"Learning Chinese not so hard"

[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. (sh)

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.

[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]

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]

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]

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.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showthread.php?p=61985#post61985

I´ve been living in Argentina almost a year now and my progress in Spanish has discouraged me. Why' date=' 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.[/quote']

[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.

[Long Pan]

Teaching material is definitely one point to consider in learning a language. As well as standardisation of phonetic. Anyone who tried to learn Cantonese knows that the big trouble is that 1) there is no unique and solid phonetic you can rely on; 2) teaching material are rather poor.

As for Arabic I do think it is less complicated than Chinese. First they have an alphabet. Then you'll find some commune roots with French for example (and on the other way, Tunisian, Moroccan, Algerian people do not have much difficulties to speak French). The big trouble with Arabic is that each country has its own dialect (spoken) with quite big differences (a Moroccan friend travelling with me in Egypt had to speak English with the people; but she could guess more or less what people said). The traditional Arabic is like latin for Italian people. It may be quite close to Egyptian or Middle East Arabic but very different from Tunisian, Algerian, Lybian and Marocan dialects. Last but not least, it seems that teaching material are pretty poor and that they mostly focus on traditional Arabic.

[atitarev]

Long Pan, you understand it correctly but don't forget that what you call Latin for Italians is not quite correct. Modern Standard Arabic is almost the only written and formal form of Arabic used. All newspapers, educational materials, formal texts and documents are written in MSA, it's the language of media. It's not the same as the classical and Quranic Arabic but very close. The variety of spoken dialects are not standardised and seldom used in the written form.

The writing system:

Short vowels, their absense (sukuun) and doubling of consonants (shadda) are not written in Arabic and you can't easily determine what they are. Not only the vocabulary but good knowledge of grammar is required to read an Arabic text. Partially phonetical script is almost like phonemes in Chinese - you can guess but you never sure

Grammar:

How much pain is it to learn plural forms in Chinese? none

There are pages of plural pattern forms in Arabic (not only MSA but dialects have this)

Verb conjugations are not straightforward, especially when root letters are semivowels or doubled letters. Passive forms are written the same way as active but pronounced differently, need to know the internal (unwritten) vowels.

Arabic pronunciation is difficult for everybody. There are a lot of sounds, which don't existing in any other language and similar sounding sounds, which are quite distinct to an Arabic speaker but sound the same to a learner.

The diglossia in the Arab world is different from that of China. You still need to learn standard Arabic to understand Arabic written text but you will have hard time practising it because not many Arabs themselves have mastered it + very low literacy rates. MSA is no-one's mother tongue and is seldom spoken on the street but it's the language of education and media, the link between very distant dialects.

Very common cause for frustration: very difficult to look up words in dictionaries, finding root letters, taking away prefixes/suffixes, finding out which verb form is used.

My native tongue Russian is also difficult for foreigners but we write what we speak and you can learn by reading. Russian is very homogenous across all Russia and there are plentiful resources. Native Chinese find find it very hard to learn.

[aussie_mate]

for those ppl who don't believe in the importance of tones, try turning up to a new ctiy and telling a taxi driver a place name without the right tones and see how that turns out.

[Pravit]

Many excellent points brought up in this thread, just wanted to comment on one bit I found interesting:

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....

I've never been in their shoes, but I think many (obvious) foreigners in China attribute many of their problems to them looking foreign. I'm of Chinese descent, and I've been told that my Chinese pronunciation is more than decent, but every time I have anything more than a trivial exchange with a native speaker, I inevitably get asked if I'm Korean or Japanese. There have also been plenty of occasions when Chinese have asked me to repeat things two or even three times despite me being absolutely sure that I said it clearly. Given the extremely wide range of accents and dialects that native speakers can understand, I think it's safe to assume that it was our pronunciation that was off. My ultimate goal is for people to think I'm some 乡下家伙 rather than a Korean exchange student...

I agree Chinese is too often portrayed as more difficult than it actually is. In terms of grammar, I think the language is actually quite easy; the problem is that it's very slow to acquire because of the reading issue mentioned earlier. I also read books very slowly in Chinese because I have this irrational urge to look up every word even though I usually can guess what it means; it just bothers me I don't know how to pronounce it.

[koreth]

Interesting. I'm basing my "it's because I'm a white guy" perception largely on the many times when I've been out with my girlfriend (a native speaker) and said something to someone else in Chinese. I get a blank stare, repeat myself, the person understands, and later I turn to my girlfriend and ask her what I got wrong the first time. Very often she tells me I sounded about the same both times, or at least that my pronunciation was close enough to be comprehensible the first time.

She is (at my request) not at all shy about correcting me when I bungle my pronunciation, so I'm pretty sure it's not just her trying to spare my feelings.

Also, when we go to a couple of our favorite Chinese restaurants where the owners recognize me and already know I speak some Mandarin, they almost always understand me the first time. But these aren't places we go often enough (nor do I ever speak for long enough) that they would have had time to get used to my accent.

Not saying my pronunciation is perfect -- far from it, I screw up all the time and there are some sound sequences that still give me lots of trouble -- but I really think there's something else going on too.

[gougou]

Given the extremely wide range of accents and dialects that native speakers can understand, I think it's safe to assume that it was our pronunciation that was off.

How often do you have people asking you to repeat on the phone?

I quite liked Bill Dodson's post on this problem:

The vendor, a young, pretty girl, simply stared back at the customer, perplexed.

[gato]

I'm of Chinese descent

There have also been plenty of occasions when Chinese have asked me to repeat things two or even three times despite me being absolutely sure that I said it clearly. Given the extremely wide range of accents and dialects that native speakers can understand, I think it's safe to assume that it was our pronunciation that was off.

How often do you have people asking you to repeat on the phone?

Pravit said he's Chinese-American. People aren't asking him to repeat because he looks foreign.

Pravit has uploaded before recordings of his speaking Chinese (see link below). You can compare and see if your accent is better than his. I'm not sure I see any evidence of discrimination here on the basis of skin color.

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/15-cctv-learn-chinese577

[gougou]

Pravit said he's Chinese-American. People aren't asking him to repeat because he looks foreign.

My accent certainly is not better than his, that's why I was wondering. Because when I speak on the phone, nobody asks me to repeat - in fact, some people won't believe me when I tell them I'm a foreigner (granted, that mostly happens when calling to the South ). Speaking face to face, though, I often have the impression that people don't understand me more because of a mental block than because of my mispronunciation.

My ex was from HK, so her face looked Chinese alright, but people would be able to tell (I guess from her clothes and her behavior) that she was not from the mainland. Most guessed Korean... That could be the case for pravit, too.

[heifeng]

I'm not sure I see any evidence of discrimination here on the basis of skin color.

I don't think it's discrimination, it's more of the shock factor that people don't EXPECT that you are speaking Chinese if you are a foreigner...or sometimes they even are trying to think of what to say to you in English instead of just listening to you speak to them in Chinese....

Pravit said he's Chinese-American. People aren't asking him to repeat because he looks foreign.

Also it is very possible the Chinese person's putonghua listening comprehension is just not that good either =D

So going on a side topic, I think this is the reason some of us may get a lil' obsessed with our pronounciation. Some of us obvious foreigners probably figure that only if we are really freakin' good can we have people understand us 99% of the time and potentially stop people telling us to aspire to be dashan...hehe

Also, on the phone topic, I've had 'qq friends' or whatever in the past that I would talk to on the phone quite often and no one really ever guessed that I was a foreigner. They just thought that I wasn't doing my part to learn putonghua well enough and just spoke another dialect, hence my 'accent'. Overall, there were minimal problems with the Chinese person understanding me, if I understood or wanted to understand what they where going on about is another story..... I think I have talked about this before on this board, but chatting with strangers on qq w/o the 视频 and not revealing your identity is about the only way you are gonna get honest feedback on your accent from Chinese people, and the only way you can avoid the whole 'how do you like China' and other b.s. questioning and dumbed down Chinese that comes with having a foreign face....I highly recommend it...at least for a short time, or until you want to learn more civilized language and get sick of wangba's....

[赫杰]

I think I have talked about this before on this board, but chatting with strangers on qq w/o the 视频 and not revealing your identity is about the only way you are gonna get honest feedback on your accent from Chinese people, and the only way you can avoid the whole 'how do you like China' and other b.s. questioning and dumbed down Chinese that comes with having a foreign face....I highly recommend it

Thank you heifeng for the recommendation, I also often commend using QQ as a tool for improvement.

About the whole avoiding dumbed down Chinese and questions thing, my recommendation is finding someone (if you are in the position to do so) that you really enjoy talking to, someone that can become a really really good friend. What I mean is, I personally feel it's better to have a few really close friends, you know that kinds where you can just talk for hours and hours about the meaningful topics or just whatever, instead of having just many many not so close friends. Of course if you are really really 外向 then go get as many friends as you can.

But I am just saying, be sure to try to find those people who simply allow you to forget that you are a 老外 (to some extent), those that actually talk to you as if you were just a normal friend (even chinese friend), and stick with them as much as possible. Finally, when faced with the painfully typical questions, routine questions warrant routine responses, say your say (or ignore them outright, if desired) and leave them to make better use of your time.

HJ