my RtK studies (see earlier posts) I often get an 'aha' moment when I see the kanji. If what you described works similarly for Chinese then yes, it's a real game changer.

The lesson I'm getting from this thread is, if you want to learn a foreign language, get a foreign bride.

The real lesson is that learning a foreign language is hard.. it needs a lot of effort. In the general case, at least.

wo yao yi bei pi jiu...

I'm fully cured of any desire to seriously study Chinese.

I started two weeks ago. I'm doing ok so far. Do give it a try with an open mind.

The biggest success factor was deciding that it's not gong to be hard, or that it's only going to be as hard as I consider it to be

Oh you sweet summer child... I don't want to discourage you, but be prepared for a slog. Try to really enjoy the process. I've been at it for many years studying by myself (not in China), and I've come to the conclusion that it's best to approach the whole thing as my "forever" hobby. Unless you live in China or you can study full time it's very hard for the average person to become really fluent in a reasonable time. But maybe I'm below average.

It’s a 4 year journey, enjoy the ride

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