Want to Learn Chinese? No Problem!
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I have the privilege of visiting China four or five times a year, usually for business meetings in Beijing, but with the occasional opportunity for a purely social outing. Always, there are surprises. Always, I encounter something new and fascinating. And always, someone observes that still, after all this time, I speak very little Mandarin. My response is simple: I haven’t noticed too many people in Beijing speaking my preferred dialect, Cantonese. We all have a laugh about our mutual inadequacies, but I shall now confess that my Cantonese capabilities are really a poor excuse for the fact that I haven’t made the time to learn Mandarin as I should. It’s worse than that, in fact: despite having lived in Hong Kong for 11 years, my spoken Cantonese is inadequate and my recognition of the written language is virtually nil. And yet I pride myself on being a linguist. So what’s gone wrong?
During a recent visit to Beijing, I discussed with a senior chinese publisher the difficulties we foreigners face in learning Chinese. His view was that Chinese is really not very complicated– it can’t be: after all, over a billion people in China speak it! My position was rather different. I believe that, of the properly established language groups, with a written form, a grammatical structure and a widely-agreed lexicon, Chinese is the most difficult one to learn. It takes considerable study and lengthy immersion in a Chinese-speaking environment to make any sense of the written language and the many variations in the spoken idiom.
There are five things that render Chinese particularly difficult for Westerners and for people from other linguistic backgrounds.
First and foremost, while written Chinese can generally be understood by all Chinese communities, there is the problem of multiple dialects within China which make citizens of different provinces mutually incomprehensible, even though they may be articulating exactly the same words. This can be extraordinarily confusing to the unwary learner. The solution may seem obvious: learn Mandarin and stay in one place while you’re learning, and you won’t encounter a problem. But that means that the student misses out on the enjoyment of traveling to other corners of this great country, and he/she will also be ill-prepared for visiting another city where the Mandarin dialect is spoken, but in a different accent. Beijing itself is notorious for its own particular accent, so my Chinese friends tell me.
I hasten to add that Chinese is not alone in this problem: consider Italy for example. Last month, I asked two Italian acquaintances how well they were able to understand the “Com- missario Montalbano” television crime series, which is set in the southern Italian island of Sicily. One said he didn’t understand their spoken Italian at all, because he came from the Veneto, in northern Italy. The other admitted that she didn’t understand it very well either, despite being a Sicilian herself – because she was brought up on the other side of the island, separated by a small mountain range. What formidable cultural barriers can be presented by geophysical features!
The second problem is the many tones that are essential to the understanding of different dialects – typically four tones in Mandarin, but as many as nine in Cantonese. Tonal languages of this kind are rarely found in other parts of the world, though they can be found in African languages with very limited vocabularies. While tones and stress are commonly used in English, for example, they are seldom used to confer a different meaning on a word. By contrast, a single sound in Cantonese can represent several completely different script characters and meanings –but the differentiation lies in the tones applied to those sounds.
Third, there is the Chinese script itself, which is unlike anything on the other side of the world and which has evolved in its form and complexity over thousands of years. To make things worse, the PRC chose to adopt simplified characters in order to improve literacy standards, while Hong Kong and Taiwan retained traditional complex script. As if that weren’t problem enough for us poor learners, neither the ability to recognize the meaning of a character nor an understanding of how to build a pictogram – neither of these skills enables one to identify how to form the sound represented by the written character. Unlike languages written in Roman script, it is not possible to pronounce a word simply by looking at the written form.
Fourth, we encounter a significant difference in grammatical structure between Chinese and other languages, though, admittedly, this is the least of our concerns. If you have managed to learn Romance grammatical structures and the derivatives of the Germanic languages, it’s not too difficult to absorb the mysteries of Chinese grammar.
Finally, there’s the lexicon, which is unlike that of any Western language. If you speak English, it’s pretty easy to guess what certain words mean in German, Spanish, French or Italian, as English is related to all those languages. Similarly, certain Arabic words have found their way into the Swahili language, so a Swahili speaker is not totally lost in the Arab countries. But virtually no Chinese words are intelligible to Westerners, cha (tea) and taifeng (typhoon) being among the rare exceptions. The consequence is that the entire Chinese lexicon has to be learnt from first principles, without the benefit of any natural word associations.
The overarching issue is that all five of these problems must be overcome simultaneously, which, in reality, means that the student of Chinese must be prepared to work at least twice as long and as hard as is required to achieve an equivalent amount of progress in other languages. Therein lies the solution to our problem – hard work, though there remains a question of commitment and motivation. Do we have the will to make the breakthrough? If so, maybe my Chinese publisher friend was right, after all: with a little effort and determination, learning Chinese should be easy!