On cultivating a lose-lose personality
With the exception of a few savants, Zhonglish speakers the world round find certain aspects of their non-native language to be exceedingly difficult, at least to the point of exasperation and sometimes to the point of bitter resentment that threatens to boil over into full Monty second-language rage. Maybe you ran into this guy at the last foreign blogger get-together, talking to his beer:
“How could they not understand my pun on tones. And even when I explained it, they all just brush it off.”
Then suddenly addressing you, “Hey, they probably DID understand. I’ll bet they’re just envious that I can make jokes in my non-native language.”
And finally, standing on the table, “They’re trying to keep me down! ZHONGLISH SPEAKERS JIĀ YÓU!”
You leave him to his beer, but it gets you thinking about your own list of reasons to loathe native speakers (oh, sure, not personally — just for their language abilities). Maybe it’s tones generally, or something more specific like a specific tone or tones in the context of sentence level intonation. It might be a particularly loathesome word: for example the BJS studio director is known to go out of his way to avoid using cèlüè (策略 = strategy) in a conversation for fear of making offensive facial expressions [and from now on he may even avoid writing it because the otherwise glorious Pinyinput IMEª, without which having to write Pinyin is an activity that should be addressed by the Geneva Convention, (and for which "imron" of Chinese Forums deserves knighthood or at least a cushy ambassadorship) actually does not accept lüè as valid Pinyin, so in a sense it agrees with the tongue's protestations -- this syllable has no right to exist.]
Maybe it’s not pronunciation at all but some more cultural aspect of language, such as why your jokes always fall flat with your peers and rate only an offhand “so annoying” from the seven-year-old camp.
Whatever your list, you need relief. Isn’t there some aspect of “the language” that has nothing to do with whether it’s your native language or not? Something that would be, if not equally hard, at least somewhat trying for native speakers as well as for the Zhonglish crowd?
But of course there is. Chinese is a big language, with something to trip up just about everyone. But where to start?
Any list proposing to answer the question would have to start with a perennial favorite here at the BJS Studios: hànzì (i.e. Chinese characters). They’re just plain hard. An adventurous reader of Mandarin, for example, native speaker or not, will always be coming across new characters for which they know neither pronunciation nor meaning — superbly annoying for oneself but always soothing when you see it happen to a native speaker. To paraphrase an old professor, who said the same of English: “Written Mandarin is no one’s native language.”
Or another angle: non-native students of the language for years have delighted in conducting pop quizzes in which they ask highly-educated Chinese to handwrite common words such as sneeze (dǎ pēntì, 打喷嚏), because as it turns out, no Chinese speaker ever, in the entire written history of the language, has ever been able to write 嚏 correctly*.
The characters-are-hard-for-native-speakers game gets tiresome after a while, though. Like whack-a-mole: easy and superficially satisfying, but never-ending.
Fortunately, BJS is happy to provide a new arrow for your schadenfreude quiver. Have a listen as PBS works on her summer homework (what a concept! says this American, for whom homework was mostly theoretical until, say, high school or so).
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PBS: Nǎonǎo**, yī shénme diànnǎo a? Yī tái diànnǎo xíng ma? 姥姥 【说的是”Nǎonǎo”】，一什么电脑啊？一台电脑行吗？ Grandma [using “pet name" pronunciation, something like saying Gammer instead of Grandma], one what computer? Is it OK to say one tái computer? YU: Duì 对. Right PBS: Yī tái diànnǎo. 一台电脑 One [tái, i.e. proper count word] computer
That’s right. A seven-year-old native speaker doesn’t feel confident about knowing the counting word for computer. Those infernal counting words, the bane of every foreign student*** of Mandarin, have to be learned, one-by-one, by native speakers too.
Lovely, and a perfect manifestation of the lose-lose personality’s path to happiness: I’m certainly not going to win, so I hope you don’t either.
———-
*In-house counsel notes that, for the record, this statement falls under the category of conjecture rather than Certified Fact; thus falsification will not qualify the above article for the BJS money back guarantee.
** In “Nǎonǎo” there’s probably another chapter for the continuing L=N saga. It all started when PBS couldn’t differentiate N and L during early language development (1-2 yrs old), thus changing Lǎolǎo to Nǎonǎo, which she decided to keep for its cuteness even after figuring out the mistake. The conflation was equal parts mystifying and amusing to her parents, mystifying because N and L are quite distinct in both Beijing Mandarin and American English, so where did the conflation come from? — amusing because it spread across both native languages and yielded gems like “nook at me” ad infinitum.
***That is, count words are difficult for every Zhonglish speaker except perhaps yours truly, who relies on ge/个 for nearly all his counting needs, regardless of intelligibility.
ªUPDATE: To clarify, the Pinyinput IME allows you to create Pinyin with tone marks — it’s NOT an IME that uses Pinyin input as a way of writing Chinese characters. Thanks for the offline questions.
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Comments 22
regarding 个, i recall a not too recent conversation with a taxi driver, shortly before which i learned 一道门. in conversation with him i used it, only to be swiftly corrected to say 一个门. foiled again.
i never quite figured out the distinction, though i recall being told it had to do with gateways/corridors/doors-proper. despite the correctness, in enough cases the native speaker has dumbed down their chinese for me and tend to lean toward 个 themselves. makes it a bit harder to learn proper measure words.
if 嚏 runs dry, there are always rarer characters. this is my approach when someone criticises me for not knowing the specifics of some english word. my favourite these days is 沽, of which they may know the sound from a toponym. knowing the meaning has had about a 5% success rate.
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 9:45 am ¶Good pt about 个, I also meant to mention that too often the whole count-word thing is VASTLY overtaught in many Mandarin-for-foreigners textbooks. You can’t really get away with just 个, as I try to, but with just a few count words you can cover a huge range of colloquial territory and probably sound more “native” than if, as your story relates, you use certain very specific count words where a native speaker wouldn’t use them.
Re: difficult characters. Sure, it’s easy to find rarer ones, but the beauty of 嚏 is that the word itself is not remotely rare. And of course there are plenty like it, where one character of a two-syllable word really only occurs with that one word — hence the word is common enough but the character’s frequency is exceedingly rare. Looking it up just now in the char frequency list from Jun Da’s data, I see it comes in at #3897 — probably close to the max number of characters that a person can actually remember how to write accurately.
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 10:13 am ¶Totally agree that measure words are way overtaught. Unless you’re writing, 个 is really pretty flexible, and at very least you’ll be understood. In any case, there are probably six or seven (个, 位, 条, 块, 台, 家, 枝, 张, what else?) that will get you through the vast majority of situations.
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 11:29 am ¶I’ve always objected to the Mair story about ’sneezing’. One, it is a rare character among the things people read: magazines, books, newspapers. Two, it is rare among things people would write or type. I think what you mean is the concept seems very basic and simple to you. This could be due to a lot of reasons, but I think it has something to do with our notion of what we knew as children or what we expect children to know. There are tons of things I consider incredibly basic that I sometimes run across or look up for whatever reason as I never learned them or rarely if ever come across them, things like basic body parts (shins, ankles, nails, etc.)
I think if the english word ankle was very difficult to spell in english somewhere closer to epiglottis (which I had to google, case in point), your randy group of “native-speaking English Phds” might put a sore group of spellings together. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t give you a 2 pages on mimesis right there on the spot. Some words are hard to spell just as some characters are hard to write, even if they are fit into our notions of what “basic” is. Perhaps risky to make generalizations an entire written system based on the select few (or sometimes more than a select few) of “words” that tend to be difficult to reproduce.
Oh, and I absolutely loathe the ‘v’ for ‘umlaut’ replacement. I loathe it like few other things in the world and much more than the overteaching of measure words which is simply another aspect of the horrible teaching program designed for chinese learners.
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 12:06 pm ¶I don’t quite agree on measure words being difficult. Everyone told me they were going to be and maybe I mentally prepared myself, but I’ve never felt they were a big challenge. For one, even native speakers don’t know the right ones sometimes and, for another, there’s only a few you really, really need to know like 一张纸. If you mess up on 一具尸体 (who came up with a special measure word for a freaking dead body anyway?), no one’s going to crucify you.
Tones are hard. Practice makes perfect, so keep talking!
As for characters, let me add at least a couple more to your arsenal, at least for traditional characters. Try zāngwù “stolen goods” which is 贓物 (most people can write it if they remember it’s 貝+藏), also just “turtle” 龜 guī is pretty hard. And a character that contains guī, 鬮 as in 抓鬮 zhuājiū “to draw lots”. Also, a “drawer” 抽屜 chōuti (the second one) is something people might not remember. Also, try “glutton” 老饕 “lǎotāo”; if they remember the word in the first place, it’d be surprising. Oh and throw in 櫃檯 guìtái “counter/bar” for kicks.
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 1:00 pm ¶Oh, another good one. 蘸 zhàn “to dip (in sauce, etc.)” like “把饺子蘸醋”. (I can’t write it, for sure.)
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 1:01 pm ¶For traditional, I actually find characters that are subtly changed in their simplified counterparts really hard to remember. A good example of that for me is 條 — I always forget that it’s that little double radical, or that the bottom is 木 instead of 夂, or something. PITA.
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 1:54 pm ¶@HSKnotes: glad you brought up the “English-is-difficult-to-spell” parallel because it’s a common one that I shoulda gotten to. The difference is not that Mandarin has this problem and English doesn’t. It’s that, as Moser conjectures, it’s an order of magnitude worse for Mandarin. Maybe the hypothesis would be something like this: If you ask native speakers of Mandarin and English, with equal amounts of education, to handwrite a note, it’s MUCH more likely that hanzi note will have script errors.
Per your “嚏 is rare” comment, my first comment is: of course. The problem is that it is rare but in a relatively common word. There are LOTS of rare characters that occur in relatively common words. This creates a long tail that makes it quite likely you’ll need to write one of those “rare” characters. For example, 喷嚏 as a word does not seem to be particularly rare in the written language. According to Jun Da’s database (see above), it occurs in a written corpus of bigrams at a rate of about 63 per million, whereas “sneeze” shows up in the Corpus of Contemporary American English at the rate of only 1.3 per mm.
Or to take抽屜 (thanks @Karan for the cool examples) – the second character is #5839, so you’d have to remember how to write almost 6000 characters just to be able to write “drawer” properly.
@John B: excellent list — seems about right to me. But why not the one for bodies?
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 4:20 pm ¶”Or to take抽屜 (thanks @Karan for the cool examples) – the second character is #5839, so you’d have to remember how to write almost 6000 characters just to be able to write “drawer” properly.“
I think this a bit (I want to say disingenuous) troublesome. It is not the case that each individual character exists on its own plane of reality independent of all other characters. You have hints, (sound hints, radical hints, meaning hints, etc) that give you clues as to how a character is formed, a ‘notch’ to help you remember/recognize/reproduce, etc.
It’s a little like saying glad or gladly, or spoke and bespoke, or note and notebook should really be considered independently and with notebook being the 19,000th most commonly used word, as opposed to note at 600, you’d have to learn 18,000 other words before you could properly spell notebook. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Yes, some characters seem to exist on their own plane and have little to build up to them from (龜 comes to mind, maybe even sneeze), but these don’t seem to be the rule, just like most english words don’t look like “schadenfreude’. So, is the ‘long tail’ in chinese bigger than in English? Maybe. Is it like 5 to 10 percent, as opposed to 1 or 5 percent in english? Maybe.
As for the ‘writing notes test’ for native speakers. I think for people who never write (using their hands) you might find they make spelling or script errors more often than you might think. Maybe the Chinese native may make more script errors, but I’m not convinced. What I did see when I asked people to write out characters was people wrote in a shorthand and couldn’t actually write the character in a non-shorthand/cursive way (sometimes they could after a second of thinking, or trying out a few times).
I sometimes think of this as something like the use of acronyms that people readily recognize. Sure, for simple ones (UN, BBC, USA) you don’t seem to run into any problems but when you start dealing with the sheer amount of commonly used acronyms (ASEAN, CNN, NASDAQ) is it always easy to unpack things so quickly?
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 7:55 pm ¶I used to think that I could get away with just a few measure words, but after a few years I changed my mind completely. Measure words are an essential and basic part of Chinese. They are even often used alone, without their accompanying noun.
I have to disagree about them being overtaught. While one can certainly be understood if one only uses a few of them, I feel it’s the same effect as non-native English speakers never using the word “the”. Of course we can understand them, but it’s not really acceptable to do that.
There are only about two hundred of them (about the same number as irregular verbs in English).
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 11:13 pm ¶About Jun Da and Corpus work:
I’m no expert on corpus work, but I’m not impressed with Jun Da’s anything (materials, explanations, papers, sources, methodology, etc). I find it more than troubling that some of the sources for the corpus are dead links.
It’s seems odd to discuss frequency of use when you haven’t discussed in detail how your corpus is balanced outside of three giant categories. But, like I said, I’m not expert on corpus analysis.
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 11:16 pm ¶“One, it [嚏] is a rare character among the things people read: magazines, books, newspapers.”
It’s not rare in comic books. Also, I recently accompanied a friend to pick his daughter up from school, and while I was waiting outside, I noticed that character on a poster about H1N1.
“Oh, and I absolutely loathe the ‘v’ for ‘umlaut’ replacement.”
You prefer start > all programs > accessories > system tools > character map, and then hunt for ü, then copy and paste?
Posted 24 Jul 2009 at 11:44 pm ¶1. China, that nexus of the comic book universe. (But, you have a point, you do get a lot more onomatopoeia and body related things in something like comics.)
2. I think I usually do a google search or copy it from a wikipedia page. Find that tends to be faster (still can’t get over Office 2007). I believe if one takes the time, they can find a much quicker way of making sure the appropriate symbol comes up quickly. Or use an IME that doesn’t stand for letting v stand for ü. Is that too much to ask for? It’s 2009 do we really have to stand for the excuse that some computers still can’t handle things past 26 letters? The separate problem with the LV situation is that it gets carried over. It makes it onto signs, people write it out by hand, etc. For example, an IME that gets created that doesn’t allow üe.
My take on it is it is for the lazy, or for some reason technologically handicapped, like tone numbers versus actual superscript. I am often lazy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think reading pinyin with tone numbers is not horrible and ridiculous and to be avoided if one can.
It’s a v. What is it doing masquerading as a vowel? (Or a representation of a vowel sound, as I guess the linguists would say.) What, just because it looks like a ‘u’? Can I substitute an i for an l now too?
This is such a silly and trivial thing I can’t even believe I’m still typing about it. Let’s drop it.
Posted 25 Jul 2009 at 12:22 am ¶http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V
According to this, it looks like “v” in an earlier incarnation (upsilon) represented the sound /y/ (ü) anyway, so maybe v for ü is just an unintentional throwback.
English has 26 letters, and so does pinyin, the only difference being that pinyin has no v and English has no ü. If you didn’t use the v key for mapping ü, what would you use?
OK. I’ll stop!
Posted 25 Jul 2009 at 12:48 am ¶And quite a throwback it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V
By the mid-1500s, the “v” form was used to represent the consonant and “u” the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter “u”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
Many fonts or output methods do not support a trema for ü or cannot place tone marks on top of ü. Likewise, using ü in input methods is difficult because it is not present as a simple key on many keyboard layouts. For these reasons v is sometimes used instead by convention. For example, it is common for cellphones to use v instead of ü. Additionally, some stores in China use v instead of ü in the transliteration of their names. Occasionally, uu (double u), u: (u followed by a colon) or U (capital u) is used in its place.
Do you see that! Chaos!!
Posted 25 Jul 2009 at 3:19 am ¶What started out as an innocent v as a time saver morphs into a ‘uu’ ‘u:’ ‘U’ and who knows what else? What’s a system for if no one can use it! We landed on the moon 40 years ago but we can’t get an IME that allows me to put two superscripts over a letter without crying?
Just for the record: I love the v for ü variation. It’s elegantly simple and works on everybody’s keyboard and cellphone.
Posted 25 Jul 2009 at 12:25 pm ¶i asked my in-house chinese tutor. she had no trouble at all writing 噴嚏, for what it’s worth. meanwhile 贓 seems like it couldn’t really be that hard to write. 貝 and 臧 are both common enough, or at least 臧 as part of 藏.
i gotta agree with chris. i rather like the v. ü is very very easy to type on a mac so i use it when i’m on my own computer, but v is a nice fallback to have and a rather simple solution.
and i’m not sure v morphed into uu so much as they forwent use of v. lack of standardisation seems a more likely subject than v snowballing into chaos.
oddly enough, i can’t type tone marks over v. if i try, my computer changes it to ǖ ǘ ǚ and ǜ. couldn’t do it if i tried. you’d have to use combining diacritics to do it since it’s not even supported by unicode, and i’d imagine even fewer fonts support combining diacritics than an umlaut over a u.
Posted 26 Jul 2009 at 12:43 pm ¶FWIW, in other Chinese languages, it seems to me that /l/ for /n/ (the opposite of what PBS was doing) is fairly common, e.g. “Lei ho ma” in Cantonese, and I’ve heard of the same thing happening in Philippine Hokkien.
Posted 04 Aug 2009 at 4:17 am ¶Is it /l/ for /n/, or /n/ for /l/? Which was first?
I don’t know the validity of it, but I’ve read that Cantonese preserves many of the features of a much older form of Chinese than Modern Standard Mandarin.
Posted 04 Aug 2009 at 12:02 pm ¶Taiwanese, a Southern min variety like the Philippine Hokkien mentioned above, is basically just a bunch of /l/’s. It seems mostly n to l (to you, I believe), but that’s actually backwards as it’s probably more likely the case that Southern Min keeps the older pronunciations and has so many things that are initial /n/ in Modern Mandarin as initial /l/.
Posted 05 Aug 2009 at 3:11 am ¶There’s a brief discussion of this on this wikipedia page:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E4%BE%86%E6%AF%8D&variant=zh-cn
Posted 05 Aug 2009 at 3:21 am ¶Yes, I made a mistake; apparently it is, also, /n/ for /l/ in the Philippines.
Posted 14 Aug 2009 at 1:06 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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