As a beginner addressing experienced learners, what makes Chinese exceptionally difficult

[Rowan]

Hey,

 

The topic of this thread is probably something that has been discussed at much length on this forum previously. Still, I'm hoping maybe the mods could leave it open as I don't think any of the other threads really got at some questions that I personally find particularly nagging and on which I'd love to hear the opinions of experienced learners. I'm the definition of a beginner, I've taken a quarter long Mandarin class in college so far, that's it, I know 150 characters or so. I'm already deeply involved in an Indo-European language and although Chinese really interests me my question isn't really coming from the perspective of someone who's been learning Chinese for any considerable amount of time or who plans on launching into the aforesaid task any time in the near future. 

 

To the point, Chinese obviously has a reputation as being very difficult for a westerner as opposed to an Indo-European language and I've read a lot of attempted explanations on this forum and elsewhere as to why, but I'm not sure I'm entirely satisfied.

 

Reading some of the older threads on here, reasons cited for the difficulty Chinese presents once you get to more advanced levels seem to include most frequently essentially the three following things:

 

- The difficulty of understanding the tones in rapid speech and tone sandhi.

 

- Way of saying things, that Chinese people just form sentences differently and it's hard to define it with grammar rules.

 

- The characters take a long time to learn compared to the relatively small alphabets of European languages.

 

 

 

The only one of these reasons that immediately makes sense to me is the characters. It's true that they take effort to learn, but I would think after learning the several thousand or so characters that make up a native's arsenal that this complication would be surpassed. And although learning several thousand characters would take a long time, it wouldn't be enough time to put Chinese in a whole different league since most of the learning process will still revolve around understanding words made up by characters combinations and how those words are used in the context of other words in the language, etc. 

 

 

 

So I guess the two questions I really want to ask is:

 

1. As for rapid speech, this is something that will always be very challenging with every language until you have the level of familiarity with the words and you have made the kind of neuronal connections that you don't have to process the information any more and the sounds of the words simply trigger comprehension and thus you can listen to rapid sentences with full comprehension because your brain can keep up. Do tones really make this aspect of the language of considerable more difficult than a rapid string of words in an alternate foreign language?

 

2. The other reason given is that in Chinese, sentences are worded differently in ways that can't be explained by grammar rules. An example I found on this site was: 

 

"This sentence roughly translates as "I waited a long time but I didn't succeed in waiting for him". Or in regular English "I waited a long time but he never showed up". 

 

Again, what leaves me unsatisfied with this reason is that from what I can tell every language has endless explainable differences in wording such as this that, if perhaps admittedly less unfamiliar than the Chinese ones, still must simply be assimilated.

 

For instance, in French you might say the equivalent of "One would say I don't leave her indifferent, so much she always fixes me of the eyes." (On dirait je ne la laisse pas indifferente, tant elle me fixe des yeux.") instead of "It seems she fancies me, judging by how much she is always staring at me."

 

So, my question is why is the Chinese example here somehow fundamentally different that it becomes so much more of a task than its French counterpart?

 

Thanks so much, and sorry for the longwindedness of this post.

[abcdefg]

- The difficulty of understanding the tones in rapid speech and tone sandhi.

Not sure I agree with that one. The more difficult task is producing the tones properly in rapid speech.

 

- Way of saying things, that Chinese people just form sentences differently and it's hard to define it with grammar rules.

Also disagree with your number 2. The basic grammar and syntax rules are not very complex.

[skylee]

But who cares if you are satisfied or not?

 

And although learning several thousand characters would take a long time, it wouldn't be enough time to put Chinese in a whole different league since most of the learning process will still revolve around understanding words made up by characters combinations and how those words are used in the context of other words in the language, etc.

 

I think there is serious underestimation here. Expressions like chengyu take a long time to learn even for natives as they involve folklores and history. But I guess the counter argument would be that it is the same in other languages. Haha.

[Rowan]

Skylee, nothing obliges you to care, I don't think I ever said you should be obliged to attempt to respond to my confusions if you don't want to. 

[renzhe]

Learning characters is difficult, but it's more of an intermediate-level thing. Upper intermediate students will be able to read moderately difficult native materials, and it's mostly downhill from there. It's a three-year investment which hurts, but eventually you're done with it and move on (except some basic maintenance).

The main difficulty of Chinese is often summarised in the sprint-marathon comparison. Each step on its own is easy, but there's just so much of it.

An example are grammar patterns. Indo-European languages typically have complicated morphology, laid out in tables, classified by grammatical gender, numerous declensions and conjugations, etc. Most of this fits on a few sheets of A4 papers which are memorised easily enough, but require mental gymnastics when forming sentences. After a while, though, these things tend to "click" and you're done with it and move on. I'd argue that you can learn all of German grammar required for passing the C2 exam in about 6 months, including using them in conversation. Few rules, which are complicated, and breaking it all in.

Not so much with Chinese. There are thousands of grammar patterns for expressing all sorts of things, and you learn them one by one. You don't get a convenient sheet of laminated paper summarising ALL grammar, like you get for European languages. Instead of you get a dictionary. Or counting words, you learn those while you're alive. As a beginner, this seems simple -- you learn several simple rules, and avoid the nasty morphology. But after three years, your French-learning friends have totally mastered conjugations and don't think about them, and you're still learning grammar patterns and counting words by the dozen.

With tones, it's essentially training. All humans process tones subconsciously in all languages, but it plays a very different role in tonal languages. Beginners don't notice this, because they use a limited vocabulary, and are talked to using slow, simple, unaccented speech, which gives them time to process this mentally. At advanced levels, you get noisy, accented speech, and you're expected to understand many words at full speed based on tone and context alone. You barely hear any initials or finals. Getting your listening up to this level where you can do all of this completely unconsciously is a long process.

I agree, producing fast speech with correct tones and sandhi is even more difficult.

[renzhe]

I think there is serious underestimation here. Expressions like chengyu take a long time to learn even for natives as they involve folklores and history. But I guess the counter argument would be that it is the same in other languages. Haha.

That is an interesting point. My mother tongue is full of concise proverbs, and I can usually find a Croatian proverb for each chengyu I encounter. They are very common in speech too, much like chengyu (though they do not have the neat 4-character structure most chengyu have).

The advantage we Europeans have when learning other European languages is that many of these stories are shared, as is much of history, culture and folklore. This means that guessing the meaning is much easier. With Chinese folklore, we have a lot more learning to do.

[Rowan]

Renzhe -

 

So concerning grammar, it's more the sheer size of different grammar patterns beyond the basics you would find in a Chinese primer textbook that makes it difficult? French has all sorts of conjugations, but they're based on repetitive patterns and don't pose much difficulty compared to learning the vocabulary of a French native speaker. In the example I gave I used I could replace the nouns and pronouns with something totally different in French, but the meaning would still work because the construction remains comprehensible regardless. Are you trying to say that in Chinese this construction would change depending on what is being brought up, or the particular situation, and thus a whole different wording would need to be used?

 

 

I think that clarifies a lot on the tones for me. Essentially, while rapid speech is hard in every language, the addition of tones make it a larger headache. Instead of listening for words that usually have at least two syllables like in most languages, you're sitting there trying to discern monosyllabic words based frequently more on tone than sound because natives don't always enunciate clearly, since they can make it sufficiently clear for themselves with just tone and context, instead of listening for mostly words with multiple syllables and no tonal complication.

 

Am I understanding you properly?

[Ruben von Zwack]

I'm just an advanced beginner, so I don't know if my opinion helps much, but to me, all those points are minor really, and you basically rebutted them yourself already. With tones, they rather help keeping all those homophones apart. But like abcdefg said, they are difficult to produce (not to hear, for me at least). At my current level, I can identify 2 problems:

 

1) accents and slurred speech. "Slurred" sonds bad, I don't mean this in a derogatory way at all. This will of course get better over time the more I listen, but I acknowledge that for a language with so many homophones, it's quite challenging. I seem to notice that Chinese people joke about homophones and misunderstanding each other in humorous ways, so I think this problem (or let's say challenge) is real and not just me.

 

2) lack of a scaffolding. My mother tongue is German, and I thoroughly studied Latin at school, plus your fair share of English. So I got a broad arsenal there to approach any other Germanic or Latin language. I don't really know anything about Slavic languages, but I've looked into some a bit just for fun, and found them to be quite "similar" too, and full of shared words (especially if you know older forms of German). Now I lack all this for Chinese. And for any Asian, African or, say, indigenous North American language. But this should be reciprocal, and someone who has Hakka as their mother tongue should by my reasoning be in the same position when embarking on French or Croatian, and find Mandarin and Vietnamese easier.

 

There used to be a third problem, lack of exposure when you live in Europe, but thankfully with the internet, it is easy to overcome that. Not as easy as if you want to listen to French talk shows and watch Spanish films and make Dutch friends, but still, it's possible with moderate effort.

[renzhe]

But like abcdefg said, they are difficult to produce (not to hear, for me at least). At my current level, I can identify 2 problems:

1) accents and slurred speech.

That's the thing. For people who are really good at tones, accents are much easier.

People who are bad with tones tend to rely on correctly pronounced (and clearly heard) initials and finals, whereas a large part of the information is encoded in the tone. So having trouble with c/ch, -in/-ing and xiao/yao, and the rest often implies that your tones are not up to speed. Initials and finals get slurred and blurred much more often than in other languages, and it's because the tones can disambiguate sufficiently.

I'm amazed at the ability of native Chinese speakers to understand utterly incomprehensible speech as long as the tones are intact. At the same time, perfect initials and finals will sometimes completely stump them if you mangle the tones.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Yes, I have watched in amazement a conversation between a Chinese guy and his girlfriend who spoke with a sunflower seed firmly between her front teeth. They had this long conversation of her modulating "♪♫ əəəəə ♪♫ ə ♪ əə! ♫♫" (and maybe some "ŋ!" may have been in there, too), and him replying in comprehensible Mandarin "isn't that a bit late? - yeah, good idea - haha really? - oh ok let's phone xy and ask"

[sparrow]

@Rowan:

I agree completely with your assessment.

 

As people are saying, tones are incredibly important in Chinese. it's really true that you can get away with barely pronouncing the words, and as long as the tones are there, the speech is comprehensible. This is very noticeable with thick, Beijing accents where slurring is so prevalent. I remember listening to my host brother talk and marveling at how little he actually moved his mouth. Most famously, 不知道 bu4 zhi1dao4 became 不儿奥 bu4'er1'ao4, which was his second-favorite answer to any question, the first being 嗯 en. 

 

But a lot of this can be overcome by realizing this is an issue and exposing yourself to it constantly. Beijing soap operas are great for this and concentrating on tones as being the word.

 

I've seen classmates learn a word, for example, 公共汽车 gonggong qiche, then they try to remember, "Okay, this is first tone, fourth tone, fourth tone, first tone." Separating pronunciation and tones counter productive. Say it aloud 20 times with the correct tones so you internalize them together. The goal is to not remember what tones a word is—and if you want to find out, you have to pronounce it and say, "Oh, from how I say it, it's apparently first, fourth." That's the level of internalization you want, and it comes from practicing saying new words many times while you're studying the vocab.

 

In my opinion, languages first and foremost are spoken and listened to. That should be your main focus; writing should be viewed as a way to reinforce your language ability. If you can say something, you can often write it (as long as you have the characters). It absolutely does not go the opposite way—just because you can write a grammar piece doesn't mean you can use it easily in speech. So, when you learn a grammar pattern, learn the necessary characters, then just say it over and over in different permutations. That's how to do it. The advantage of a good textbook is the ability to spend a significant amount of time practicing grammar examples in various permutations (thank you, Integrated Chinese).

 

But I'm not sure how prevalent the above issue is, so I apologize if that's nothing new to anyone.

 

Rapid speech is difficult—understanding and producing—but the same was true for any language in my opinion. Every language I've tried to learn involves native speakers who slur words, take shortcuts in speech, and so on.

 

And in a way, dealing with this problem in Chinese is easier because most Chinese visual media has subtitles due to the number of "non-standard" speakers in China. This subtitle issue is not true for most languages—though it can be fixed by buying DVDs to watch. That still doesn't help with news broadcasts, though.

 

Characters take a lot of time and daily persistence—if you miss a week of practice, that really sucks—and that is more true with Chinese than with Indo-European languages, though it is still true for all languages. However, characters are a barrier that can be overcome by anyone with time and patience. 5–10 new words a day gives you a vocabulary of 1825–3650 in a year, which is a decent amount and well within reach for anyone who is committed.

 

Chengyus may take time to learn, but they are just new vocabulary to acquire, which is similar in other languages. In fact, I feel Chengyu are a bit easier because every Chengyu has a story behind it. Plus, as a foreigner, when you drop a Chengyu on a native speaker, they shower you with praise, brownies, 饺子, and 糖葫芦, freak out, then turn to anyone within earshot and exclaim how amazing your Chinese is (exaggerating). You won't get that in France.

 

Seriously, though, when a Chinese person freaks out about something you said being very 地道 authentic, whatever it was that you said will have a very strong hook in your brain and you will remember it.

 

Also, I'd argue that even though there's a library of grammar patterns in Chinese to learn, you don't need to use them—though understanding a good portion is helpful. Sticking with a smaller subset of these will get you extremely far in terms of speaking and writing, which is not really true for Indo-European languages. You need to learn your tenses in those languages, otherwise you will be making glaring mistakes and won't be able to express yourself correctly because the sense of time and the persons involved will be incorrect.

 

In Chinese, you can express yourself correctly using a fairly small set of grammar patterns—they might in fact fit on a few pages of A4 as they would look similar to a vocabulary list, with a few examples for each grammar point.

 

I think after just a few months, your opinions about Chinese are pretty spot on. People see Chinese as a bigger problem than it is. Functional fluency doesn't mean you need to learn and use everything fluently; it's enough to create a solid foundation well that will serve you in a variety of situations. Except for characters—those really do just take awhile (though not as long as people think if the right kind of practice is involved).

[Ruben von Zwack]

@Rowan - I have the impression Chinese is monosyllabic in linguistic theories, but not so much in reality. And as they have so many homophones, I find the tones help, rather than being an additional difficulty (I'm talking about understanding only, not about speaking correctly or even pleasant to a native's ear, alas). For example, I was just looking for a word that sounded like yanqing. Pleco gives me four of that spelling, but because the first syllable was so clearly tone 4, at least I can rule out the suggestions with tone 2.

 

I am not sure if you mean you want to dive in deeper into learning Chinese, or not. But if tones are troubling you now, just be patient, work with a lot of audio material,  and give yourself some more time. If you keep up the effort and don't give up, tones will for sure get more natural to you every day.

[abcdefg]

I'm amazed at the ability of native Chinese speakers to understand utterly incomprehensible speech as long as the tones are intact. At the same time, perfect initials and finals will sometimes completely stump them if you mangle the tones.

I notice that over and over. Could not agree more.

[Meng Lelan]

host brother talk and marveling at how little he actually moved his mouth

 

 

Yes, I notice that too, makes speechreading impossible. 

[c_redman]

This was such a refreshing post from a relative beginner!

 

Instead of listening for words that usually have at least two syllables like in most languages, you're sitting there trying to discern monosyllabic words based frequently more on tone than sound

I think this is a crucial point that is incorrect in the original premise. Yes, you could learn 2000-3000 characters in about a year, and be able to pronounce anything you read, but would still be far from fluent. What we would consider "words" are commonly more than one character for content words, and that means maybe 15000-20000 more items to study. In terms of listening, it's also multisyllabic. There are more homophones to deal with than other languages, but it's not an insurmountable problem. For me, it's still the large number of words one needs to know, and be able to recall in real-time.

 

So concerning grammar, it's more the sheer size of different grammar patterns beyond the basics you would find in a Chinese primer textbook that makes it difficult? French has all sorts of conjugations, but they're based on repetitive patterns and don't pose much difficulty compared to learning the vocabulary of a French native speaker. In the example I gave I used I could replace the nouns and pronouns with something totally different in French, but the meaning would still work because the construction remains comprehensible regardless. Are you trying to say that in Chinese this construction would change depending on what is being brought up, or the particular situation, and thus a whole different wording would need to be used?

I'm not that advanced to answer definitively, but that's my impression of Chinese. After the basic grammar is learned, I think of it as mostly a nebulous set of customary usages that even Chinese may not think about as grammar until a foreigner said something that "we don't say in Chinese" or "isn't very elegant". I imagine it's similar to the following in English:

to get {on, in} a car

to get {on, in} a bus

to get {on, in} an interstellar spaceship

One of these is more correct in each case, but even native speakers (like me) would have difficulty explaining why, other than collocation. You could take 4 years of English class and read 10 textbooks and never learn which is right in each case. Even now, I can't find a decent rule online other than unsourced theories. Is it about public transportation or historically open-ended seating? if you insisted on a grammar point for this, any working theory would be mostly safe. But it would be a rule that covers a small number of situations. Alternatively, you could just go by common usage, which would be more accurate, but would require a lot of language exposure.

If you want an idea of the nuances in Chinese grammar, look through Yip and Rimmington's Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar. Why can you say 看书 (to read) and not 阅读书? Because an action verb and an object must obey a rhythmic principle, and a disyllabic verb can't be followed by a monosyllabic object. Why is 他在跟他聊天 (he is chatting with him) correct and not 他在聊天 (he is chatting)? Because 聊天 (chat) is incompatible with a singular subject. What Chinese lacks in verb conjugation (which I never thought was a difficult part of language learning anyway), it more than makes up for in the number of highly specific usage rules.

[querido]

c_redman said: "...but would require a lot of language exposure"

In light of the thread - just going with the best posts above - if anything "makes Chinese exceptionally difficult" it is that it is easier to automatize a grammar book (French, Russian) than it is to set up and experience the extensive audio-only experience that ingrains those usages of which c_redman wrote, or which makes that sunflower seed trick possible.

I hope you don't mind the following aside:

In my experience, repeating the audio of typical textbook lessons or podcasts - pieces that are too easily memorized or partly-memorized - doesn't touch this problem very well (the problem that someone can memorize a set of lessons but still be stumped by someone using the same words in a different context or with an accent). What is needed is graded listening pieces so long that the experience is of continuous decoding uninterrupted by unknown words and unaided by a memory playing along in the background. It looks like the audio that comes with graded readers is my most promising material in this regard.

Some podcast audio includes commentary in Chinese that is several times longer than the podcast. Clipping this off and "learning" only the podcast was a very bad mistake I made.

To content producers here's an idea: "HSK Radio". Thanks. :-)

[Demonic_Duck]

Plus, as a foreigner, when you drop a Chengyu on a native speaker, they shower you with praise, brownies, 饺子, and 糖葫芦, freak out, then turn to anyone within earshot and exclaim how amazing your Chinese is (exaggerating). You won't get that in France.

 

This even works if you get the chengyu wrong, as long as it's a sufficiently obscure one. I came out with "隔靴挠痒" the other day and was instantly showered with heaps of praise. It was only later that I realised it should have been 隔靴搔痒, but apparently that fact wasn't worth mentioning.

[anonymoose]

Why is 他在跟他聊天 (he is chatting with him) correct and not 他在聊天 (he is chatting)?

 

I think 他在聊天 is acceptable.

[sparrow]

@c_redman #15:

and that means maybe 15000-20000 more items to study

In terms of vocabulary (as you said, 生词 instead of 汉字), 5000–10000 is usually enough through active study. After that, you will pick up most new vocabulary through context, similar to how a native speaker would.

 

to get {on, in} a car
to get {on, in} a bus
to get {on, in} an interstellar spaceship

 

Natural languages are not logic-based creations. Sometimes, it is best to just learn how things are done, rather than trying to figure out why. Despite any logical pattern that may exist, certain things are idiomatic.

 

Of course, knowing the hows and whys can be helpful, but when you're speaking at 300 words per minute, you will not have time to ponder over which preposition is appropriate.

 

For the English learner, one approach is to be aware of prepositions that you read and hear, try to write a few new ones down everyday, make omission-style flashcards ("Today, we're traveling ___ an airplane."), and just drill it for a two or three minutes each day. It should make a huge difference.

 

 

This is perhaps where the difficulty lies: Trying to remember the conditions of a grammar pattern might be the wrong approach. Make a ten or twenty correct examples of each condition and just drill it. There's little point knowing that XYZ is wrong. However, if you can hear that XYZ just sounds wrong, then you're internalizing the language better.

 

My approach when I first started studying Chinese was to read the grammar explanation once, then drill the hell out of the example sentences. I never had to remember any specifics—the proper use of the grammar pattern was internalized. If my understanding was not perfect, fine—I would run into unorthodox uses when reading/listening and would take note.

 

At least in my experience, remembering a million grammar factoids is much more difficult than the above approach.

[sparrow]

@Demonic_Duck #17:

Wow, if I had been there when you dropped that, it'd be 饺子馆 time. That's pretty beast.