Why is Chinese so hard to learn?

26 May 2005

Download this program (Right click and Save As...)

If you ask professional linguists a question like that, most will probably say that every language is complex in some ways and simple in others, and that they average out to around the same level of complexity. But that's probably not the kind of answer you're looking for. If we rephrase the question, though, and ask which language is hardest for native English speakers to learn, well, yes, a pretty good case can be made for the group of closely related languages we call "Chinese". Let's look at some of the reasons.

One difficulty is that Chinese is unrelated to English. When you study one of English's cousins in the Indo-European language family, like Spanish, Russian or Hindi, you find plenty of cognates--words similar in sound and meaning--to use as stepping-stones. Learning Chinese means acquiring a vocabulary totally new except for a few borrowings like "typhoon" and "gung ho".

As a second obstacle, Chinese has a phonetic feature that's hard for English-speaking learners to hear and reproduce. Like English words, Chinese words are made up of consonant and vowel sounds, but each word also has an intonation pattern that's not optional. The Chinese word liu⁴ means "six"; liu² (same consonant and vowels but different tone pattern) means "remain". Jia⁴zhi² means "value"; jia³zhi¹ means "artificial limb".

Here's a little poem to show what Mandarin Chinese sounds like, with its four different tones:

[Chinese poem]

Now, many other languages lack English cognates. And some, like Vietnamese, are also tonal. But there's another obstacle that puts Chinese on a whole different level: its writing system.

If you've ever volunteered as a literacy teacher, you know what a frustrating handicap illiteracy is, and how empowered an adult learner feels as he or she masters the "code" that links sounds with the squiggles that represent them on paper. People learning Chinese have a very complicated "code" to master.

The squiggles the Chinese writing system uses--usually called "characters"--don't represent simple consonant and vowel sounds, the way English letters do. Each one stands for a whole one-syllable word or word element, combining sound and meaning. For example, if a Chinese-like system were used to write English, the word "unbearable" might be written with three squiggles, one for "un", one for "bear", and one for "able". And that "bear" squiggle would be different from the squiggles used in "grizzly bear", "childbearing", and "the right to bear arms"--to say nothing of "barefoot", "Bering Strait", and "baritone". That adds up to a lot of squiggles for learners to memorize--several thousand characters instead of a couple dozen alphabet letters. Not surprisingly, illiteracy is a major problem in China.

And when you meet a new character, how do you look it up? There are hundreds of Chinese dictionaries, and almost as many different systems for arranging characters. Without alphabetical order, tracking down an unknown character is much more labor-intensive than flipping pages while silently mouthing the ABC song. Even when you find the character, you won't necessarily know--without still more dictionary research--whether it's a standalone word or part of a compound like "unbearable".

I hope these comments serve less to discourage than to challenge people interested in learning Chinese. On the upside, the sound system of Chinese is pretty simple except for the tones, and its grammar poses no real difficulties for English speakers. Even the writing system, devilish as it may seem, has fascinated foreigners for centuries, and offers a key to understanding the classical literature and modern economic vitality of one of the great civilizations of the world.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from philologist and free-lance writer Barry Hilton in Maine. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Liwei Jiao at June 15, 2005 11:56 AM

Posted by: Ron Wolf at June 15, 2005 08:25 PM

Posted by: Webmaster at June 16, 2005 09:11 AM

Posted by: Hanh King at October 20, 2005 12:04 PM