Thoughts on "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard"

I just came across the article Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. I have to say this is the best thing I've read on the language in a long time. I have written before about what make Chinese easy and hard but David Moser really understands the hard part. He mainly focuses on the writing system, but does include a few other things like the tones. The big thing I got out of the article was an assurance that I'm not stupid because I'm not doing as well after 4 years of Chinese as I did with three years of Spanish. Moser had studied Chinese for six years when he wrote the article and still couldn't read the newspaper without stopping to look up words.

This article is included in the book Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday, so it makes sense that this article would spend a lot of time picking on the character system, since that is John DeFrancis' least favorite part of the Chinese language. He may carp about the character system more than is necessary, but he comes up with new insights so in the end the whole article is useful.

One thing to keep in mind is that this article contains the rants of a frustrated Chinese student. A more scholarly article might distinguish between the features of the language that are arguably designed badly such as the writing system and features that are just plain hard for non-Chinese, such as the lack of cognates and the difficulty of using the tones. While the lack of cognates definitely makes learning Chinese difficult for the native Indo-European speaker, it is not a problem for the native speaker of Chinese. This is an important point, because early on Moser says "Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, the Chinese people". Chinese actually has lots of cognates, they are just between the different forms of Chinese, such as Mandarin and Cantonese. A Chinese gets the benefits of cognates in two ways. The characters are generally interchangeable across the languages, and provide a clearer way to read something written by a speaker of another form of Chinese than do the pronunciation similarities Moser refers to with French, German, and Spanish. The second form of cognate is the pronunciation cognate. I have only studied Mandarin, but I have seen a number of Cantonese words that have clear similarity to Mandarin and I'm sure the author has, too. Having said this, the lack of cognates does make learning Chinese difficult for the Westerner. I know when I started learning Chinese it was as if someone had made a language out of random syllables.

So that's my main gripe about the article. I otherwise agree with his sentiments completely. If you are studying Chinese this article will provide some good catharsis.