How much truth is this guy really telling?

[yingguoguy]

The multiple readings for Japanese character do make learning them harder than Chinese. On the other hand script reform in Japan has limited the number of characters somwhat, and there is a tendency to write the more complex ones in the native alphabetic script rather than use the traditional character (Though newspapers often use characters outside of the 2000 approved characters)

On the otherhand there is increasing a large number of loan-words from English that have entered Japanese language in the past fifty years and foreign names are transliterated in such a way that you can usually work out the meaning if you say it aloud. Picking up a newspaper in Japan it's far easier to work out that it's talking about Azerbaijan than in Chinese. Similarly reading a programming manual or scientific paper is often easier as a vast number of terms are taken from English. I imagine classical Japanese is as much of a nightmare as Chinese though.

[trevelyan]

The multiple readings for Japanese character do make learning them harder than Chinese.

How is this different than needing to remember the different pronunciations of 为 or 转 or other 多音字? I always had trouble with those because when you see the words in different contexts and look them up... the tone is different from what you remember and its quite easy to just imagine you'd remembered it incorrectly.

Lu --> I think Moser mentioned, possibly elsewhere, that he was at Michigan studying classical Chinese. Knowing that coloured my reading of that section anyway. I agree that it isn't hard to peg the contemporary stuff and wasn't attempting to be offensive or dismissive. Cheers.

[perjp]

How is this different than needing to remember the different pronunciations of 为 or 转 or other 多音字? I always had trouble with those because when you see the words in different contexts and look them up... the tone is different from what you remember and its quite easy to just imagine you'd remembered it incorrectly.

In Japanese, characters with multiple pronounciations are the rule rather than the exception. Additionally, for Kunyomi (the native Japanese pronounciation for a character), characters are used semantically rather than phonetically, which means that the phonetic hint hidden in most characters cannot be used.

[necroflux]

I will certainly vouch for the difficulty of learning Japanese characters - it was easily more difficult than Chinese being that it's a hodgepodge, borrowed system. That combined with the varying degrees of politeness which seemed to effect a large portion of speech was what finally convinced me to switch to Chinese. Phonetically Japanese borrows from English so that was a plus, and obviously you don't have tones to worry about, but overall I'm going to say Japanese is a more difficult language to learn.

[chenpv]

Interesting article!

I am reminded of two questions concerning English spelling while reading the part 3. Could some one explain that how do you persuade yourself writing ' extravagant' instead of 'extravegent' and why do you use 'un', but 'ir', anterior 'reasonable' to create 'not reasonable'?

[novemberfog]

How is this different than needing to remember the different pronunciations of 为 or 转 or other 多音字? I always had trouble with those because when you see the words in different contexts and look them up... the tone is different from what you remember and its quite easy to just imagine you'd remembered it incorrectly.

Because almost every character in the 1,945 Joyo kanji (hanzi) list for basic literacy has several readings, with some characters with quite possibly 4 to 5 readings. And when you think you finally remember it all, and you see the hanzi in a compound, it changes from "setsu" to "zetsu" or "ton" to "don". Even when I start to figure out such patterns, there are always exceptions. Or perhaps it falls back on a not so common reading. It is quite different, my friend.

Luckily Japanese has doesn't use tones, and the words where tones matter...well you can figure it out by context.

I also find Japanese grammar to be harder, but I have not reached advanced level Chinese so I cannot make an accurate statement. Perhaps because I am learning Chinese as a third language, I figured out my learning style and that is why it seems a bit easier? Then again, the tones are not easy for me...

[noblsheep]

I will certainly vouch for the difficulty of learning Japanese characters - it was easily more difficult than Chinese being that it's a hodgepodge, borrowed system. That combined with the varying degrees of politeness which seemed to effect a large portion of speech was what finally convinced me to switch to Chinese. Phonetically Japanese borrows from English so that was a plus, and obviously you don't have tones to worry about, but overall I'm going to say Japanese is a more difficult language to learn.

Watching classmates learning Japanese in (a Chinese) middle school taught me that learning Chinese is a difficult task that gets easier and learning Japanese is an easy task that gets harder. As for classic Chinese, eventually we learn to guess our way through it after high school... but it's mostly impossible for anyone to understand classic works without footnotes - in ancient times people wrote books explaining books that were written a few dynasties ago. Think of it somewhat like reading pre-Shakespeare English literature and not something to be worried about.

[bomaci]

I disagree with what he says about tonal languages being weird. It is only weird if you let it be. That you emphasize something with a falling tone is a very Anglo-centric way of looking at things and is not even true in all european languages. Mandarin is a language completely capable of expressing a wide range of emotions through intonation. Just because it does it differently from English doesn't mean it is weird. In my mind the reason many people find the tones difficult is more due to the way they are taught in most schools. The intonation of every foreign language sounds weird at first, but as you listen to it more and more it starts to become natural. I don't think mandarin sounds weird at all anymore.

[Ferno]

I think it's interesting that the difficulty of writing Chinese characters is quickly becoming less important in the computer age. I can't write more than 100 characters on paper, but I am very easily able to "write" on a computer using a pinyin input system. With that ability I've decided that for my purposes being able to write every character I can recognize on paper would be a waste of time. Granted I won't be able to fill out any Chinese-only documents in China/Taiwan in person, but I'm willing to forgo that rarely needed ability for a massive amount of time saved.

i agree with this.

my knowledge of characters is poor but i can input phrases with pinyin.

i've had success with this with finding song lyrics/titles. I get a few phrases (none of which I understand, and toneless because of the music - not that it matters since most syllables of a specific tone have multiple characters) and then just input the character using Microsoft pinyin IME, which sorts everything out with the context recognizer.

speaking of the context recognizer, it seems to work quite well i wish i could memorize all the programming rules or whatever it has

i wonder how much Chinese people have to manually select the characters they want? There are still homonyms even with 2 syllable words:

ie I typed out "wo de xi guan" and it writes 我的习惯 - it chooses the xiguan 习惯 "habit" over the xiguan 吸管 "drinking straw"

[gato]

Could some one explain that how do you persuade yourself writing ' extravagant' instead of 'extravegent' and why do you use 'un', but 'ir', anterior 'reasonable' to create 'not reasonable'?

Although I don't have an answer to your question, I believe that you can blame it on the French because many of these words are borrowed from French. The French ruled England for several hundred years after William of Normandy (aka William the Conquerer) invaded England in 1066.

http://www.wikimirror.com/William_I_of_England

William initiated many major changes. In 1085, in order to ascertain the extent of his new dominionans and maximize taxation, William commissioned the compilation of the Domesday Book, a survey of England's productive capacity similar to a modern census. He also ordered many castles, keeps, and mots, among them the Tower of London, to be built across England to ensure that the rebellions by the English people or his own followers would not succeed. His conquest also led to Norman replacing English as the language of the ruling classes, for nearly 300 years.

The in-, il-, im-, ir- constructions are all from French, I believe.

in- incomplete

il- illogical

im- impatient

ir- irregular

un- is probably more Anglo-Saxon. I don't think the French use "un-." For instance, "unfair" is "injuste" in French.

Extravagant is also from French, who got it from Latin.

http://m-w.com/dictionary/extravagant

Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin extravagant-, extravagans, from Latin extra- + vagant-, vagans, present participle of vagari to wander about, from vagus wandering

[BFC_Peter]

As an English-speaker learning Chinese, I agree with the majority of his points about learning Chinese but I don't find his arguments so convincing when he says things like 'learning Chinese is also very hard for Chinese people' - it seems to me that he's judging Chinese on the attributes of English and I'm not sure it's fair to do that.

I remember being told a long long time ago that the hardest languages to learn were Chinese, Russian and English with English being there because so much of it didn't follow the rules that it had - don't know how true this is but my point is that I don't see much argument about the bad points of the English language.

As for the point about Classical Chinese being especially unintelligible - is this any different from the fact that the writings of Shakespeare are equally unintelligible to the majority of English-speaking people?

While the article is amusing and some of his points make me think it'll be another five years before I get beyond Basic and Intermediary levels, it doesn't deter me from learning Chinese, in fact it makes me think I have to work even harder.

[Lu]

I don't believe English is one of the more difficult languages. Sure, the spelling is quite impossible, but for the rest it's not that hard. The grammar is pretty regular, few exceptions (unlike French, Russian, Dutch), only one article (the), no der-dem-den etc like in German, the xingrongci stay the same whatever mingci you put behind it (unlike Dutch, Spanish and more), not many 'times' that a verb can have (unlike Spanish and French).

I saw a list once (I think from a link somewhere on this forum) of the most and least difficult languages, English was one of the easiest, Chinese one of the hardest.

[ddjiii]

I loved this article and most of it rang true for me - especially the sickening experience of being able to casually read something in a romance language I have never studied to better effect than the Chinese I've spent years trying to get a handle on.

But let's look on the bright side and find the easy points:

1) Grammar is dead easy. No verb tense, no verb person, no adjective agreement, no article agreement (no articles at all, really). It really could not be easier. To those who think English is easy, try teaching a Chinese person when to use the subjunctive and when to use the conditional.

2) Much more "logical" words than western languages, in many cases. Look at the numbering system: learn 9 words, and you can count to a billion. Try that in French. And compare a lot of ordinary words: train - 火车, locomotive - 火车头, truck (or lorry, of course) - 卡车, truck cab - 卡车头. The English words have no relationship; you have to memorize them. You still have to learn the Chinese of course, but once learned you're likely to remember. Especially with technological words, Chinese often uses a description or function, whereas with English it's just a word to memorize.

3) I would maintain that the sounds of spoken Chinese are easier than those of English. There are some Chinese consonents that are weird for us, but native English speakers often don't realize how unusual some of our sounds are, such as both th- sounds and especially our bizarre vowel dipthongs - although Chinese actually shares a lot of these.

4) Vocabulary. I have heard it said that because of all its borrowings English has a much larger vocabulary than most other languages, although I don't know if this is true. Certainly our system of verb/preposition combinations is maddening to English students - think about hang up, hang out, hangover, hang on, hang around. They have completely different meanings, and there are many examples of this.

Having taught English to Chinese people, I can tell you that they often find it very frustrating too, so we should take courage.

[lau]

But let's look on the bright side and find the easy points:

1) Grammar is dead easy.

I would disagree. It does look easy - no changes in 形容词，no tenses, no articles... But somehow, the more I study, the more i need to look back at the simple things. I have been spending some time lately trying to figure out the ultimate truth about 了's. After some years of studies I even bought a grammar book, which is something i never thought i will ever need. And all the damn 同义词 and 近义词! It's not grammar, but it's not just vocabulary either... All the books I ever used to study concentrate more on the sentence patterns, but most of the mistakes I get in my writing is excess/lacking 的，some 就，也，去 added/crossed out, get my 懂 changed to 明白，不管 changed to 不在意 etc. And when I ask - why?, they just say "we don't usually say it this way". Which makes perfect sense, of course, but even my brand-new grammar book cannot help.

But lets look on the bright side - learning chinese develops guessing skills greatly, and the wonderfull skill of explaining yourself with a lot of "那个，那个..." and really intricate gesticulating. Very good for the intravert types like me ;)