Is Chinese more difficult than European languages

[HashiriKata]

@ atitarev & chrix: Let the professional be the referee and sort it out for you!

It's important to say that Japanese grammar is different, not difficult.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear this from a Russian speaker, but to people whose mother-tongue language doesn't involve a lot of morphological encodings, Japanese grammar can be said to be complicated, especially at the beginning stage.

Politeness and respect language in Japanese can be difficult to remember too, because it's very easy for learners to confuse between these two separate aspects of the language. Even for native speakers, if they don't use 敬語 very often, it's also easy for them to make simple slips which can seem very serious purely because of the social situations in which they have to use 敬語.

Japanese pronunciation is very simple to master, so it's easy to say what you want in Japanese but it may be not so easy to differentiate, and therefore, to comprehend what's said. I hope this won't be a challenge for atitarev on his next trip to Japan but I'd be interested to hear what his experience on this will be like. Anyway, wish you a very pleasant trip, atitarev!

[renzhe]

It's certainly a good point that our native language plays a large role when it comes to what's "easy". People complain about German grammar, but I found it very easy. When it comes to languages that decline nouns and conjugate verbs, German is as easy as they come. For people not used to cases, it's difficult to comprehend.

That's why I find it strange when people say that Chinese is easy, if you ignore the tones. You can be understood if you ignore tones, but you can also be understood if you ignore declensions and speak German only using nominative case. In both cases, it sounds wrong, but you can usually guess the meaning.

The very fact that so few Chinese learners completely master tones is an indication that this is, indeed, something difficult.

[roddy]

That's why I find it strange when people say that Chinese is easy, if you ignore the tones.

Yeah, and the characters. Chinese is really easy if you don't worry about the tones and the characters. Similarly, advanced mathematics is simple, as long as you skip the equations and numbers.

[bhchao]

I took French in high school and college. Learning the French verb and adjective conjugations was a nightmare.

Unlike French and Japanese, there are no verb and adjective conjugations in Mandarin (no SOV structure either). Mandarin does not have verbs and adjectives with honorific forms like those found in Korean.

Mandarin grammar is too easy and straightforward.

Edited May 25, 2009 at 07:23 PM by bhchao

[FadedStardust]

That's why I find it strange when people say that Chinese is easy, if you ignore the tones.

I see these comments not to mean "ignore/don't use tones" but rather, "Chinese is easy other than the fact that there are tones," implying that the tones are the difficult part to master, making an otherwise "easy" language "hard."

I even somewhat agree with this, spoken Chinese is very simple, of grammatically speaking, compared with languages with a lot of cases/conjugation/gender rules. But, as has been stated before, it depends on what languages you already know/your own personal experiences learning other languages to determine what you'd consider easy or hard.

Yeah, and the characters. Chinese is really easy if you don't worry about the tones and the characters. Similarly, advanced mathematics is simple, as long as you skip thyoe equations and numbers.

Unfortunately, a lot of people DO ignore learning characters; I remember doing language exchange back when I first started learning Chinese (I had been studying maybe about a year at that point) and having the people I was talking to be very surprised that I was already learning to read. One person told me that someone else they did language exchange with had been studying for many years, was very fluent when it came to speaking but couldn't read ANYTHING that wasn't in Hanyu Pinyin, not even the simple 你好 that most of us start off learning. I find myself unable to understand why the person was/is THAT afraid of learning characters. Pity, really...

[renzhe]

Learning the French verb and adjective conjugations was a nightmare.

Yet they all fit on a couple of pages. Now imagine how it is for me to learn all the measure words for all the different nouns, which neatly fit in 100-page dictionary

Unlike French and Japanese, there are no verb and adjective conjugations in Mandarin (no SOV structure either). Mandarin does not have verbs and adjectives with honorific forms like those found in Korean.

True, and morphology is often the most difficult aspect learners face with new languages.

but then again, French doesn't have aspect particles, complements of state and degree. You don't have to think about tone sandhi while talking.

Mandarin also has a very strict ordering of words in a sentence that is difficult for speakers of languages like Croatian, where you can rearrange the words in a sentence in any order and it still makes sense.

And then there are counting words.

I see these comments not to mean "ignore/don't use tones" but rather, "Chinese is easy other than the fact that there are tones," implying that the tones are the difficult part to master, making an otherwise "easy" language "hard."

Different languages are difficult in different ways. "Chinese is easy other than the fact that there are tones" sounds like "Russian is easy other than the fact that there are declensions and conjugations".

Not having morphology (or having very little of it) does not mean that Chinese is easy, since the tonal complexity more than makes up for it, imho.

I'm not trying to attack anyone here, I just find it surprising how many people consider Chinese to be easy. I guess people really are different.

[renzhe]

Here, a perfect example: a recent thread.

I've been studying Chinese intensively for years, and I still have no idea how to say such a simple thing. I've been thinking and I don't have a clue how to order the words to make it correct Mandarin, or which other words I should use.

I've only done a couple of semesters of once-a-week Spanish, and saying this in Spanish is easy.

[chrix]

renzhe, I think the difficulty about French conjugations is the irregularity, not so much the patterns as such. Maybe in the same way German noun declensions are not difficult per se but there's something like over 20 different patterns German nouns can be declined, which can drive people nuts. What's your take on this, I'd be curious to know.

roddy, sometimes people tell me that they'd like to learn Japanese or Chinese for business purposes, but would dispense with the characters. I'm not sure how it's working out for them, and if this is useful at all, but there's a number of people doing it.

[chrix]

renzhe, that was a joke with the measure words, right? Most languages with classifiers have lots of them on paper, but the number used in colloquial speech is much lower, so it shouldn't amount to 100 pages. (I know that Chinese seems to be amongst the languages using a higher number of them than others like Indonesian which is down to three, orang for people, ekor for animals and buah for things, even though theoretically they'd have around 100 as well).

I think one problem with the difficulty discussion is the fact that in the West, usually morphology is taken as the standard of comparison, so if you order European languages by this criterion, Russian is more complex than German which in turn is more complex than English and so forth. Against this standard, Japanese appears easy and Chinese even easier. But how many people have said here, there's a lot of difficulties in the syntax. I think it can be both said for Japanese and Chinese, their syntax is quite different from the way SAE (Standard Average European, i.e. the "major European languages") works, which makes learning these languages harder for speakers of SAE.

[renzhe]

renzhe, I think the difficulty about French conjugations is the irregularity, not so much the patterns as such. Maybe in the same way German noun declensions are not difficult per se but there's something like over 20 different patterns German nouns can be declined, which can drive people nuts. What's your take on this, I'd be curious to know.

The 100 pages thing was ... somewhat exaggerated. Still, counting words pose quite a bit of difficulty for Europeans, and there is little help short of memorising them, for each new word you learn. It's hard to argue that a language is very simple when you can't simply say "one tiger" or "one cow". Especially when you have three counting words to choose from, depending on the context.

German declension is not difficult at all, actually. You usually only decline the article, and the adjectives undergo some morphological change, so it's simpler than the languages like Latin or Russian, where each word changes. The killer in German are the genders. Especially genders for non-German words. They're almost random.

Anyway, having learned Latin (and English), I agree that exceptions are the worst part of any language. Which is why I'm even more perplexed when people claim that English has easy grammar.

[chrix]

sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I didn't mean German declensions were difficult, but you have to know for every noun which of the 20+ declensions it belongs to. How did you master that? Just curious.

In high school we had a very cool assistant teacher from France, he told us about techniques he used studying German, for example taking cold showers to practice the "ch" sound For the genders, he had all these Eselsbruecken (mnemonics) such as "Rock" (skirt) is masculine because it's worn by females, and the other way round with "Hose" (pants), and stuff like that.

[renzhe]

sorry, I wasn't clear enough. I didn't mean German declensions were difficult, but you have to know for every noun which of the 20+ declensions it belongs to.

20+ ? Are you sure you're not confusing it with some other language?

There is the feminine declension, the masculine/neutral, and the -n declension (which is rare and only for people/positions/occupations). And they all have the same plural.

The tricky part is knowing the gender and the plural form (for masculine/neutral nouns). Which takes memorisation and mnemonics.

[chrix]

yes, I was taking them together, from a systemic point of view, they're different paradigms. Of course we could also call them subdeclensions, if you will, but the fact remains that there's more than 20+. (I mean if you have never seen a noun before, and also don't have any other clues such as gender etc. then you have to choose among the 20+)

[renzhe]

Well, it didn't seem that difficult to me, to be honest, but I generally have little trouble with structured stuff like declensions, and German doesn't have many exceptions.

With gender, there are general rules that can help: -er is usually masculine, diminutives like -chen and -lein are neutral, most words ending in -e are feminine, almost everything with -heit and -keit is feminine, etc. It doesn't cover everything, but it helps.

Generally, it's easy to pick out the feminine nouns, distinguishing masculine and neutral can be tricky. If you're not sure, reformulate the sentence so you use plural or the dative singular form (they are the same for masculine and neutral nouns).

The plural is the tricky one and you have to learn it.

But this is getting a bit off topic. Still, it shows how all languages have something tricky. None of these points applies to Chinese, but in Chinese you have to deal with tones, characters and measure words. The complements of state also depend on the verb and you have to know what goes with what. Lots of stuff that's anything but obvious to a European.

[chrix]

yes I agree completely. The answer to this question is relative to your mother tongue and other languages you have studied so far. I think that's very important to keep in mind.

Sometimes when I'm asked what the most difficult language is, I'm tempted to retort "how would you feel about Abkhaz" , but in reality I find it quite difficult to answer, because usually people expect a one-word answer, not a lecture...

[krinque]

I think that when discussing relative difficulity of a language you should take into the account not only what languages a person knows but also what are her/his abilities.

When learning a language there are many different things you have to memorise and the speed of memorising depends on a person's capacity.

You have to memorise:

1) grammar rules, for example that you use measure word after 这 but not after 这些

2) additional grammar information, which are often presented in a table, for example a list of measure words and categories in Chinese or a gender and plural of each noun in German

3) pronunciation

4) the way a word looks like

Poor abilities in 4) won't be a problem when learning German, Korean or Vietnamese (you write basically as you read), it will make some problem about French or Thai, but is a severe obstacle when you plan to learn Chinese or Japanese.

However Chinese written language has a very nice feature that majority of characters consist of other characters or other meaningful parts (radicals and others). This feature makes it much easier for me to understand Chinese characters, as I almost don't have to remember how a character looks like but what it is composed of. But I'm not sure if all people find it useful. I know that some of my friends find the German fashion of combining words into new one as disturbing whereas for me it is easier to memorise word which consist of other words.

[chrix]

what exactly do you mean by the "German fashion of combining words into new ones"? If you mean these famous monster compounds Mark Twain talks about, he was mostly joking when he wrote

it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary--six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam--that is, without hyphens

It is by no means typical of the language. Words cited here are mostly bureaucratic language, and you find monstrous bureautic coinages in most languages' legal codes. In fact, the main difference between German Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän (which is a word that only occurs in this joke) and the putative English equivalent "Danube steamship company captain" in my eyes mainly differ in their orthography. You could make the case that English also just strings the words together but unlike German leaves the spaces.

[krinque]

I was thinking rather about words like "Krankenhaus". If you know that "krank" means ill and "Haus" means house, then it is nearly obvious that "Krankenhaus" means hospital. This does not apply to the english word "hospital" itself. If you don't know this word you will not guess its meaning.

In addition, my basic mnemonic, which is imaginating a story involving the meaning of the word to be remembered and the meaning of an already known word which is similar in sound, is of limited use when learning the word "hospital". The reason is, it will help me only to remember that the word sounds similar to, let's say "ospa" (Polish word for smallbox (天花）). It is much simpler for me to learn a language if words compose of each other. It is not a problem that the meaning cannot be derived from the meaning of the parts. I memorised 天花 immediately although it's literal meaning (flower of heaven, correct me if I'm wrong) had nothing to do with that terrible disease. It was also very easy to learn the word 无 （without）because it was so similar to 天 (sky, heaven). It would not be as simple if I learned traditional chinese, as 無 is much more complicated than 无

Anyway, if one prefers to remember the words by heart without using the same mnemonic as me then her or his view on relativy simplicity of languages is much different.

[chrix]

Well, German also has "Spital" ;)... Well it's true that Krankehaus is made up of two parts like this, and in this particular example the English equivalent is different, but there's tons of words that work in English the same way, such as bodyguard, pig farm, high school, homework etc. I guess my point is, while I see that German does a lot of this, I fail to see how special this is compared to what English does, with the potential exception of those monstrosities confined to bureaucratic speech.

天花 is a nice example for a noncompositional compound, which means a compound whose meaning cannot be deduced from its parts. But almost all compounds have some degree of noncompositionality, some more, some less. For instance, the English compound blackbird is idiomatic since it can no longer refer to ANY black bird, but to a SPECIFIC type of bird.

Well as far as mnemonics go: unless you have a gift like Ken Hale, you'll need to memorise stuff. I think most people find mnemonics helpful. I personally don't recall using any for Chinese (but that's because I grew up with characters), but I came up with plenty of silly mnemonics when I was studying Indonesian (they also say the sillier the mnemonics the easier to remember).

[zozzen]

it reminds me of a frequently discussion appeared in different language forum. Not only does Westerner think Chinese is tough, Chinese people feel the way too. But can most of us master a perceived 'éasier' language? i doubt it.