I took Ancient Greek I the same semester I was taking the first semester of second-year Chinese in college. Greek was 3 hours per week, Chinese was 6. I had to spend about three times as much time on the Greek course to get the same grade. Go figure. Characters are one thing, but a really robust grammar system is quite another. Both can be troublesome to a learner, especially if they are dissimilar to his or her native language.
Written chinese is just a lot harder than it needs to be. it’s obvious.
I did Japanese and Chinese as a double major for my undergrad, and I easily spent more time on Japanese than Chinese, and that’s despite the fact that I’d already invested a few years into Japanese and was only a beginner at Mandarin, and I still got much better grades in Chinese than Japanese. Mind you, considering the crappy NZ system means I spent four hours of class time a week on each language and did no homework outside of required assignments for Chinese, spending more time on anything was a pretty easy thing.
Personally I don’t really think it’s anything to do with the characters themselves that make the language hard or otherwise; I think it comes down to motivation, the teachers, and the way the learner learns. I had the motivation, good teachers, and am a fairly visual learner, so I was lucky to get a good setup. Others might not be so lucky.
Test
Aah, but spoken Chinese is even harder…It just looks deceptively simple.
Last semester I had a Chinese teacher who had studied overseas. She was funny, explained grammar clearly (which I need) by writing the rule on the board, writing a few examples, (using different clored pens to distinguish similar, yet different structurew. Then she ran us through some simple exercises> Followed up by giving us situations to explain using the new structure, or getting us to come up with our own. (sometimes we would choose the question/situation for fellow students. she would of course vary this according to how easy/difficult the structure was. Often she would review the next day (mainly by getting us to use it), and the next day, until we felt reasonably comfortable with it. When we stumbled across the same grammar a few weeks later, she revised again.
She NEVER said, “We did that last week/month/year!” and just move on.
It was great! I learnt a lot, gained alot of confidence and improved.
This semester my new teacher thinks I’m going to learn by her talking non-stop for two hours at lightning speed. Taking over my sentence when I am hesitant or make a mistake (and not give me the opportunity to follow up.) Adding 20+ new words a day to the 40 or so that are in the boook. Not to mention the 3 or 4 idioms. This is all scribbled across the board, wihtout her taking a breath!
Today SHE read through the entire dialogue, interjecting explanations, history and culture lessons with no pause or direction that she had left the text, returned to the text,or repeated part of the text.
I wanted out of class after the first twenty minutes.
Strangely enough, my Korean classmate (who was rather timid las semester) seems to be thriving on the new teachers style.
I wonder if this is why I find Chinese as difficult as I do?
What are your experiences with Chinese language teaching styles?
Do you think this has anything to do with the degree of difficulty many westerners encounter?
As long as you can nail the tones (and I guess for a lot of people that’s a big if), I think learning to speak isn’t that hard in comparison to other languages. I find the grammar is a lot easier than when I was learning French or German.
Having said all that learning to read and (worse) write is the stinker. I’ve found learning characters a lot easier as I’ve gone on. I suspect already being able to speak pretty well before starting to write helped a lot. But it’s a mammoth task and everytime I stop to think about how long I’ve got to go, I feel like chucking my dictionary out the window. It is especially frustrating when I pick up a novel in German (which I have not studied for years and probably studied for as long as I have studied Chinese) and read it.
So yes, I agree with a lot of what was in the article. But as for what he said about newspapers, they are hard for any language learner. Half of the words are names of people and places. Often obscure ones at that.
Aah, but spoken Chinese is even harder…It just looks deceptively simple.[/quote]
I know you’re joking now!
I agree with a fair bit of the article, but i also agree when people discuss teaching methods. My (Chinese) new years resolution is that I just learn to speak, forget about writing. Hell, it can’t be worse than my current progression, and I’m tired of focussing on reading and writing.
After a bit I’ll go back and learn the writing.
My new year’s resolution is to abandon Chinese altogether and to claw back some part of the 6 years I spent taking Chinese classes. (Although I think the loss of those years cannot entirely be blamed on a pointless study of Chinese) 
[quote=“funkymonkey”]
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. [/quote]
Ha. No. It’s just designed for a different usage model. The following are just some properties. They don’t make a character script “good” but there are usage models that can take advantage of them:
- It is regular and compact.
- It encodes rich semantic information.
- It lossily encodes pronunciation.
Compactness is good for saving space and for reading. Regularity makes it easy to do block printing, and page alignment and makes it possible to write forwards, backwards, top to bottom, bottom to top without any formatting problems or semantic problems (the shape forms a unit of meaning.) Handwriting recognition is easy to implement.
Rich semantic information within each character means Chinese writing is space efficient. This is proven. More importantly, it can be scanned much faster in speed reading. It makes word construction easy. Coin a new word? Each character has enough meaning to make a two character neologism self-explanatory at first reading. It’s also why idioms can be just four characters. Also makes for pithy yet interesting poetry.
Lossy encoding of pronunciation may seem a huge drawback, but actually it means it is adaptive. It can be used across dialects and across changes in language. No fretting about “spelling” going out of sync with pronunciation. Take this a bit further and you get benefits like being able to read ancient texts and even guess-read Japanese newspapers.
Sure, it’s hard to learn due to the large alphabet size. That’s why you don’t learn all of it at once. Just like you don’t learn all vocabulary at once, you learn characters a little at a time. Phonetic scripts are just a crutch anyway to get you started. For mature users of phonetic scripts, the phonetic aspect is hardly used at all. You go from the “shape” of the word directly to its meaning (if reading) or sound (if vocalizing). You do not go look at each letter and sound it out like a child. When you are at that level, a phonetic script has zero advantage of over a character script. It is worse.
Come on people, face it: learning Chinese is fun, because of the characters, not in spite of.
And writing IS difficult, but it hasn’t got so much to do with the characters themselves, but rather with the fact, that in Chinese you hardly write anything the same way you would say it.
learning chinese is harder than it needs to be. i took chinese in high school and university. i have had many instructors. they all taught it the same way. introduce new vocab and matching characters at the same time. repeat ad naseum until you terminate your studies. it just ain’t natural i tell ya. when you first started learning your native language how much of a lag was there between learning to speak and learning to write? years, by god, years!
when i get my MA and some chinese teaching job at a no-name college here is how i am gonna do it: focus on spoken chinese. spoken chinese is easy enough. after a month or so (when some of the intimidation has worn off) i’ll then start teaching them chinese characters in a logical way. i won’t test them strictly on character form, tone, pinyin and english translation but also on WHY the characters we study have the form they have. heck, by then the students will have enough grasp of the spoken language to discuss the written characters. that way we’ll have something in class to actually talk about that has pertinence to everyone in the room: ““zhe ge bian you “shou” haiyou na ge bian you “ding” suoyi zhe shi “da” to hit.””
just memorizing characters without and reasoning/rational/understanding behind each one is just…er…um…FEUDAL.
the longer i play with this stuff the more i am convinced the laowai are gonna have to start the next round of chinese language reform. mainlanders can’t read traditional and other parts of “greater china” can’t read simplified. both sides are ossified and somebody is gonna have to break the incorrectly grafted calcification. yeah, the cripple is gonna wail, but is for his own welfare. as long as we have the simple formula of “determinant+phonetic” as an anchor we can achieve the wonderful dual tasks of unifying disparate scripts and hacking YEARS of mandatory study time for all learners of chinese script, chinese and laowai alike.
heck, why not start up an int’l effort to unify/simplify chinese script?
any thoughts? as is, the system is backwards and past due for the next step towards the sagely objective of the rectification of names.
You are joking right? You couldn’t have thought up a more taboo (to Chinese) plan.
Except you are wrong on all counts. Mainlanders obviously CAN read traditional very well and other parts of “greater China” like Hong Kong and Macau are taking up simplified for practical reasons. If you include Singaporean/Malaysian Chinese, they are taught simplified form since decades ago. Pretty soon it will just be Taiwan that’s still using the traditional script, which isn’t bad, but they’ve been doing it for the wrong reason – political.
[quote]
as long as we have the simple formula of “determinant+phonetic” as an anchor we can achieve the wonderful dual tasks of unifying disparate scripts and hacking YEARS of mandatory study time for all learners of Chinese script, Chinese and laowai alike.[/quote]
The phonetic side is a nearly precise phonetic encoding for Old Chinese, up to voicing/unvoicing of the initial cluster. But of course, Old Chinese isn’t spoken today. However, regular phonetic changes retained most of the phonetic classes, except some that merged and some that split.
yes, it is taboo. that is why laowai are gonna have to start it.
when i lived in mainland china i saw first hand that the common chinese person couldn’t ID many traditional characters. i had a copy of the textbook “taiwan today” with me. the students would peruse it and ask me what the characters meant.
rectifying the script would be incredibly simple. for example, assign every “ma” the same phonetic half- for conversation’s sake let it be “horse”.
“linen” would use “horse” phonetic + “grass” determinant while
“mother” would stay exactly the same as it is.
we couldn’t botch it up any worse than the PRC and/or 5000 glorious years of history has.
No! Not the changing the writing part (as PRC has obviously done it quite liberally), the “laowai” part!
First, you’ve got to find a literate adult. Well, no, it’s not taught in school, if that’s what you mean, but it comes up often enough that by the time people are out of school they’ve picked it up, either through calligraphy, reading “old style” storefront signs, historical monuments, reading classics, using the internet, writing checks, or whatever. It’s not that hard (to read). A recent survey showed more than half the mainlanders have little or no trouble reading the traditional script. That’s basically about the same as grasp of pinyin, which is taught in school.
BTW, the simplification scheme used for the most part straight pattern-matching substitution and in-common-use simplifications (in cursive writing) and only “created” from scratch a small portion of the character set.
[quote=“skeptic yank”]
when I get my MA and some Chinese teaching job at a no-name college here is how I am gonna do it:[/quote]
First, there are not very many colleges – even “no-names” – that hire people with an MA for Chinese teaching positions. I assume from your profile that you’re in the US, BTW.
Second, even if you get a Chinese teaching job, it’s unlikely that you will have much freedom to do “what you want”. The department will have a lot to say about what is taught. You cannot impose your own dislike for the writing system (even if it’s one that I personally share! 
) on the students. It might be possible to offer two parallel tracks of Chinese language courses, one with the four skills and one focusing on oral/aural skills, but based on my experienec in the US university teaching scene, you won’t get far with the plan you’re proposing.
[quote]the longer i play with this stuff the more I am convinced the laowai are gonna have to start the next round of Chinese language reform. … yeah, the cripple is gonna wail, but is for his own welfare. … hacking YEARS of mandatory study time for all learners of Chinese script, Chinese and laowai alike.
heck, why not start up an int’l effort to unify/simplify Chinese script?
[/quote]
Before you charge off saving the world, could you please fix our own house? (I am assuming you are a native Englsih speaker - but if you’re not I am sure the same could be said of your own language.)
I would like to see a standardisation (or standardization) of English. it would make things a little less colourful (or is that colorful?). Do we really need the complicated “ough” “ight” endings? Why not get a little more phonetic. and use “ow” “oe” “uff” and “ite” Get rid of redundant silent letters like “k” in knife, know, etc. the “-tion” suffix could become “-shen”
Standardise vowel combinations too - change the confusing “ea” to “ee” in
wors like “read” “pleat” and to a single “e” in words like “bread” and “read”.
Change the whole silent “e” (vowel consonent e) trick to double vowels (because so much of the time the rule doesn’t apply anyway (love, dove, move, stove, live (as a verb))
This would certainly hack YEARS of mandatory study time for all learners of English, laowai and non-native speakers alike. (I am aware of the meaning of laowai - I am just so used to being a waiguo ren - even in my own country) Sure us cripples would wail, but it would be for our own benefit.
Not to mention it would certainly make teaching English much easier too.
Wen we hav fiished this litle rashenalizashen of reeding and riiting English we wood then bee in a good enuff pozishen too maak the moov in orlteraating foren langwiges. Don’t uu think?
HA! Little did I know that my simple question would snowball into a spirited debate. Thank you all for your input (especially you, twocs, for your insight on the Rosetta Stone lessons - can’t wait to get mine). It only fortifies my impression that I have a long, tough road ahead of me, but isn’t that what makes life rewarding? If all else fails, I’m sure I’d at least have the skills to master a menu in Chinese, or WILL I? 
Compared to many of you, I’m green, but give me a year and I’ll be on the “Green Island.” Hope to see you there.
–Jon
Menus? No one reads them, just point to what you want. But you might be able to enjoy the newspaper in Chinese while you’re eating…