Five myths about learning Chinese

1) Chinese is impossibly difficult

The most widespread myth concerning Chinese is that it is practically impossible for non-Chinese to learn. This myth is commonly held both by outsiders and by the Chinese themselves, who will sometimes tell you that their language is the "most difficult in the world" with a kind of odd pride that their forebears managed to come up with such an impenetrable tongue. The truth is that while Chinese is certainly one of the hardest languages to master (at least for non-Asians), it is by no means impossible to do so.

The list of Westerners who have acquired fluent Chinese is by now quite long. You can see some examples in this previous post. Even in China people are starting to get less impressed when they hear foreigners speak their language well, although it can still attract amazement. The fact is that if you have a keen intelligence and a few years to dedicate to it, learning to speak Chinese to a functional level is perfectly possible.

Modern technology has also made things a lot easier. While remembering how to write Chinese characters by hand is indeed almost impossible unless you do nothing else but write Chinese for years and years (like Chinese schoolchildren), it is now almost never necessary to do so. Writing Chinese with a computer or a mobile phone is a lot simpler, as it only involves imputing the word in pinyin, and at most recognizing the character (which is many times easier than remembering how to write it). Electronic dictionaries are also incomparably easier to use than paper dictionaries, in which it is virtually impossible to find a character unless you already know how it is pronounced.

2) Chinese isn't really that hard

An opposite myth, peddled by Chinese language schools and sinologists and others who want to sell the language, is that Chinese isn't really as difficult as all that, especially if you use the right method. The reality is that mastering Chinese takes an awful lot of time and dedication no matter how it's done. Stories you hear about people who could speak fluent Chinese after only living in China for a year or so are to be treated with great skepticism.

You may hear claims that Chinese has an easy grammar, and this is more or less true. The point though is that the hard thing about Chinese is not its grammar. Chinese essentially has two aspects which make it difficult: the writing system and the tones. Learning the thousands of characters necessary to read the language is not unachievable for an adult, but it will take years of memorizing and practice, and there are no shortcuts. Claims that you "only" have to learn 3 or 4000 characters, as opposed to the dozens of thousands of words you need for English, ignore the fact that those characters can be put together in all sorts of ways to make up other words.

The tonal system is in some ways an even bigger obstacle than the writing: for those who did not grow up speaking a tonal language (most of humanity), it is just extremely unnatural to use tones to convey meaning. Learning to reproduce the four tones of Mandarin Chinese in isolation is easy enough, but learning how to use them smoothly while speaking is a huge feat. Even if you manage to memorize the tone of every syllable, actually convincing yourself to say the words like that is hard. Some people seem to have a natural ability to just pick up the tones by osmosis, but they are few and far between. Most people will just end up with toneless Chinese unless they make a conscious effort to learn the tones.

Add to all this the numerous characters which can have two or more different pronunciations according to their meaning, the hundreds of "four-characters proverbs" constantly used in writing, the high number of homophones guaranteed to confuse learners, the occasional use of traditional characters even in Mainland China etc etc... and you get the picture. Learning Chinese, while not impossible, is very tough. Just like learning Japanese or Arabic, it will take you years of work.

3) Learning the tones isn't necessary

This is a piece of advice which foreign learners sometimes get from well-meaning but misguided Chinese friends: don't worry about the tones, they aren't necessary. Even if you don't use them, "we Chinese will understand you anyway". There is a degree of truth in this: as long as you talk about pretty basic stuff in an otherwise correct fashion, most Chinese will be able to understand what you mean from context in spite of your lack of tones. However this changes as soon as you want to discuss deeper topics, or if you say a word in isolation (for instance, when you give a taxi driver the name of a place you want to go). The ability to understand toneless Chinese seems to vary from one person to another as well.

But there is an even better reason not to take this advice: if you speak Chinese without tones, it sounds pretty dreadful. People may understand you, but you are going to end up sounding extremely foreign for the rest of your life. It's a bit like speaking a European language and not conjugating any of the verbs. People can probably understand you anyway, but it's not a good reason to do so. 

4) In many parts of China people don't speak Mandarin

You may hear people claim that Mandarin (here meaning 普通话 , China's official language) is only spoken in Beijing and will be almost useless in other parts of the country. This is nonsense. This state of affairs did hold true 100 years ago, and perhaps even 50. It is however quite untrue nowadays. The reality of the situation is that Mandarin is spoken just fine by all the young and the educated throughout the PRC (the exception is Hong Kong, because of its separate history and system). In fact, some of the other "dialects" (which might just as well be called languages) are unfortunately dying out in urban areas. In big cities you may struggle to hear anyone speak the local dialect.

Things do change when you go to the countryside, but in my experience even in little villages the young are able to communicate in good Mandarin, even if the middle aged and the elderly are not. As long as they don't go to Tibet or to remote areas, the chance that the average foreign traveller will meet anyone who can't communicate in Mandarin is tiny. Even when travelling in Guangdong, supposedly the province most attached to its own dialect, I had no trouble getting around with Mandarin.

It is true that people in the South of China sometimes speak Mandarin with a strange accent, and get some of the sounds wrong (in some areas L and N become mixed up, while in other areas it's H and F), but if your Chinese is up to scratch, it shouldn't be hard to understand people. Sometimes Mandarin spoken with a regional accent is enough to throw a foreign learner with basic Chinese, but that says more about their own abilities than it does about China's linguistic unity.

5) You can learn to speak Chinese without learning to read and write it

Due to the nature of the Chinese language, with its non-phonetic writing system, it would in theory be possible to learn to speak it without learning how to read and write it at all. You could learn how to say all the words, without ever learning the corresponding characters. The reality however is that it is extremely unusual for people to learn to speak Chinese without learning the writing as well.

Although there are certainly plenty of foreigners in China who pick up some basic Chinese phrases without knowing how to read at all, it is very hard to progress beyond that level without learning the characters at the same time. Any language course will teach you the writing system, and very few people have managed to get far with Chinese without learning it out of a book.

All the same, it is a widespread misconception among the Chinese that foreigners who speak their language are still likely to be quite unable to read and write it. If they think about it at all, they may assume that foreigners learn Chinese entirely through the medium of pinyin, or just by speaking it. They may also assume that Chinese writing is simply too difficult for foreigners to master. The following scenario has happened to me a number of times: I chat with a Chinese person in their language for a while, without them even commenting. Then at some point they see me read a message in Chinese on my mobile, give me a puzzled look, and say: "wow, you can actually read Chinese". Well d'oh.

Is Chinese unlearnable?

There seems to be a school of thought among Sinologists and foreigners who know Chinese, according to which the Chinese language is particularly difficult and fundamentally unlearnable, or so difficult to learn that it's basically not worth the trouble to do so. There are a number of serious articles on the internet written from such a perspective, and their aim is often to discourage foreigners from embarking on the learning of the Chinese language before they realize what they are getting into.

A good examples is this article by David Moser, from the Center for Chinese studies of the University of Michigan, entitled "Why is Chinese so damn hard?". Other examples are this post on "the Lingua Franca" blog, or this rather shorter and less serious post on "the China Expat" site.

The basic argument is that Chinese is too difficult to learn as an adult for it to be worthwhile, and true fluency is beyond reach for most people. It will take you years of full time study, probably while living in China, to get anywhere, in the which time you could have learnt three different european languages or an entirely new profession. You will always sound like a foreigner and never master the tones correctly, except perhaps for a few who have a natural talent for it, and being able to reach a point where you can express yourself fluently and naturally and are able to read a book either takes years or is out of reach.

Chinese is Hard

That Chinese is hard to learn for someone whose own language is unrelated to it is beyond doubt. I myself have lived in China for three and a half years, studied Chinese full time for one of those years (as in 20 hours of class a week in university), and learnt Chinese on my own or in part time private classes for the rest of my time here. I have numerous Chinese friends, and I do my best to communicate with most of them in Chinese. I also chat in Chinese on the internet regularly using QQ, the Chinese instant messaging software.

The results? Well, I can get around in China, and even go through the process of renting a flat in Chinese (including phoning landlords, negotiating with housing agencies and so on). I can chat about general topics in Chinese, but I often have trouble understanding what the other person is saying, and often can't think of the word I need. If the person I am chatting to doesn't make an effort to speak a bit slower than usual and use realtively simple language, it becomes much harder. Someone who speaks with a strong regional pronunciation can completely throw me. I have to settle for expressing myself far less fully than I could in my own language, and I normally sound stilted and unnatural. Speaking about specialist topics is almost impossible, except politics or history because I have an interest in them, and thus have learnt some of the vocabulary. My pronuncation is also not good: I can pronounce almost all sounds correctly, but I usually only know and use the tones for the most common words, and when I speak fast even those get lost. I sound very markedly foreign, and although most Chinese people can understand me, they sometimes have to make an effort to do so. When Chinese people speak to each other I can only understand some of it, how much depending on the topic. And that is provided they speak clearly and in a standard fashion.

When it comes to reading, I think my skills are actually unusually high when compared to my speaking, mainly because of the effort I put into it. If I can follow Chinese films at all, it is mostly thanks to the Chinese subtitles they almost always have underneath. I can read a newpaper article and usually understand the general point, but there will be lots of words and even phrases which I don't understand. With books it very much depends on the topic. Even if I can understand enough to make it worth reading, it takes me such a long time to read a Chinese book that it's almost pointless. As for writing, I can write pretty fast with a computer or a mobile, but writing by hand is of course slow and painful, and I routinely forget how to write even elementary characters (although my Chinese handwriting apparently looks very nice and neat for a foreigner. It's odd, because my english handwriting looks horrible.)

I am not a genius at learning languages, one of those people who can go to a foreign country and starts chattering away in the local argot after a few weeks. Still, I suspect my abilities in this area are higher than average, and Chinese is not the first foreign language I attempt. Needless to say, if I had spent as much time and effort learning any European (or I suspect, Indo-European) language, by now I would be far more comfortable in it, and able to function almost fully.

But are other languages really easier?

The question I want to focus on is this: is Chinese objectively harder to learn than other languages, or is it just that any language with no relation to your own is going to be tough? In the article I quoted earlier, David Moser takes the first view: "(...) part of what I'm conteding is that Chinese is hard compared to..well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people".

Some of the points made in the article seem definitely weak to me. I mean, complaining about not being able to read classical Chinese after learning modern Chinese is a bit like complaining about not being able to read Latin after learning Italian. The point about the difficulty of using dictionaries has been made irrelevant by electronic dictionaries, and at least in the PRC there are no longer different Romanization systems to contend with. However, the basic point that Chinese is especially difficult, in a different category from "normal" languages, will strike many foreigners learning the language as credible.
But is this true? The Foreign Service Institute of the US State Department once classified all the world's major national languages (88 of them) into three categories according to their difficulty for an English speaker. Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Arabic and the various forms of Chinese were the only languages to fall into Category III, the one for the hardest languages which necessitate on average 2200 class hours to be learnt (I haven't even reached 1000 in Chinese). Even many other non-Indo European languages (thus entirely unrelated to English) such as Tamil, Armenian, Thai and Vietnamese fall into Category II ( languages necessitating 1100 class hours).

According to this well-known classification, it would seem like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Mongolian, are indeed particularly difficult. But is Chinese the hardest of all? My impression is that the Chinese writing system is objectively harder and more impractical than other writing systems. There is no other language in which you have to learn a few thousand characters by heart in order to read fluently (except Japanese, but it is the same system). The Chinese take more years than anyone else to learn to read and write, and writing by hand remains difficult even for Chinese adults at times. There is also a big gap between the written and spoken languages, with many characters which are only ever used in writing, even for the most basic concepts (for instance 此，meaning "this", which is not normally used in speech).

When it comes to speaking the issue is more debatable. As it is often pointed out, Chinese grammar is relatively simple, not possessing any cases, declentions, or gender and singular/plural variations, which is a big advantage in comparison to European languages. The tonal system is indeed a big hurdle, but it is shared by some other languages (notably Vietnamese and Thai). A few people at least do seem to be able to pick up the tones naturally just by speaking to the Chinese, something which cuts down a lot of the learning work.

The combination of the tones and the characters is pretty daunting for most foreign learners, but other languages have their complications too. Japanese and Korean have difficult grammars and a complicated system of different levels of speech according to the status of the person you are speaking to, which foreigners do need to master in order to function in Japan and Korea. Japanese also uses a combination of Chinese characters and two different phonetic alphabets. Foreigners who learn Japanese also like to claim that it is the hardest language in the world to learn.

Arabic doesn't often get compared with the East Asian languages, since it is unusual for someone to learn both, but it is also recognized as extremely hard to learn. Personally I did give it a shot in the past, without getting terribly far. The alphabet is relatively simple, but the grammar is extremely complex, and the language is full of commonly used sounds which most non-Arabs can neither hear nor reproduce. A further huge complication is that "modern standard Arabic" or fusha, the official language of the Arab world, is literally not spoken anywhere at all, and it is a necessity to learn the local dialect to live in an Arab country. Looking back, I don't feel Arabic was any easier than Chinese for me to get my head round.

The truth is that while some languages may be objectively harder than others (on the other end of the scale, Malay and Swahili are known for being objectively easy), I would assume that most of the difference simply depends on the distance of the language learnt from your own one. The less closely related it is, the harder it is to learn. European languages, with their super-long words and their strange grammas in which every word is either masculine or feminine, are basically just as hard for the Chinese to learn as Chinese is for a European (at least when it comes to speaking. The characters might make Chinese objectively harder to read and write).
Chinese is hard, but not impossibly so, and the fact that Chinese minorities whose mother tongue is not Chinese still manage to learn it reasonably well through school proves the point.

Chinese as an international language
On a related note, it has by now become commonplace to hear the prediction that "Chinese will be the international language of the future", especially coming from foreigners learning Chinese.
The reasoning is that since China will one day be the world's foremost superpower, it's language will also rise to a comparable status. Setting aside the issue of whether China really is on track for superpower status, is it really possible to imagine a language like Chinese rise to become an international lingua franca?

On the one hand it is true that when a language has the prestige of having a great power behind it, you find that people suddenly can learn it no matter how difficult it may be. The myth that English is easy to learn is in fact just that, a myth. Unsurprisingly, this myth is not very widespread in China, where people find the language incredibly hard to achieve fluency in. English does have some easy sides for sure. In particular, it's grammar is far easier than most other European languages' ones, although the Chinese would take that for granted. On the other hand, English spelling is a nightmare of un-phonetic, illogical spellings which give little clue to pronunciation (think "four" and "forty"), and in fact British children take longer to learn to read and write than any other European children. Even well educated English speaking adults sometimes make spelling mistakes, something almost unthinkable in Spanish or Italian, which reminds me of how Chinese people sometimes forget how to write characters.

English pronunciation is also quite hard in comparison to most languages, with a wealth of unclear, barely differentiated vowel sounds and words which sound almost the same, but not quite. English also has a huge vocabulary, far wider than most languages, and often uses words with different Latin or Germanic roots for similar concepts (think "tooth" and "dentist" rather than the more logical "toothist"). All this is of course barely acknowledged in English speaking countries and in the few North European countries where, because of cultural and linguistic similarities, most people have aquired good English.

In spite of these shortcomings, English has reached the status of international working language because of the power of the British Empire and more crucially, the United States. In so doing it has displaced French, another language with tricky pronunciation and spelling. And somehow, even in China or Japan people who really need English do somehow manage to learn it, at a huge expenditure of time and money. If a language like that can make it, surely there is a chance even for Chinese? Or does the Chinese writing system make it unthinkable that Chinese could reach such a status, in spite of the presumed power China will enjoy in the future?

My feeling is that it is unlikely that Chinese will ever be able to displace English, partly because English is much easier for anyone who speaks a European language (a large chunk of the world outside of Asia), partly because English is already so entrenched in so many countries, and partly because I doubt China will ever enjoy the sort of power which the US enjoyed from the Second World War until recently.
Having said that, it is really hard to say with these things. In the coming years, it will certainly become more common for members of the elite in other countries to have learnt Chinese, and especially in other Asian countries this might start trickling down to the masses too. We will just have to wait and see.

Simplified vs. traditional Chinese characters

Today I would like to share some thoughts with you about the simplification of the Chinese characters. It is well known that the characters now used in Mainland China were simplified in the middle of the twentieth century, so as to make literacy more accessible to the masses. The vast majority of people learning Chinese throughout the world, and all those who learn it within the People’s Republic of China, will be familiar with the simplified characters.

For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, I will give some background: various Chinese intellectuals started suggesting that the Chinese writing system should be simplified towards the beginning of the twentieth Century, especially after the May Fourth Movement of 1919, when traditional Chinese culture was challenged by modernizers. There was an attempt by the Guomindang government to simplify the characters already in 1935, something which makes the current die-hard opposition to the simplified characters in Taiwan all the more curious.

After the revolution, the characters were simplified in two rounds, one in 1956 and one in 1964. The simplification involved reducing the number of strokes and the complexity of the characters. Many of the simplified forms had already been used in handwriting for years. A few characters which had the same pronunciation and meaning were merged. Many characters were also left entirely the same. There was a second round of simplification in 1977, just after the Cultural Revolution, but due to widespread opposition and confusion the reform was abolished in 1986. A few of the simplifications introduced in 1977 can still sometimes be seen I handwritten signs, for instance仃for 停 and歺for 餐 (I can see why people like that one).

While the People’s Republic of China and Singapore officially use the simplified characters, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau continue to use the traditional ones. In some cases, the traditional characters can be extremely more complicated than the simplified ones. Take 个，the most basic Chinese character, whose traditional form is個. Or 与, which becomes與.

I have personally never studied the traditional characters, and although I find I can guess some of the most basic ones, I am basically unable to read them. Here in Mainland China, traditional characters are usually only found in ceremonial circumstances or in logos, although most people seem to know them to some degree. The only time I find not knowing them a problem is when I go to karaoke parlors, since most of the karaoke machines have subtexts in traditional characters, because they are produced in Taiwan.

When I studied Chinese in Qinghua I used to sit next to a student from Hong Kong. He was dead against the simplified characters, and tried various times to convince how they are ugly, illogical and actually more difficult to learn than the traditional forms. A hostile attitude towards simplified characters is apparently widespread amongst the Chinese outside the Mainland and especially in Taiwan. In Taiwan people are basically convinced that the simplification of the characters was part of an evil Communist ploy to destroy traditional Chinese culture, and that they are the defenders of Chinese tradition because they stick to the old writing form. This is in spite of the fact that it was by no means only members of the CCP who initially wanted Chinese writing to be simplified.

I have been surprised however to notice that even quite a few Chinese Mainlanders, when asked, will lament the disappearance of the traditional characters and even advocate their return. I have heard many people argue that the traditional characters are preferable because they “contain Chinese traditional culture”, and that they are actually easier because you can guess the meaning just by looking at the character.

Although I realize that since I am not Chinese and I don’t know the traditional characters, most Chinese people would not take my opinions on the issue very seriously, I am still going to share my thoughts on the matter. Even though I am not literate in the traditional characters, I find the idea they are easier because they allow you to guess their meaning rather improbable. Although a few of the traditional characters may have a rather obvious relationship between their shape and their meaning which is lost in the simplified form, this is not such a common occurrence. In any case, the traditional characters have got to be much harder to learn to write by hand and to differentiate, and in a country where it takes children until high school to learn to read and write, this has to be an important point.

It may be because I am not used to it, but when I see a website written in traditional characters I can’t even make many of them out without enlarging the font size, because they are so full of strokes. Although this can also happen with a few particularly complex simplified characters, it is much rarer. The traditional characters seem to me to be impractically complicated for a modern society to use (although the Taiwanese seem to manage somehow). Then again, isn’t that true for the entire Chinese writing system? It is impractically complex, but the Chinese manage one way or another. In the past there were proposals to just overhaul the entire character system and only use pinyin. However, they never gained much popularity.

There is the argument that Chinese could not practically be written solely in pinyin, because the language is so full of homophones that in some cases the meaning is ambiguous if you use a phonetic script. If this is so, it means that the characters have to be kept, but simplifying them seems to me to be a reasonable move. The fact that after World War II the Japanese also simplified the Chinese characters which they use suggests that it is a natural step towards creating a modern society where the writing system has to be accessible to the masses. It is true that modifying the characters could be viewed as a cultural loss, but then again Chinese characters and all other writing systems have changed throughout history, and it is right that they should keep on changing.

And as a final point, poor foreigners in China like me already struggle enough to learn Chinese as it is. With the traditional characters the difficulty would be even greater. This is not such an irrelevant point. As more and more foreigners flock to China, and more and more people around the world take an interest in learning Chinese, it is important that the writing system be easy enough for them to at least have a chance of becoming functional in it.

Sounds which the Chinese mix up.

It is a universally held stereotype in the West that the Chinese and the Japanese cannot distinguish between the letters L and R. When it comes to the Japanese, this stereotype does hold true in my experience. When Douglas MacArthur was running as presidential candidate in the States, his Japanese supporters displayed a banner in the centre of Tokyo, reading "we play for MacArthur's erection".

When it comes to the Chinese on the other hand, it is little realized that it is only the Chinese from the South who can't distinguish between L and R, since Southern dialects don't distinguish between the two. Southerners get the two sounds mixed up even when speaking standard Mandarin Chinese, which does distinguish between the L and the R (although the Chinese R is a bit different from ours, and the ability to produce a long rolled R can make the Chinese fall around with laughter.)

The Chinese from the South have much greater trouble pronouncing the sounds of standard Mandarin Chinese than do Northerners in general. This is unsurprising, since the language is based on the Beijing dialect, which is closer to other Northern dialects than to the Southern ones.
Another mix up which is not at all well known in the West, but which I find far more baffling than the inability to tell an L from an R, is the lack of distinction between the L and N sounds which one finds in many dialects of Southern China (although not in all of them).

When I traveled through Guizhou province, understanding the locals' Mandarin was made harder by their constant and unconscious substitution of N for L. Although I had never thought about it before coming to China, I suppose the two letters are pronounced similarly. I know lots of people in Beijing who come from Sichuan, Guizhou or Hunan, and they are still unable to tell the two sounds apart. If they know English they will make the same mistake in English, referring to a lecture as "necture" or Mr.Li as "Mr. Ni". Although some of them do make an effort to learn the difference between the two letters (which is after all marked in the Pinyin they learn in school), it still seems to take a conscious effort for them to remember which one is which. A bit like me with the second and third tones of Chinese.