On Mandarin learning challenges, the definition of language, and the best taxi-driver critique of hànzì ever recorded.
You’ll be forgiven if you missed the pins-and-needles press conference of foreign minister (wàijiāobùzhǎng, 外交部长) Yáng Jiéchí 杨洁篪 a couple of weeks ago (hat tip to Joel Martinsen at Danwei). Perhaps you were absorbed by events on the roof of the world. (For the record I have struggled with the same sense of triviality expressed by Dan at China Law Blog. Covering the subject of “Beijing dialect & culture,” with sound, just doesn’t have quite the weight of life and death questions about self-determination. My way of dealing with this is to pause for a genuinely reflective moment of silence, acknowledge that fact, and then continue, appreciative of all the very thoughtful commentary put out by the China blogosphere and others.)
But back to our intrepid foreign minister, Yáng Jiéchí…
In the midst of the usual harmonizing and so on, he snuck in a few language opinions that you might interpret as the basis for a belief about why Chinese will eventually dominate the world, or a not-so-subtle jab at the Zhonglish of the reporter who’d asked a question a few minutes earlier:
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现在学中文的人很多阿
xiànzài xué zhōngwén de rén hěn duō a
Today there are a lot of foreigners studying Chinese我希望在座的这些女士先生们也能够
wǒ xīwàng zàizuò de zhèxie nǚshì xiānshengmen yě nénggòu
I hope the ladies and gentlemen present will also be capable这个外国，这个记者女士和先生们也能够
Zhège wàiguó, zhège jìzhě nǚshì hé xiānshengmen yě nénggòu
These foreign journalist ladies and gentlemen will also be capable抓紧学中文
zhuājǐn xué zhōngwén
of learning Chinese中文，我认为是世界上
zhōngwén, wǒ rènwéi shì shìjiè shang
Chinese, I think, in the entire world is最容易学的语言之一
zuì róngyì xué de yǔyán zhīyī
the easiest language to learn否则你很难解释
fǒuzé nǐ hěn nán jiěshì
Otherwise you have a hard time explaining为什么有１３亿人
wèishénme yǒu shísān yì rén
why 1.3 billion people选泽中文作为他们的母语
xuǎnzé zhōngwén zuò wéi tāmen de mǔyǔ
choose Chinese as their mother tongue[laughter]
Here’s the official translation from the second half of the sound clip:
There are more people in the world studying Chinese now
I hope that foreign reporters present today will also learn some Chinese
I believe Chinese is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn
Otherwise you can’t explain why 1.3 billion in the world
choose to speak Chinese as their mother tongue
And here’s a link to all 2 hours of it if you’re into that kind of thing (and if so, please no emails about particular tastes for cuffs/leather — I’m really not asking). The clip above is from about 1:45 of the second video.
The points raised by Yang continue the meme of “the whole world’s learning Chinese” that keeps popping up these days like a whack-a-mole.
Is he right?
You hear these things often enough and you start to wonder. Maybe there’s something to what he’s saying? Well, the Beijing Sounds fact-checking staff set to work on the issue, splitting his assertions out into three parts. You can probably skip the 397-slide powerpoint (link if you must) and go straight to the executive summary, which gives credit to Yang for getting some of the basic ideas right…
1. More and more foreigners are studying Mandarin
2. Mandarin is easy
3. Lots of people speak Mandarin
… but takes him to task for getting them right at the expense of some basic truths
1. Foreigners are not succeeding at learning Mandarin
2. They’re failing cuz Zhōngwén is hard, despite the fact that Mandarin (the spoken language) is pretty easy in some ways
3. There are not 1.3 billion people with “Chinese” as a native language, except in the most trivial sense
Foreigners are not succeeding
You can’t deny that lots of foreigners are studying Chinese. My adopted hometown in the US, beautiful Minneapolis, MN, may not be San Francisco, but it has no fewer than TWO full-time Mandarin immersion programs for grade school students, not to mention several schools, including public ones, that offer regular Mandarin classes from a very young age.
Yes, there’s no questioning the boom in the study of Mandarin (and when people say “Chinese” that’s almost always what they mean).
And there’s no shortage of really fluent foreigners speaking Mandarin. Of course there’s the perennially loved or loathed Dà Shān (大山) [full disclosure: Beijing Sounds audio staff have analyzed and analyzed and still found nothing in his speech worthy of being called Zhonglish]. But the field is much deeper these days than back when Dashan rocked the New Year’s show. I’m aware, for example, that a high percentage of the seven readers of this humble blog hold their own in various regional flavors of more or less pǔtōng huà. Also, not too many weeks ago a certain O’Kane from Beijing’s very own blogosphere was featured in a well-known PR journal for his consummate Mandarin skills (you can discount his kèqi 客气 — humbleness — about aforementioned language skills and read the more interesting version of the story on his blog, here).
So how could anyone claim foreigners are not succeeding?
Allow me to temper the claim just slightly: For the huge number of study-hours invested, I’d guess that the percentage of students able to carry on a rudimentary conversation in Mandarin is shockingly low vs. other languages. Sorry I can’t offer any social science to bolster the claim, but there’s lots of anecdote and experience, not just mine, such as:
1. Victor Mair has taken up the subject at Language Log in an article about how two bright young sisters with many years of Mandarin study still struggle with basic communication
2. There’s lots of discussion of the value of Mandarin education for foreigners here at China Law Blog or here from The China Expat, with the general undercurrent that the literal economic value is low is because it takes too many years to be successful at it.
The basic point that Mair makes and that others acknowledge is that the pedagogy around the teaching of Mandarin as a foreign language — specifically that characters are taught to students TOO EARLY (e.g. day 1 of semester 1) — is responsible for sucking time away from the real study of language. Memorizing characters without a base knowledge of the language is worse than a waste of time; it’s an endeavor destined to failure for all but the most diehard mental gymnasts.
The further insult is that this ineffective, masochistic pedagogy is often based on a starry-eyed reverence for characters that has no basis in psychological reality and gets the relationship between language and script utterly backwards.
On a positive note, I do hear that this is changing, albeit slowly and only in some places — that the Chinese 101 courses that teach the reading and writing of 1000 simplified and traditional characters in the first semester may be fading away. I will hope against tradition that this is true.
中文 is hard
I know, there’s always the stray foreigner who speaks like a native and reads Tang poetry (see references above). But they don’t count. For mere mortals, written Mandarin is just obscenely hard. Don’t take a foreigner’s word for it, though. Better to go straight to the Beijing taxi driver.
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字儿，可太难认了，说实话
zìr, kě tài nán rèn le, shuō shíhuà
Characters are really too hard to recognize, to tell the truth不用说你外国人
búyòng shuō nǐ wàiguórén
Doesn’t matter if you’re a foreigner们美国人就跟中国人也不一样
nǐmen měiguórén jiù gēn zhōngguórén yě bùyíyàng
You Americans really aren’t the same as Chinese要把那些字认出来，太难了
yào bǎ nèixiē zì rènchūlai, tài nán le
If you want to recognize these characters, it’s too difficult你们那个，就是，单词，字母，
nǐmen nèige, jiùshì, dāncí, zìmǔ
You (with) those words, letters记住了一拼就差多了
jìzhu le yī pīn jiù chàbuduō le
Remember and write: more or less中国的破字儿不行
zhōngguó de pò zìr bùxíng
China’s lousy characters are no good一个音它能出十个字
yígè yīn tā néng chū shí gè zì
One sound can have ten characters有三五十个字
yǒu sān wǔ shí gè zì
There are 30 or 50 characters一个音五十个字可能都是它
yígè pīn wǔshí gè zì kěnéng dōu shì tā
one sound might have 50 characters然后写出来以后那个意思就不一样了
ránhòu xiě chūlái yǐhòu nèige yìsi jiù bùyíyàng le
and then when you write it, each meaning is different麻烦，太麻烦
máfan, tài máfan
Complicated, too complicated还有念那种过去那就
háiyǒu niàn nèizhǒng guòqu nà jiù
Also when you read that kind of old我们学那些就是古诗
wǒmen xué nèixiē jiù shì gǔshī
we learn these old poems文言文儿
wényán wénr
classical Chinese writings啊哟麻烦死了，真是太麻烦了
āyo máfan sǐ le, zhēn shì tài máfan le
Ahh, you’ll die they’re so complicated — really they’re too complicated自己念的都不懂，你知道吗？
zìjǐ niàn de dōu bùdǒng, nǐ zhīdao ma?
Read it out loud and you yourself don’t understand, you know?那几个特生硬的字放在一起，
nèi jǐge tè shēngyìng de zì fàng zài yīqǐ
These really tough characters all thrown together…自己都不知道说什么呢
zìjǐ dōu bù zhīdao shuō shénme ne
You don’t even know yourself what you’re saying[laughter]
“Pò zìr (破字儿).” Enough said.
Who speaks Chinese as a native language?
Now let’s not forget who started this all. We can ignore Yáng Jiéchí’s comment about native speakers “choosing” their native tongue. But it’s hard to ignore the 1.3 billion fraud.
Let’s be clear: lots of Chinese speak Mandarin. But certainly not all of them. Many of the rest speak languages that are related to Mandarin, just like many Europeans and Americans speak languages that are related. But as with Cantonese and Mandarin, speakers of Dutch and English don’t have a chance of understanding each other unless they are educated in a common tongue. Since I’ve finally gotten around to reading DeFrancis’s phenomenal book on this topic, The Chinese Language, Fact and Fantasy, please humor a quote:
The “Chinese” spoken by close to a billion Han Chinese is an abstraction that covers a number of mutually unintelligible forms of speech. Some two-thirds to three-quarters of the Chinese-speaking population speak what is loosely called Mandarin…. Within this category there are differences roughly of the magnitude of the differences among the British, American, and Australian varieties of English.” (p.39)
Enough on Mr. Yang, I wish him great harmony. And I thank him for the comments, which strengthen our resolve on Beijing Sounds that, when we talk about language, we’re going to try to
1. Bucket together as co-lingual ONLY people who can basically hold a conversation together
2. Keep the pīnyīn flowing, kind of like it says in the Constitution.
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Comments 11
I think you were lucky to get a response like that from a cab driver. Cab drivers often agree with me that learning Chinese is hard, but when I ask them why, they say it’s because one word can have so many meanings. Then I tell them that every language is like that — the reason Chinese is hard is because it has too many damn characters (太多他妈的汉字).
I guess it’s possible that my cab drivers mean that each syllable (word) has so many characters (meanings), but they invariably say “词” ci2 “word”, and not “字” zi4 “character”. Maybe there is a fuzziness among the 老百姓 (lao2bai1xing4, average people) about the difference between a word and a character. Next time I get a cab driver saying that, I’ll be more probing to make sure.
破汉字 indeed.
Posted 31 Mar 2008 at 6:40 am ¶Randy, my guess is there is fuzziness among the People. I’ll look for your recording soon :^)
There certainly is fuzziness among the semi-literati who are responsible for spreading so many of the character myths. DeFrancis covered this admirably in his book in the chapter on the monosyllabic myth, which explains why Chinese is not monosyllabic and how the characters have contributed to this misconception.
Posted 01 Apr 2008 at 12:42 pm ¶At the risk of going against the grain here…
I started with characters and I don’t think I could have done it any other way. I certainly claim no great talent for languages, indeed quite the opposite, and for much of my first few months was completely baffled by what I was hearing, so I retreated into lengthy sessions of writing individual characters. Though, I was increadibly slow to get talking, and it took an age to get to the point where I could actually learn vocab through conversation, I think the slog to get through the first 500 characters, and then the next thousand, really set me in good stead.
I’ll accept there are lots of characters that one needn’t distinguish in order to converse, e.g. 像 and 象，but being able to piece together some kind of meaning was a great help to me (I’m not suggesting everyone would have the same experience).
Sure, if you already speak, learning to read and write should be much easier than if you’re starting from scratch – there are so many phonetic clues. Clearly an illiterate native speaker could form grammatical sentences and possess a reasonable vocabulary. Obviously, the notion of ’speaking characters’, which is how I from time to time I hear native speakers describing the process, seems faintly absurd. But I just felt I could make sense of what I was hearing, and trying to say, through which combination of ‘characters’ was being used.
I had a colleague here who was pretty much fluent (he’d been here longer than I had) at the point where I could barely buy a train ticket. He couldn’t even write pinyin. We travelled together and were a right double-act – him, blind; me, deaf and dumb. Anyway, he had no trouble picking up new expressions in conversation: I still find it tough. But I keep plugging away.
Actually, being here (in the PRC) and spending hours locked away writing, when I could have been out chatting to people, might seem pretty dumb, but much of the input from the local environment, for me, was signs. I found I started to recognise the characters I saw all around me pretty quickly, and that was a great encouragement.
If people are really picking up the language more quickly by avoiding characters in the first year or so, that sounds great to me. But I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have made it to year two.
I’m not sure about the ’semi-literati’, but I reckon defining a word is a pretty tricky business. I’ve certainly given up quibbling with cab drivers on the issue.
Posted 02 Apr 2008 at 7:35 am ¶Sima — I’m humbled as always to hear a more nuanced opinion than my own. The moral here, I think, is not to be absolutist about it: characters sometimes work.
When I get worked up about the inadequacies of characters, I might tend to go a little over the top. But through your experience I recognize than they can still be quite effective, even for a beginning language learner if that’s the way you learn. For the record I also recognize their aesthetic value and historic significance (although I’m very much of the mind that the “indispensability” argument is, as DeFrancis puts it, a myth).
All that said, I still think that the general rule for second language learners should be pinyin education first, along with learning of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Characters can come after that — except in unusual cases like yours.
Posted 03 Apr 2008 at 8:29 am ¶syz, thanks for the polite description of my equivocal ramblings.
I think any language learner needs to work out their own strategy, based on some knowledge of their own shortcomings, and teaching always needs to allow for that. Of course, there’s a danger that ‘I’m a visual learner’ (or whatever) becomes self fulfilling. I certainly don’t think I’m unique. There must be a significant proportion (albeit a minority) of Chinese learners who have had the same experience as I have.
I think there’s a good case to be made for concentrating on pinyin in the early stages, and wouldn’t be at all suprised if there’s good evidence to suggest that this approach is generally the most productive. I’m generally of the belief that whatever gets the learner out of the paddling pool and into a situation where he can ‘really’ start to learn, in the shortest time possible, is the way to go. There are certainly English (and other language) programs which claim to achieve this.
But I don’t believe though that learning Chinese characters is ‘hard’, as such. I think many people are put off by their reputation and many people who have learnt to read and write, not least a lot of native speakers, are far too happy to overstate their achievement.
I accept it takes time and effort, but I don’t believe it requires particular talent. Even the time required might be slightly over played. More importantly, I don’t see it as a classroom activity.
As I didn’t attend formal classes, I don’t know how much time is devoted to writing characters in beginners classes. From what I’ve seen, most beginners books carry pinyin and characters side by side.
For me, memorising characters was nothing but a pleasant way to relax. I saw it as almost entirely seperate from ‘learning Chinese’; it was what I did when I couldn’t be bothered to study, and I generally found it quite relaxing.
As for “indispensability” being a myth, I find this notion (that characters are dispensable) most seductive, but something still niggles. I’d best go and immerse myself over at pinyininfo.com again, before I expose myself as a counter-revolutionary.
Posted 03 Apr 2008 at 10:28 pm ¶wow, 文言文儿？ i thought that was one of those things you couldn’t add erhua too, just like 图书馆…oh well…
Posted 13 May 2008 at 4:13 am ¶–Foreigners are not succeeding at learning Mandarin–
You have an excellent point here, that is not raised so often.
To share a personal experience: I like learning new languages, even when it is only picking up a few sentences during a trip to a new country, and I feel I am pretty gifted at that.
My theory was that all languages are learnable, with the right amount of motivation and perseverance.
Now, I took up Chinese 2 years ago and I must say I have revised my opinion. It is so damn hard that I really see the risk of NOT MAKING IT and having to give up.
And as you and fellow commenters correctly point out, it has to do with memorizing. My head feels like an hourglass: as I pour new words on top, old words a the bottom (even easy ones) just seem to flow out and away…
I work regularly, though, I wrote computer programs to help me study, I hold tight, but yet there are moments of despair that make me want to throw in the towel.
(I take advantage of this 1st post to congratulate you for your blog, which is both fun, well-written and interesting!)
Posted 18 May 2008 at 12:55 am ¶Emmanuel, thanks for dropping by. Don’t feel glum about your studies. If the head’s an hourglass, mine is the bottom half — with nothing at the base to catch what little dribbles in. I once downloaded your Pablo software and found it quite useful. I know you must spend loads of time studying. My only thought is to ignore the characters for a while and just work on vocabulary & pinyin. The brain is meant to memorize language, not writing systems as complicated as hànzì. Good evidence of that can be found in asking any native speaker who’s been outside of China for a while to write down a few sentences. There are bound to be characters they struggle on.
If you do go for the pinyin+vocabulary method, you could even find some pinyin texts on pinyin.info. Mark Swofford over at that site just posted a link to some texts he’s got. I’ll probably get around to linking to them more formally at some point.
Posted 18 May 2008 at 10:50 am ¶Thanks a lot for the support! I’ll stay tuned.
Posted 18 May 2008 at 10:21 pm ¶i want to second Sima’s statement. for me, the only reason to ever start learning chinese at all was the characters. i went on because i wanted to see what it would be like to learn a language that is, in history, in writing, in speech, so utterly different from my mother tongue, german.
there are many bad things that can be said about chinese characters, like there are simply too many of them (70′000 CJK glyphs are defined in unicode). they are, however, in fact used by hundreds upon hundreds of million people more or less efficiently, which means there is no getting around learning some of them when you want to achieve a certain level of proficiency in the language.
in a way, learning the sounds or the writing or both of a language that is very different from your own is like doing martial arts: it requires a lot of discipline and a lot of time, it will help you break out of your habits. i respect every statement by a native that characters are hard, and i myself think they are, but please, as someone who has grown up with the ABC, do not assume that any other way of writing is just ‘too hard’ and ‘inefficient’.
i lived in taiwan, japan, and korea, and i’ve done this in other countries too: i seek to understand the phonological system of the language (in theory), how it gets expressed in the writing (in theory), how it actually sounds (in practice), plus—and this is surprisingly effective and fun thing to do—how the writing is actually used in practice, in everyday life, on the street, in the temples, in the papers, on the bus. i go there and read read read almost every sign i can grasp hold of, whether i understand it or not. i expose myself to the max, at times writing down particular things to look up later, at times just allowing my mind to float freely as the language that surrounds me rains down on me through my eyes and ears. for me, paying attention to writing and living in a city means that each newspaper stand, each shop sign, each street sign is my teacher.
Posted 07 Feb 2009 at 12:20 am ¶~flow — hard to disagree with your poetic approach to language acquisition. Normally I’d quibble about the statement that chinese characters are “used by hundreds upon hundreds of million people more or less efficiently” — because in many cases it seems to be squarely on the side of less efficient. But it’s kind of a moot point, as you say. Not only does a learner need to figure them out in order to achieve real fluency, but the characters do serve (as in your and Sima’s case) as an inspiration to some. Not to me, but I can live with that and it’s a good reminder that I should be a little less self-centered!
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