Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

From the recent deluge of email*

Dear SYZ: Is it unfathomably hard to learn Chinese, or is it actually laughably easy?
- Tone-deaf in Dōngzhímén

Dear TD in DZM

I feel your confusion. Daily. The short answer is, Yes. Another common answer is “Go to hell” (if you happen to ask someone who has just misread 农 for 衣 for the 29th time). Or maybe it should be “Idunno,” because I’m only a Stage 3 learner anyway.

But the following True/False quiz should clear a few things up, especially if we consciously skip all the frothing about what “Chinese” means and just focus on Mandarin as it’s spoken and written in Beijing.

[Note to Beijing-R fans: there's not much, but you can scroll straight down to the answer to #2 for the best érhuàyīn (儿化音) in the post.]

—————————
EASY MANDARIN QUIZ
easy (mandarin quiz)
(easy mandarin) quiz

Běijīng huà (北京话 = Beijing dialect) is…

1. sweet, cuz it’s got no declension
2. a relief, cuz it’s got no tense
3. not that hard, cuz you don’t need to know that many characters to read 90% of what’s out there
4. easy, cuz the characters communicate universal meaning independent of spoken language
5. not so hard, if you just ignore those nasty tones
6. impossible, cuz it’s got all those characters
7. hereditary, and it would take you a lifetime, dear foreigner, to absorb the 500,000 years of history contained in the language, and even then it wouldn’t be part of your soul

Answers below. C’mon. Don’t cheat. Write’em down…

OK, here goes.

1 — Sweet, cuz it’s got no declension

This is way TRUE. Declension sucks. Sorry for you students of Spanish, German, etc. — even English. Not to mention even worse situations in Latvian, Basque, Finnish, ad nauseum. Declension just doesn’t make any sense to the adult second language learner. The ESL learner asks, quite reasonably, “Why should I have to remember to add the -s for ‘two annoying languages’?! After all, I already said TWO. What part of TWO do you not understand?!!”

No declension means Mandarin might be the next Esperanto. No declension = universal love

Example of no declension for plural

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yīgè yuè…qī bā gè yuè
一个月。。。七八个月
one month…seven or eight months

But notice that you don’t have to do anything special to yuè [month]. That’s what no declension is all about, and it’s sweet.

2 — A relief, cuz it’s got no tense

This gets a TRUE — with an asterisk.

Now if you’ve suffered through voy, fui, iré you’re saying, “Hey, what’s the asterisk crapola? Mandarin has only one verb form, regardless of sex, time, conditionality, and texture of your conversation partner’s nose hair. I love it.”

Yeah, I agree. It’s great not to have to remember a bunch of different verb forms and the inevitable exceptions. It’s as if you could say:

• Yesterday I see an apple
• Today I see an apple

It’s all clear from context, right? But the asterisk is this: as if to make up for the simplicity of the verb forms, Mandarin introduces insidious stuff like the 了 [le] “aspect marker”. It has something to do with time some of the time. But it’s just not directly equivalent. It’s wonderful for the Ph.D industry. It’s fine for native speakers. For the rest of us? As clear as the Beijing sky on an August afternoon.

Here’s an example. It’s parent visitation day at my daughter’s school. Four first graders are answering the teacher’s question about what they can see in the picture she’s presented. And every single one of our little friends adds the le into their statement. Would the hapless CFL student have thought to do that?

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wǒ kànjiànle píngguǒ
我看见了苹果
I see an apple

wǒ kàndàole shù
我看到了树
I see a tree

wǒ kànjiàn — le yígè [unclear] zhuōzi
我看见–了一个…桌子
I see a … table

wǒ kàndàole nèigè zhuōzi pángbiān háiyǒu yígè zhà lanr [Pronunciation note: the books would tell you to say zhà lán, but the Beijing pronunciation makes it a fifth tone that sounds like /lr/ ]
我看到了那个桌子旁边还有一个栅栏儿
I see next to that table there’s also a fence

3 — Not that hard cuz you don’t need to know that many characters to read 90% of what’s out there

FALSE. Or at least sneaky, as a statistic. Why do we hear this kind of thing? Well, you can look at stats that come from Jun Da’s analysis of character frequencies and make the statement that, “The most frequent 1023 characters constitute 90% of written Chinese.” It sounds pretty attainable, right?

Read 90% of what’s out there? Hey, I’d be happy to read 20%, heh heh.

Here’s the problem: Reading 90% of characters really means you’re missing one character out of ten. And you know what that means? You probably won’t understand at all because you’ll be missing the key content words in each paragraph.

It’s a fairly meaningless statistic. Language Log followed this idea in another context and found that only 20 words accounted for more than a third of one particular English language newspaper article — but of course you couldn’t understand any of it knowing only those 20 words. Just for kicks, I did the same sort of thing with a randomly-selected article off of CCTV.com. Here are the 429 characters that show up without scrolling:

京华时报讯 （记者杨珺）昨天，“中国控烟履约高层研讨会”在京召开，与会专家一致通过并签署了“政府以身作则，共创无烟环境”的倡议书，呼吁国家机关各部委带头禁烟

据介绍，我国目前有3.5亿“烟民”，每年死于烟草相关疾病的人数约为100万。我国还有约5.4亿不吸烟的人群正在遭受二手烟的危害，其中15岁以下的少年儿童有1.8亿。

卫生部部长陈竺表示，《烟草控制框架公约》在中国已生效两年，距离公约要求的实现100%室内无烟仅三年，形势严峻，因为减少烟草消费涉及到提高烟草价格和税收、全面禁止烟草广告与促销赞助等，这些措施的到位又涉及政府各部门职责的落实，有关政策、法规的调整与修订。国家发改委经济运行局副局长李仰哲表示，明年拟考虑把禁止烟草广告列入广告法修改的议事日程。

会议通过的倡议书提出：国家机关各部委办公场所率先做到全面禁烟，鼓励各级政府办公机构制定政策，全面禁烟；国家机关各部委应严格要求所有工作人员遵守在公共场所和工作场所禁止吸烟的规定，鼓励并帮助吸烟者戒烟。

Out of these, 10 characters are outside the most common 1500 characters (using Jun Da’s stats). That gives us a “reading” rate of 419/429 or 98% if we knew 1500 characters. Pretty good, right? (As long as you don’t think 1500 is a lot of characters).

BUT THERE’S A MUCH MORE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM with this statement. Just knowing all the characters in a word doesn’t mean you know the word. It means you can pronounce it. Maybe. As long as it’s not a duō yīn zì 多音字 — a character with multiple pronunciations.

Because just like English, Chinese has some words that make a lot of sense on the basis of their components. Think: shoemaker = shoe + maker. Arguably, it has even more of these kinds of words than English. But it also has lots of words that are much more than the sum of their parts. You can’t piece together shǒu [手 = hand] and jī [机 = machine/device] and know intuitively that it means cell phone. You have to learn it. So even if you knew all the characters in the newspaper article, you probably still wouldn’t be reading it. You’d be pronouncing it.

Nope. Reading is hard. No way around that.

4 — Easy, cuz the characters communicate universal meaning independent of spoken language

False, sadly. Although it’s been thoroughly debunked, the belief of “language-independent meaning” is still held and repeated even by many who should know better. See here for an amusing but well-argued primer.

5 — Not so hard, if you just ignore those nasty tones

I suppose it’s true as far as it goes. You can ignore the tones and make your language-learning task a lot easier. Analogously, some Beijingers ignore the difference between /s/ and /th/ when learning English, or between syllable-final /r/ and /l/. You can do it, but the inevitable result is that many of your most basic utterances will be misunderstood.

Alternatively, you can work on tones, which are hard at the syllable level, harder at the pair level, and even harder at the sentence level. Bummer, but worth working on.

There’s loads of strong opinion and misinformation out there on tones. You can get the flavor on this thread in Chinese-forums.com. Suffice it to say that you can’t separate “knowing the word” from “knowing the tone” any more than you can avoid distinguishing “sink” and “think” in English. It’s just part of the language. It won’t come naturally (unless perhaps you’re a native speaker of another tonal language?! Let me know — I’ve always been curious about this) — and you just gotta work on it.

6 — Impossible, cuz it’s got all those characters

TRUE, pretty much. Yeah, I know about the geniuses and savants who say it’s not that big a deal, who have learned to read and write Mandarin as adults and can pass for Beijingers. I’ve also heard the argument:
Hey, a billion Chinese have learned these characters. It can’t be that hard
to which I have two responses:

1. How much written language do the billion really know? Apologies for the unanswerable question, but those who look into this sort of thing tend to believe that literacy is not all it’s cracked up to be.
2. Try this test. Get your five best Beijinger friends together and have them each, individually, write the word for sneeze (pēn tì). Then compare their renditions of the second character. I’ll wager that no two are quite the same. Why? Because written Mandarin is hard, even for native speakers.

7 — Hereditary, practically…

I hope the link still works. What can you say to this kind of sophomorism? I don’t think Mandarin-speakers are any more chauvinistic than English speakers, who also tend to bluster about how their language is uniquely rich, expressive, logical, etc. But it’s hard not to yawn when yet another article gets written on the specialness of Chinese thought. I know some really creative and insightful Beijingers. I also know some creative and insightful Losangelenos. It’s not the language, it’s the person.

Bottom line: Mandarin definitely has some second language learner advantages, until you start to learn hànzì. If you want a more in-depth look at the difficulties of written Chinese, or you just want to get depressed, check out Why Chinese is So Damn Hard.

*Yep, in other words, I made it up

[Update 12/22/07 - improved translation of one kid's comment. Originally "I see a fence next to that table"]