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Chinese characters hard to learn? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| siromar Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6745 days ago 104 posts - 103 votes  Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Swedish | Message 9 of 40 28 June 2006 at 5:24am | IP Logged |
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I agree with Tadeo. Not all languages are of equal difficulty. I appreciate the fact you're trying to encourage others to work hard, but lets be realistic. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and a lot of other non indo-european languages are harder to learn for an English speaker than languages within his native tongue's family.
Of course no language is unlearnable. With enough time and effort, and with the right kind of motivation, you can learn anything. You just gotta work harder on certain languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7223 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 10 of 40 28 June 2006 at 11:49am | IP Logged |
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I'm also inclined to agree with Tadeo. I remember Ardaschir mentioning something to the effect once that it was better that people overestimate the difficulty of Korean than underestimate it, because while overestimation may keep some people away, underestimation will lead to a lot more people becoming discouraged when they find how strenuous it really is. I'd say that applies here as well.
It's all well and good to say things like "If you just learn 2 new characters each and every day, along with regular studying, you'll know 3000 characters in just 4 years", but most languages won't take 4 years to become literate in anyway; furthermore, 3000 characters is a pretty half-assed level of literacy. I mean, even young adult literature is full of characters like 癟 (bie1; I saw it for the first time in a Harry Potter translation, and it's pretty much always used in 乾癟, "wrinkled") that aren't even among the 4000 most commonly used characters. If you try reading pre-twentieth century vernacular literature, it's going to be a whole lot harder than reading Jane Austen; 3000 characters won't get you very far when they start tossing around things like 酴醾, 桔槔, and a bunch more that technical limitations prevent me from even entering here (And that's just from glancing through one chapter of A Dream of Red Mansions for examples). And saying "It's a lot easier if you focus on recognizing characters and don't worry too much about writing them"(No one actually said this, I'm just paraphrasing)? If you start talking like that you're no longer even comparing the difficulty of languages by the same criteria. Reading AND writing are both critical languages skills, and someone who can only do one is only halfway there. Most people would not consider someone who had difficulty spelling any English word more complicated that "dog" or "cat" to be literate. Sure, learn to read before you learn to write, but writing is still a skill that you will need to acquire eventually in order to achieve complete literacy. Yes it'll take a lot of work, no there isn't actually a lot of use most of the time, and yes you'll forget how to do it the moment you stop using it. But hey, that's what language learning's all about :p Maybe Chinese isn't more difficult in an absolute sense and it really is only a question of how much time it takes, but that's close enough to being more difficult as to make no odds. I mean, if one task can be done in 2 years without too much hassle, and another task can only be done in 2 years with nearly Herculean effort but can be done in 4 (Or 6, or 8) with comparable ease, the second task might be no more complicated than the first, but it's still definitely more difficult. Edited by Cthulhu on 28 June 2006 at 11:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| NascentOne Pentaglot Newbie Norway Joined 6889 days ago 19 posts - 43 votes Speaks: English, Norwegian*, Hindi, Punjabi, French Studies: German | Message 11 of 40 29 June 2006 at 3:52am | IP Logged |
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I have not studied any Chinese (though I'm currently tackling the "Remember the Kanji" series for Japanese characters) but a while ago I, came across this hilarious account of "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" by David Moser at the Department of Asian Languages and Culture, University of Michigan. Take a look at it, if only for the sake of humor!
"Why Chinese is So Damn Hard" 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6890 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 12 of 40 29 June 2006 at 4:21am | IP Logged |
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I can really sympathise with the author of that article! Even after years of studying Chinese, I could never say I can skim through a Chinese book or read a newspaper with few problems.
To be fair, I've been very lazy with maintaining and improving upon my Mandarin so my progress is, of course, minimal at best. But I know from personal experience and hearing my ex-classmates that it's hard to read Chinese for pleasure, even after 4 years of university study. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 40 29 June 2006 at 10:52am | IP Logged |
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I had hoped that someday, after I'd mastered a few other languages, I'd try my hand at Mandarin, but, after reading the article, I've been completely put-off. How do you guys manage?
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| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 40 30 June 2006 at 1:57am | IP Logged |
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I have no plans to learn it for a very long time since there are lots of other languages I want to "master" first, but thanks for the encouragement!
1 person has voted this message useful |
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