The Secret about Chinese Language You Might Not Know

The Secret about Chinese Language You Might Not Know

-- My comment on "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard? " 

By: Wang Yujiang

I recently read an essay on “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard” by David Moser of the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies. As a native Chinese speaker, I would like to clarify and correct some information about the Chinese language noted in this essay. I will also share with you some secrets about the Chinese language you might not know.

Firstly, is Chinese hard to learn? It depends on what you want to learn. If you learn spoken Chinese only, it is as easy or as hard as every other language including English. Written Chinese is certainly hard. As we all know that there are thousands of Chinese characters instead of 26 alphabet letters as in English.

The Chinese characters are so numerous that most native speakers do not know how to write most of them unless they check a dictionary. In China, everybody has had an experience of writing or saying the wrong characters.

Secondly, David Moser wrote, “the writing system just ain't very phonetic.” He may say that the classical written Chinese is not phonetic; however, the contemporary written Chinese (Baihuawen) is phonetic. A Chinese character now stands for a sound, or a syllable. The Baihuawen in Chinese means the writing is like speaking.

Thirdly, David Moser wrote, “tonal languages are weird.” David Moser and many linguists regard Chinese as a tonal language. Actually, it is not. They do not distinguish the name of characters and the sounds they represent. English letters have both names and the sounds they represent. Chinese characters also have names and sounds they present.

Since we produce around four hundred sounds for thousands of Chinese characters, we have to use different tones to distinguish them when we talk about a single character. That is a tonal character not a tonal language. When we speak, we do not follow the tones marked in the dictionary that linguists call change of tone. Chinese intonation is the same as people speaking English.

Fourthly, David Moser wrote, “there's classical Chinese.” Now nobody uses classical Chinese because it is a clipped way of writing, which is similar to writing a telegram message. Sending a telegram was generally charged by the word. To save money, people typically wrote their telegrams in a very compressed style. Ancient Chinese people used knife-pen or brush-pen to write characters on bamboo slips, which are very slow. To save time, they had to pack as much information into the smallest possible number of characters. This is classical Chinese.

Classical Chinese is a style of writing without spaces and other marks between words and sentences. When reading classical Chinese, readers must put in the punctuation themselves to extract meaning from the writing. About a century ago fountain pens and pencils were introduced into China. Consequently the New Culture movement developed contemporary Chinese writing that replacing classical Chinese.

Now Chinese writers punctuate articles so the readers only have to space (multi-syllable) words by themselves. However, spacing words is still hard work for readers, because it is mostly trial and error. I guess it is especially hard work for a foreigner. If the writer spaces the words, Chinese is as easy as English.

Fifthly, David Moser wrote, “there are too many Romanization methods and they all suck.” There is only one scheme for the Chinese phonetic alphabet (pinyin) passed by the Chinese Congress and it works. Unfortunately it sucks because some conservative intellectuals resist it.

Conservatives believe that alphabets are not suitable for Chinese. If they know arbitrariness theory in linguistics, they will realize that any symbol is good for any language. In fact, the Chinese alphabet is a Roman alphabet that has been used by many languages in the world for long time.

Sixthly, I agree with what David Moser wrote, “the (Chinese) writing system is ridiculous.” However, my support is a little bit different. The progress of a language is based on the growth of the smallest units in writing, which is a simple metric to quantify languages. The Chinese characters are the smallest units of the Chinese writing. No matter how many Chinese characters there are, the quantity of them is limited, because the growth of characters in writing is unsustainable. Even though we treat Chinese characters as phonetic letters, we do not group them into a multi-syllable smallest unit, because they were the smallest units.

Since a Chinese character is the smallest unit, now ten thousand Chinese characters build up only then thousand smallest units. That is it, no more. Meanwhile twenty-six English characters (letters) build up hundreds thousands the smallest units (words), and they are still continually increasing. Needless to say, letters are more efficient than Chinese characters. Using thousands of Chinese characters instead of dozens letters is the reason why the Chinese writing system is ridiculous.

Lastly, if you ask me why written Chinese is so hard. As far as I am concerned, there are two causes. You have to space (multi-syllable) words by yourselves when you read contemporary Chinese writing, and there are numerous Chinese characters.

References:

New Concept Linguistics

《Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard》 by David Moser from University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/1991Moser.pdf