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.

The Oxford-Duden Pictorial Chinese & English Dictionary

The Oxford-Duden Pictorial Chinese & English Dictionary is a dictionary covering lots of specialized words by using pictures. Each page has a thematic picture at the top with definitions below. Sample topics include the bedroom, dining room, meteorology, electrician and gliding (soaring). Using pictures to find the items is very helpful, because a lot of the time I don't know what the English terms are for some of the things, like diagonal spar or golf ball cap.

I'm of course highlighting obscure words, but a lot of them are actually useful and if you are interested in one of the specialized areas this dictionary will be helpful. Having said that, though, there are two problems with the dictionary. One is that the dictionary only displays the Chinese in traditional characters with no Pinyin. If you aren't familiar with the characters it can be difficult looking up definitions like the one for "line space adjuster", which is 5 characters long. The second problem compounds the problem, and that is the small font used for the Chinese. It can be hard to distinguished the strokes of the traditional characters when they are squeezed in a tiny font.

In conclusion, if you want to learn specialized vocabulary and know your traditional characters well then this is a good book to get. You should look at the book before buying, though, to see if it will actually be useful for you.

Using Google for studying Chinese

I found a way to use Google for Chinese study. I'm going through the book Making Connections and came up to a question that I didn't know and the book did not answer. In Lesson 6 the book has the student use 一点都不 and 一点也不 to answer questions. While these sounded familiar, I didn't really know what the two phrases meant. I typed them into Wenlin, copied and pasted the sentences into Google, and found good examples for both phrases. In particular I liked what I found for 一点也不. It gets used well at the end of a joke. Actually the example I found for 一点都不 worked out too. It showed up in a quote by Linus Torvalds, who isn't worried at all about SCO.

Followup on Making Connections

I have finished the first 5 chapters of Making Connections and have some some comments to follow up on my earlier review.

First, the book does much more than teach listening comprehension. Depending on what you want to learn, this can be a good or bad thing. Along with real life conversation, they include real-life ads, maps, etc. This would be OK, except that I bought the Simplified Character version and the examples use the Traditional characters. While this may be good for me, I consider it a waste of my time, as I'm not interested in learning traditiional characters, especially not this way. The publisher says a future version of the book will use simplified realia in the Simplified character version, and this will be a major improvement.

Another observation after listening to some of the conversations is that these aren't like the recordings you listen to in the language lab. The speakers throw in hmms and slur words together. The worst one for me was when I couldn't recognize the word ping1pang1, even after hearing it multiple times and having it pointed out by my teacher. She, of course, picked it right out. This is really annoying, but I've heard people speak a lot less clearly in real life so I consider this good training.

Spoiler alert

My last comment is on the storyline. What I'm talking about comes from listening to the recordings, so consider this to be spoilers.

The story is about a couple of students who are married, but not to each other. They are in a foreign country. One is a man and one is a woman. The man's wife is with him, but is always out shopping or doing something else, so these two students hang out. The woman invited the man out for dinner on his birthday and went to see a movie with him and his daughter another time. I don't want to think the worst, but this is the strangest relationship I've seen in a language book.

Chinese Character Test - How many Chinese characters do you know?

Clavis Sinica has come up with a fun test to determine how many Chinese characters you know. What you do is take a quiz where you need to identify the Pinyin and definition for individual characters. Based on your score you will be told how many characters you know. While I think their estimate for me was a bit low, it was at least in the ballpark. I have 776 characters in my Supermemo database and got a score of 623 when I took the 72 character test. I think the truth lies somewhere between the two numbers. Still, though, this gives a ballpark figure. Most people don't keep track of which characters they have learned, so this gives them an idea of how far along they are.

Note: Reading instructions is never fun, but it is worth checking out the background document. It explains what the skill level means and how to set it. In short the higher levels contain tests for more words. By picking an accurate level you will get a test more finely tuned to your knowledge of Chinese characters.

Understanding Spoken Chinese

I'm trying a new book called Making Connections from Cheng & Tsui. The book focuses on understanding spoken Chinese. This is exactly what I need, because I always have the hardest time with understanding a foreign language. The book has 45 lessons and 2 CD's worth of listening exercises. Each chapter starts with some warm-up material to prepare you for the audio lesson. You then listen to the audio once or twice and answer a few questions to see if you got the gist of the conversation. There are then deeper questions for which you can listen to the audio as many times as you like. Finally there are some written exercises to reinforce the subject.

The recordings are designed to sound like real people talking, with run-together words, ums, etc. The real test for me will be if they have people talking while eating. Or if they have a mumbler.

The lessons fall into three groups, Novice-High, Intermediate, and Intermediate/High-Advanced. When I first got the book I listened to the first recording and the last. I could generally understand the first one, but couldn't get the last one at all, so this should be a useful book. Note that while the first level is Novice-High, this book is designed as a supplement to regular instruction. It will teach new vocabulary and usage, but only in conjuction with the material. Also, characters are used, with pinyin only employed for new words, so if you don't know the characters this book won't be very useful. Also, a number of the exercises involve reading real Chinese from maps, posters, and the like. While the course emphasizes listening comprehension, it could also be said to help one learn useful reading comprehension as well.

Note that the book has both Simplified and Traditional versions.

I have finished the first two chapters. The first one included map reading exercises. These wouldn't have been too bad, but the characters are scrunched real small. Having seen real maps that had the same problem, though, I suppose this is preparation.

I'm really looking forward to using this book. I wish I had something like this when I was learning my other languages.

Listening to Chinese on VOA

VOA's Internet broadcasts are a good way to practice listening to Chinese. The announcers speak clearly, and if you know the news otherwise it will help you understand VOA. The only thing is that you will need a broad vocabulary, and the sentences can be somewhat convuluted. If you want to read what they are talking about check out the text archive. Finally, if you read the text archive, copying it into Wenlin will help a lot with the vocabulary. Its Chinese-English is full of VOA words.