What things are difficult or easy about Chinese?

Some opening Q & A

In this day of rising interest in China, interest in the language is also exploding.

Can Chinese (standard Mandarin) be learned by English speakers?
Yes, but expect it to take more time to learn to any particular level of proficiency than the commonly studied European languages.

How much longer?
The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (http://www.dliflc.edu/) has grouped languages into three groups in terms of time it takes English speakers to learn them. Chinese is in the third, or most difficult/time-consuming, group, along with Japanese, Korean, & Arabic. Their estimate is that languages in this group take about two and a half to three times as long to learn to certain benchmark levels. This is also reflected in the length of time that each language is studied in their programs. Also keep in mind that their students are already preselected for high presumed ability and likelihood to succeed. They also spend huge numbers of hours a week studying, and are therefore less likely to forget things between lessons. Believe it or not, this is actually intended as an encouragement. In other words, don't be discouraged if you find that studying Chinese by less rigorous methods and schedules is taking you even more than 3 times as long as it took you to learn a less challenging language. On the other hand, this might motivate you to maximize progress and minimize forgeting by daily practice and reinforcement. In addition, I believe that understanding the nature of what it is that you must learn can also help provide you with greater focus.

Outline of some difficulties

Very briefly, for English speakers, what are some of the more difficult aspects of Chinese to learn?
Basically, in outline, this includes all aspects that are significantly different from English, including:

Writing & Reading: How to write & read several thousand Chinese characters. This includes the formidable question of how to associate those thousands of characters with their pronunciation and with the appropriate tone.

Pronunciation: How to differentiate (both in listening and in speaking) the tones of Chinese and certain sounds or distinctions that we don't have, such as two kinds of "sh" (pinyin sh & x), two kinds of "ch" (pinyin ch & q), or the rather buzzy initial "r" sound, among others. Added to this is the problem of understanding significant numbers of Chinese speakers of Mandarin who are actually native speakers of other varieties of Chinese, and who therefore do not themselves pronounce words in strictly standard fashion.

Vocabulary: Except a small number of loan words, Chinese words bear no relationship to English, and even the loan words can be difficult to recognize without some training.

Grammar: The grammatical difficulties of Chinese lie in areas other than the areas of conjugation and case, that give us some much trouble in European languages.

A few General Observations

In language learning, as in learning in general, it is more difficult to learn things that are different from things one already knows. Similarities with things one already knows, on the other hand, usually make learning (at least initial learning) easier, although when learning two or more similar languages, learning to differentiate a large number of similar but not identical items can also be difficult. Because there are many aspects to languages, a language that is difficult in certain respects may not be so difficult in others. For English speakers, for example, learning the cognate vocabulary component of many European languages may be much easier than learning non-cognate vocabulary, verb conjugations, case endings, or when to use the subjunctive, etc.

Furthermore, both on an aspect for aspect basis and in general, for any language pair, the difficulties faced by speakers of language A trying to learn language B are not necessarily the same or of equivalent degree as those of speakers of language B learning A. Clearly English speakers face a massively more formidable challenge learning how to write and read several thousand characters of Chinese, than is the case in reverse. If, in a very rough kind of way, we can visualize languages (and each constituent aspect) in terms of Venn diagrams, we should ask not only what parts are similar (overlap), but also what is the amount or nature of the parts of the target language that are not like that (/those) already known.

Knowledge of additional languages, can help in at least two or three ways also. First, it can provide a larger repertory of familiar items to drawn upon when learning the new language and a sense of at least a few of the ways in which languages can be different. Secondly, most people who have already studied another language have acquired a better of the formal terms in which languages are usually described (parts of speech, terms for grammatical functions, gender, etc.). In addition, such people also have some prior experience of some methods that may help in learning another language.

Other factors can also enter into the equation, such as motivation, learning styles, attitudes, degree of success in previous language learning, or simple ability to stick with something that cannot be learned in a short amount of time. How a language is taught and or studied can also produce significant differences.


Some Specifics for learners of Chinese

Writing System: Not just the volume ( 3 to 5 thousand characters-汉字 han4zi4), but also learning to visually discriminate so many characters, and the extra problem of learning how to write them! To be sure, this large number of characters has been built up from a much smaller number of constituent parts, including but not limited to the 214 radicals (部首 bu4shou3) by which all characters are classified in traditional dictionaries. In such dictionaries, characters are grouped together with others that share the same classificatory radical (部首 bu4shou3). These radicals themselves have a traditional order in which they occur in dictionaries, based on the nuber of strokes in each (although some radicals have variant forms with different numbers of strokes.

The vast majority of modern characters have at least two, three, or more components, although have been eliminated or otherwise simplified in simplified characters (简体汉字 jian3ti3 han4zi4). So learning to write or recognize these compound characters is not a question of learning several thousand totally different characters, but of remembering which combinations of more or less familiar components they contain. Furthermore, certain components or combinations of components tend to come in particular locations in compound characters, so this also helps one learn. The classificatory radicals mentioned above, tend mostly to come at the top or at the left hand side of compound characters.

A further difficulty is that the characters are not "spelled" phonetically. Although many do contain a component or combination of components that points to some (sometimes quite vague) kind of phonetic similarity (sometimes referred to as "rime"). Unfortunately, the writing reflects similarities in the pronunciation of Chinese of more than a thousand years ago, often very different from that of modern Mandarin, and the similarities may not have been that precise to start with!

It can be very helpful for the learner of Chinese (and also of Japanese or traditional Korean, written with Chinese characters) to see characters that share the same rime components grouped together, because they may be easily confused, sharing one or more components in their appearance and often having a similar sound, though not infrequently with a different tone. Rick Harbaugh's character based dictionary (Zhong1wen2 Zi4pu3 中文字譜, Chinese Characters: A Geneology and Dictionary) does exactly this, but it contains a formidable number of characters, and is, partly of necessity, tradtional character based, because some of the rime components have been lost or changed in simplification.

The online version at Zhongwen.com is definitely easier even for non-beginners to navigate and to move back and forth between traditional and simplified characters. The online dictionary Yellow Bridge, gives a breakdown of the components of each character looked up individually when you click on the etymology tab. If there is a phonectic component, it will be indicated as such. In addition, on the left-hand side of the etymology tab page, there external links that include one directly to the full character in the just cited Zhongwen.com. Once in Zhonwen.com, on the right-hand side of your screen, you will see that character on a "genealogical" tree (or at least a componential compnent tree) placed on a branch under its phonetic rime component along with other characters that also share the same component. If the phonetic component is itself a compound of components, it will also be linked to a node of one of its components, not necessarily phonetically related.

Knowledge of Chinese characters as used in Japanese or Korean can also be somewhat helpful.

Pronunciation:


(to be continued)