Most times I tell someone that I study Chinese he or she goes: "Wow, that must hard!". Indeed it is, but, why? Is it really more difficult than Spanish or, even, German? Does it apply only to writing, due to all its complicated symbols, or is it speaking also hard to master? Isn't there a linguistic universal that says that there is by definition no language harder to master than others? If you want to know the solution to all these questions, keep reading.
Yes, Chinese is really hard to master, both in speaking and in writing (especially this one). And I would go as far as saying that writing Chinese is also difficult for Chinese people themselves. If you don't believe me, try looking for some diffucult to write Chinese characters and ask a Chinese friend to write them. More often than not he or she won't be able to handwrite some of them. Young Chinese are too used to typing in the computer or cell phones, and so they often forget how to handwrite many characters.
But let's focus on non-native speakers. The first thing that will strike them is tones. Chinese is a tonal language, and that means that two words that are apparently pronounced in the same way can mean two different things, because their intonations is different. The traditional example used to illustrate this is the word "ma", which has four different meanings depending on its intonation: interrogation mark (neutral tone), mother (first tone), leprosy (second tone), horse (third tone) and to insult (fourth tone).
This should not be entirely new for us though, since European languages also have tones. However, tones in European languages do not serve to differentiate meaning between different words, but to convey more subtle things, such as the speaker's state of mind. So, we would have different tones for the interrogative pronoun
what depending on what the speaker wants to convey. It could be neutral, like when some friend casually calls for our attention (
-Hey Julian) and we answer:
-Sorry, what?
But compare this example, where the tone would be neutral, with the tone we would use when someone tells us something that greatly surprises as:
-Hey, you know that Michael Jackson just died last night? -Whaaaat? The way we pronounce
what here is radically different from the one in the first example. That is, we use different intonations. So there you go, if you can tell the difference right away in the above example you might be good at Chinese tones!
Actually, it's not that easy. Once we have mastered tones individually, we realize how difficult it is to pronounce them correctly when they are inserted in a real conversation, where we usually forget which tones is each word. But its difficulty goes even farther. The five tones I have described change when they are inside sentences. So even if you remember them perfectly one by one, that won't often be enough in a real conversation. For example, the third tone is not third tone anymore when followed by a second tone. In this case both would be pronounced as second tones. And when two third tones are together the first thrid tone changes into a much shorter third tone that could be argued to be a totally different tone (and we'd have six in total).
But don't give up yet, since even if don't pronounce the tones correctly, context will most times help the listener understand you. Most times...
If you think oral Chinese is difficult wait until you know about its writing. Unlike all European languages (that I know) which have alphabet (finite number of letters, usually some tens, used to form infinite number of words where, usually, each one of the former correspond to a certain phoneme or way to pronounce it), Chinese is written by means of characters. Each character is a word that means something on itself, although it can also be used together with other characters to form different words. There are thousands of Chinese characters, and you need to memorize a couple of thousand to be able to start reading something serious. That means hours and hours sitting at the table writing the different parts of the character (stroke) until you have memorized it. And then you need to learn how to pronounce it, since you will often find that a character gives you very little clue about its pronunciation. Let's give an example to see the difference with English, by looking at the word
bank, 银行 (yínháng) . Even if you don't know the word
bank in English, you can still read it if you see it written somewhere. And then once you are at home watching TV you might hear it again in the news, so you will remember about it, look it up in the dictionary and then it'll hopefully stick to your brain. But with the word 银行 you won't know how to read it in the first place if you haven't studied it before. Chances are that you know any of its characters, but even this is tricky, since the second one, 行, is often pronounced "xíng", whereas in this case is pronounced "háng". So you might very well know how to say the word
bank in Chinese, but then you will see it written and have no idea what it means. That actually happens to some of my friends who have been working in China for a long time. They have high proficiency in oral Chinese, but then they will see daily used words in its written form and won't know how to read them.
And finally we find one last problem with Chinese characters. There are two different writing systems, the simplified one (used in mainland China) and the traditional one (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan). They way to write characters in these two systems varies more or less depending on the word, and native Chinese speakers usually have no problem recognizing either one of them. But things are different for a foreign student, just like me. I have been learning Chinese for many years, the last two in China completely devoted to the study of the language. And yet sometimes I buy a Chinese movie only to find that it contains traditional characters that I can't understand (maybe it is a Taiwanese or Hong Kong movie or maybe it is a Chinese movie forbidden in China that was imported outside from Taiwan or Hong Kong). In times like these I wonder why on earth I decided to start learning Chinese.
So, there are no good news?
There are! Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world, with no less than more than a billion speakers in China and 20 million in Taiwan. But its influence can also be seen outside its frontiers. More than half of the 5 million inhabitants of Singapore speak Chinese. The influence of Chinese is huge all around Asia. I could confirm this in my recent trips to Thailand and Japan, where I had the most meaningful encounters with Chinese speaking people, either natives of Chinese origin, exchange students or Chinese immigrants. Its influence can easily be seen in most countries of Europe or America as well. All this makes Chinese an incredibly useful language to learn, so maybe the pains of learning it are worth it after all.
Chinese is also a language with thousands of years of history which had an outstanding influence in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese. That means that if we want to learn any of those languages it'll be easier if you already know Chinese. For example, more than fifty percent of Korean words are of Chinese origin, and so their pronounciation is similar. Japanese has three different alphabets, one of them, the kanji, is almost 100 percent made of Chinese characters. That means that, if you know Chinese before learning Japanese, we will have very little problems at studying one of the most difficult aspects of Japanese!
The process of learning Chinese can be as hard as rewarding. Chinese characters, with more or less modifications, have been the instrument of communication for Chinese people for more than three thousand years. That also has positive and negative aspects for Chinese students. This old language has embedded elements of Chinese culture that are thousands of years old. Some idioms and the meaning of some characters might seem strange to us, since its meaning refers to the way things were done a long time ago. That might be one of the reasons why Chinese have been able to preserve its customs throughout the centuries: thanks to the language its users has access to the Chinese culture from its origins. However, it is also a reason why the language is so hard to learn. Some characters and idioms make no sense nowadays, but people use them anyways. Dead metaphors are part of this process: expressions whose use is understood nowadays although the original meaning has been lost. All languages have dead metaphors, but you can imagine how many metaphors have "died" in a language as old as Chinese.
A key to solve some of these problems is learning Ancient Chinese, which not only would help you have a deeper understanding of modern Chinese, but which would also allow you to read Ancient texts in its original language. Besides, Classic Chinese was the instrument of formal communication for Korea, Japan and Vietnam during different periods until the 20th century. So in case a time machine would be invented, you could travel hundred of centuries in the past and still be able to communicate with people from these countries. Imagine how cool it would be to have a conversation (written) with Confucius or The Art of War writer Sun Tzu in their own language!
Chinese is a terribly hard language to learn and especially to master, but it is also a very rewarding one. And by the way, I still haven't answered the question from the introduction about that linguistic universal that says that all languages have the same degree of difficulty. Well, after many years studying Chinese, let me assure you that the know-it-all linguist who said that probably knew no Chinese at all!
