Does this Article Make a Legitimate Claim?
0 voters
Do those of you who have experience learning Chinese believe this to be true?
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
I recently bought the Rosetta Stone set and am rearing to get started, but this article makes me wonder…
I don’t have a lot of experience with this. However, compared to my experiences with other foreign languages, and after a year of exposure to Chinese language up close, I’d say that his article was very accurate. Sure, people can and will take issue with the degree of his opinions, but his facts seem very solid to me. Without knowing the reasons exactly, his main points were conclusions that I had already come to intuitively through observation.
A bit off topic perhaps but in Indonesia I realized that there was one great thing about the Chinese writing system and that is that it very clearly isn’t English. In Indonesia they use the alphabet and I was constantly looking at stuff on magazine covers and such because it looked like something I could read. I think I bought two or three Indonesian newspapers before learning to be more careful. At least when I see characters here I know enough to ignore them completely. Of course if I was studying Indonesian all of that written material I saw there would have been a tremendous advantage.
Depends on how it’s taught. It must be pointed out that the methods used for teaching Chinese are not as advanced as those used for teaching the other languages the author talks about; plus, there is obviously a far greater degree of similarity between English and those other languages.
On another Indonesian side note: I think Indonesian is a keen language – all the advantages of Chinese (verbs don’t conjugate, no pesky plurals, etc. etc.) minus the characters. It’s like Chinese all in Romanization, except that since it’s polysyllabic, you don’t have the problems with disambiguation of homophones if you don’t put the full tone marks in (oh yeah, I forgot: no tones, either! 
) I found I could get along fairly well when I studied it for a few weeks and then spent two weeks in Bali.
I used the now famous “Get out the lonely planet phrase book, read the phonetic guide on the plane to Jakarta, try to pronounce a bunch of useful expressions when you get there and get somebody to correct your mistakes, and tape record the whole process” method while there and although I didn’t really learn much I did have rather a lot of fun and the tape is magic!
But, you must admit, learning to read Chinese is not rocket science. It is simply memorizing characters (to a point). A person either memorizes 5000+ characters, or they don’t. I’m not sure that a good Chinese teacher can help with that.
This may anger some people, but I truly believe Chinese writing is the most idiotic writing system in the world. It may be nice to look at, but it is also needlessly complicated and time consuming to learn. I think people need to know what they are getting themselves into before even attempting to learn the written language. Those that begin with the “Oh, it’s so pretty” way of thinking NEVER stick with it. It is a Hurculean task. 
One more digression and I quit I promise 
The first experience that I had in Indonesia was attempting to speak to a taxi driver using the phrases from lonely planet. He understood me! I was able to speak intelligably a few phrases in a language that I had never heard! Try that with Chinese characters.
Thanks everyone. I’m assuming it’s a given that speaking Mandarin is much easier than learning the characters. I’d like to gain a conversational level of proficiency in Mandarin. I’ve always been good with tones - we’ll see how it goes. My best friend/college roommate is native Taiwanese. He’d like me to go over to Taiwan to teach English - says the opportunities are great and the food is cheap, plus he can get some connections for me. Sounds like a plan - maybe I’ll spend about a year of intensive study, two hours a day. Hopefully this’ll be enough to build upon for the move over.
Thanks again for all your comments, and I look forward to reading more posts about the expat life.
Intensive study. Two hours a day! 
Sorry haeber but we all made that mistake. Intensive study is more like eight hours a day if you include all of the wrangling with the language you will do in attempting to live and study here. There is A LOT to learn and if you don’t use what you learned before you are liable to forget it as you move on to more other, perhaps more difficult material. Learning a second language as an adult is like reprograming an old computer underwater with lousy tools. It is difficult, time consuming, and, unlike rewiring an old computer underwater with lousy tools, one of the most amazing experiences you will ever have.
Yes! After struggling with Chinese, it’s AMAZING to discover that you can pull out an English-Bahasa dictionary and try out a few phrases to an Indonesian, and ACTUALLY BE UNDERSTOOD, THE FIRST TIME YOU TRY THE WORDS! Tagalog works the same, when I talk to Filipinos. So does Spanish. Languages that are actually pronounced the way they are written - what a concept!
Indeed. I have been playing my “try pronouncing some common expressions in Indonesian, getting somebody to correct your pronunciation and tape it all” tape for my English students. I think it goes a long way towards introducing them to the wonders of the alphabet. You would never get them to actually admit to being impressed of course but it shows on their faces regardless. I am thinking about making a list of two or three common expressions in five or ten alphabetic languages (including Chinese in PinYin), learning to pronounce them well, and presenting them with that. Should be fun. I think people get sick of English English English all the time. In fact I feel vaguely nauseated now…
Sure I find Chinese difficult, I’ve been studying for a while now and I have a long way to go. I am sure if I had learned Spanish I would be pretty fluent by now.
BUT, I taught English to immigrants, and some of them were immigrants who did not use a romanised alphabet. It took these students the better part of a year to get out of the beginners class (two hours a day - 5 days a week) As adults it would take them several months to master the alphabet, as for word recognition… (curiousl one of these students, after some time, was really quick at unjumbling words) My point is that they were struggling with a new writing system, and they progresse far slower than language groups that used a romanised alphabet.
On the other hand, my Japanese and Korean friends (who just happen to be from a background that is familiar with the character writing system) who study Chinese ARE reading books and news papers within a year (and sometimes months) of beginning to learn Chinese.
Yes, I think Chinese is difficult, but to call the written language (which according to McNaughton, in Reading and Writing Chinese, can cross seventeen languages. How “dumb” can a language like that be?
To a very large extent, the difficulty of Chinese depends on your background.
Actually I’ve found it’s not nearly that bad. You memorize the first few hundred perhaps, and then after a while you get a feel for the structure of it and can quite often pick new characters by a combination of their individual structure and context. And if you’ve got a grounding in the spoken language to start with (or in parallel) you’ve got yet another foot up. You don’t have to memorize all those characters, just remember them, and there’s a definite difference.
That’s one thing I find from people starting out learning to read/write Chinese - they look at the characters and go “Holy shit how am I going to remember all that?” But as you get further along, you get to understand the system. It doesn’t always work, no more than knowing how the English alphabet works is a guarantee you’ll be able to figure out every new word, but there’s a certain logic that often works in characters.
Brilliant article. Chinese is far too difficult. I wish I’d never bothered. What a waste of time. All the people who do really well in Taiwan and China don’t speak a word. I could have learnt something that would have made me money instead. Oh well 
I’ve often heard that learning Chinese is easier than learning English. Of course, it’s only true if you 1. figure out the tones and sounds and 2. don’t bother learning how to write. If you only want to speak Chinese it will only take X number of years and learning to speak English takes 2X. I’ve heard that X is about one, but that must be for someone better at learning to speak and listen than me.
I’m impressed with how much I’ve learned with the Rosetta Stone software by only focusing on listening. Every time I choose a new lesson on the CD I’m learning some basic communication that I never knew before, so I’m not sure that it’s going to make me be able to communicate. Then again, people use much simpler words and sentences when speaking than when writing. I’m at lesson 10 and there are 19 lessons. I’ll let you know how well I can speak when I finish the program. (I only allow myself to proceed to the next lesson once I have absolutely mastered the current lesson. It might take a while to finish the CD-ROM at this rate of study)
I would love to find a good listening program for an advanced beginner such as myself. I have been through the Shida CD a few times and while most of it seems pretty authentic I would prefer something a bit more upbeat. I don’t know why they can’t make language programs like that with people who have warm, pleasant, perhaps even a bit sexy voices. And why can’t they include a bit of humor? Some decent music to break it up a bit?
Do you guys think this Rosetta Stone is anything like what I am looking for? Right now I am making my own tapes by reading aloud from my PinYin dictionary and grammar books. Actually I carry my tape recorder around all the time and any time anybody teaches me anything I try to get it on tape. It’s a delightful way to review but still I’d like something a bit more organized. I’d especially like lots of manipulations of basic grammar structures. That about sums it up I guess. Sexy voice, grammar emphasis, hot tunes. Perhaps I could somehow persuade rantheman and Ironlady to make me a tape…
Don’t know if I did well in Taiwan or not, but I certainly make a lot of money off Chinese…just about all the money I’ve ever earned in my life. What other major would lead to me being flown to Barcelona and put up for free in 2 weeks for a couple of days? (interpreting job) 
[quote=“bob”]I would love to find a good listening program for an advanced beginner such as myself. I have been through the Shi-Da CD a few times and while most of it seems pretty authentic I would prefer something a bit more upbeat. I don’t know why they can’t make language programs like that with people who have warm, pleasant, perhaps even a bit sexy voices. And why can’t they include a bit of humor? Some decent music to break it up a bit?
Do you guys think this Rosetta Stone is anything like what I am looking for? Right now I am making my own tapes by reading aloud from my PinYin dictionary and grammar books. Actually I carry my tape recorder around all the time and any time anybody teaches me anything I try to get it on tape. It’s a delightful way to review but still I’d like something a bit more organized. I’d especially like lots of manipulations of basic grammar structures. That about sums it up I guess. Sexy voice, grammar emphasis, hot tunes. Perhaps I could somehow persuade rantheman and Ironlady to make me a tape…[/quote]
Rosetta Stone’s format is very simple. There are four pictures on the screen and four sentences, one for each picture. When they read one of the sentences, you match the sentence with the picture that it corresponds with. You need to use it with a computer - it’s interactive learning.
If you have a lot of chance to listen during the day, they have many audio programs. The one I see most commonly on the internet is Pimsleur, though I don’t know how good it is. The guys who studied Chinese at UCLA always had their headphones on listening to the lessons. Learning Chinese as a foreign language must be done intensively or you’ll fail the course. They said they spent as much time on Chinese as they spent on all their other classes combined. That aggressive studying never appealed to me so I never enrolled in the Chinese program during my time there.
I only took one semester of Chinese in university, but I took it during my senior year of college. I was taking 12 hours of electrical engineering courses (some simple, some advanced) and 5 hours of Chinese. I figure that I spent about the same amount of time on my Chinese class as I did on all of those other classes. Of course, at that time I really wanted to learn Chinese because I knew I was coming to Taiwan. Still, learning Chinese requires an enormous amount of time.
Which is why a good listening program is essential. You can put it on and do other things at the same time: clean up the house, go for a walk, take a bath… With the tapes I make for myself I find that I absorb them best if I play them while walking around town.