'They say Chinese is difficult - European languages are more difficult'

It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european! Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a native speaker!<p>The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn?<p>I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes.<p>"chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence of the word from the french word for "candlestick"

Recently my wife (born and raised in China) was on the phone with her dad. She was trying to tell him something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking insect), but she didn't know the Chinese word.<p>She looked it up in the English-&#62;Chinese dictionary, and that told her what the <i>character</i> is. But since she was on the phone -- voice only -- she was still unable to communicate it, since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. She tried to describe the strokes in the character to dad, but just couldn't get it across.<p>EDIT: to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. That's because Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. A given pronunciation would only address one specific local pronunciation of one specific sub-language, so it's not so useful.<p>Also, his complaints about not being able to figure out new words aren't really valid. Since so much of English consists of building words from roots stolen from Latin and other languages, if you know those roots, it does get you a good deal of the way toward understanding new words.

Every language has its difficulties. Chinese grammar is very easy compared to English. However, to get to a basic reading level, you need to know at least 2300 characters (in other languages, the alphabet is very small). There are also tones (mandarin only has 5. Other dialects like Cantonese have 9).<p>It's also nearly impossible to know the meaning of a character (or how to pronounce it), unless you have already seen it (you can look at the root, but that doesn't always work).

&#62; Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%.<p>Good luck reading sentences where the most important and meaningful word is the one you don't know.<p>And what's with the interest in characters? Didn't you just get done praising how most words are formed out of a bunch of characters? So now we need to memorize a few thousand characters <i>and</i> memorize how multiple characters form a word/concept. The alphabet looks better all the time...

It looks like the problem the author is struggling with is vocab-as-meaning vs vocab-as-etymology. She complains that english creates new words for everything; "bus", "envelope", etc, but we really tend to re-use words for different but allegorical meanings all the time. I'm sure all the readers here are familiar with at least one meaning of 'bus' that has nothing to with wheels. And the noun 'envelope' would be, I think, a pretty easy word to guess if you saw it in context and were already familiar with the verb 'envelop'.

As someone who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, I've noticed the same thing. E.g., lobster is "dragon shrimp," computer is "electric brain," etc. I wonder if the reason European languages have so many apparently 'unique' words is their inclusion of other older European languages such as Greek and Latin. Chinese, by comparison, seems to have borrowed mainly from itself.

Ah, but the complainers are the adults who are pretty lazy (&#38; lousy - in relative to children of course) at learning a foreign language. The U.S. especially needs to do a better job of teaching foreign languages. But sadly, most start a second language in schools around high school and are not very good at it either.<p>As about the european languages argument, the comparison is mostly about vocabulary it seems. That's hardly a justifiable comparison. Sure, words may indeed be simpler in Chinese, but the sad reality is that languages are a cultural heirloom that gets guarded but yet is stolen many times. Part of the gosh-darn specialty of these languages is to strengthen the cultural ties and keep it <i>in</i>. In fact, you might as well compare english with scientific papers written in english...

I am a white American, lived in the US for 29 years and now have been in Taiwan for 3 months with my Taiwanese Fiance. I have been studying Chinese for about a year, with increasing fever since coming to Taiwan. From what I can gather so far, Chinese is much harder to get to a basic level than English.. Let's say a 1st grade level. This is primarily due to the tones, and the characters having no correlation to the words (this is the big one... thank god for flash cards).<p>My unqualified claim is that Chinese is "Hard to learn, (relatively) easy to Master" due to the reasons stated in the article... English would be "Easy to learn, hard to master", primarily due to the insane vocabulary and tricky grammar. How many chinese born speakers have you heard say "the, than, 's, that, which, at, " and the like, not to mention correctly pronounce all the various english sounds, not to mention American vs British english.<p>Anyways.. Point is. Chinese is hard. But so are other languages.<p>Of course, picking up another language that is similar to yours would be much easier. (English -&#62; German), or (Mandarin Chinese -&#62; Cantonese). It's all relative.<p>Something pretty curious about Chinese, though, is how difficult it is to understand if you don't know it. When being welcomed to a shop, they say 歡迎光臨 (Huānyíng guānglín) which I never noticed until I learned it, after which point I have heard it constantly. For comparison, in Tokyo, I vividly remember countless occurances of "irashaimase"

(I submitted this link, and I should add that I'm not the author.)<p>I think the commenters who write about distinguishing learning vocab from digging deeper into understanding etymology ( eg skermes, <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131</a> ) have hit the nail on the head (translate that one!). At that point, learning vocab, whatever the language, becomes more fun for me.<p>Back to the cooking thing though...<p>I'm surprised that most comments I see so far are about the language, because what drew me to the article in the first place is the author's connection between the Chinese language and Chinese cooking with non-specialised tools, and how that contrasts with western cooking.<p>I think both Chinese and 'western' cooking tools have specialized, though interestingly in opposite directions. The Chinese specialization towards one wok, one cleaver, one chopping board (prep hygiene, anyone?), chopsticks (and food cut and cooked to size) and green tea minimizes the toolset.<p>The 'Western' way specializes in a different way: specialize the tool to what's being cooked and eaten - a fish pan, a medium sized knife to prep, a fish knife to eat, and white rather than red wine.<p>I'm not saying one is better than the other - I'll happily eat both Chinese or western food (or any other) if you're cooking for me! ... I'm just interested in studying the differences and similarities.<p>Disclosure: I'm Chinese.

&#62; Chinese like everything simple, doesn't have to be too exact<p>Oh, don't start. "I don't know what the bug was, but I fixed it." - verbatim quote. This was a mode of operation of disturbingly large number of Chinese devs I have worked with. After several bugfixing iterations of this kind it was easier to throw the code away and redo it from scratch than to understand how <i>that</i> managed to work. So, yeah, "don't have to be exact" is certainly there.

I think the central claim about Chinese isn't that it's hard to <i>speak</i>; it's that it's hard to <i>read</i> and <i>write</i>. Although the wonderful article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard" (<a href="http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html</a>) does mention the lack of cognates and the difficulty of tonal languages, which are clearly a matter of perspective, there is little doubt that the Chinese writing system is more difficult than alphabets in absolute terms.

I took Chinese in college and the problem for me was the tones. If you don't grow up hearing them then they are very hard to pickup as an adult. The characters you an learn with effort. But the tone shifts just didn't register.

Wait, what? I think the author is just ignorant of Greek and Latin roots (it's ok, most native speakers are too).<p>iso-tope is literally "at the same place"<p>commun-ism is literally "share-ism"

From OP <i>Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%.</i><p>Anyone know where I can get my hands on this list? This would help tremendously while learning chinese.

A language where a spoken word has completely different meanings depending on how hoarse you are that day can be a lot of things, but "simple" is not one of them, imho.<p>The author doesn't understand that most european words aren't just made up on the spot for new things, they are built with the same process as he describes for chinese: pick an existing term and adapt it for a new use, or pick several terms and join them up. Of course, you probably have to go back a few hundreds or thousands of years to get at the root of the thing.<p>otoh, I could say that the advantage of having a small non-meaningful alphabet is that you're not stuck with the symbolism of existing characters, so you're free to actually make words up if you want to.<p>The advantage of having a (for the most part) neutral tonal system in european languages combined with a small neutral system of characters, combined with the rich heritage of the small number of base languages that created all these languages (latin, greek, etc) and the freedom to synthesize words whenever appropriate is what is making english the lingua franca that it is, and what keeps all other (let's not say euro, but western) languages up there on the importance chart.<p>I wonder if it would be easy for chinese speakers to understand how western languages work if we say that each character in the latin alphabet is the equivalent of a single stroke in chinese...

Every language has its quirks and pluses; otherwise, it won' survive.<p>For Chinese vs English (or other alphabet-based languages) in term of semantic representation, the main distinction is semantic GRANULARITY of a base term. English has 26 alphabets as base term, which have no meaning. The 26 alphabets are combined to form words, which have meaning. When a new thing comes along, a brand new word has to be invented.<p>On the other hand, Chinese has couple thousands (or more) root words as base term that have meaning, which can be used by themselves alone or they can be combined as two-word or three-word phrase as new terms for things. The mixing of root words into new words happen in both Chinese and English. E.g. Firetruck comes from fire and truck, and provides some semantic description of what the term is. It's just that in Chinese, the word combination is the 95% of the language because of large root word set, while only a very small percentage in English due to the inconvenience of combining long words.<p>In Chinese is very easy and cheap to build new term (2-word or N-word phrase) to describe new thing and got accepted by other people since the semantic of the new term has strong relationship to its composing root words. As in English, firetruck is probably related to fire and truck. You won't call a firetruck as waterboat.

After two years studying Mandarin quite intensely I've stopped thinking of the language as "hard" and recognize that it just takes a long time to get where I want to go. Driving to the next big city is not hard but it does take longer than driving to the corner store.<p>Learning any language involves rewiring the brain and, for a westerner, learning Chinese involves a lot more of that rewiring because almost nothing from English is transferable. When I say 'rewiring' I mean coaxing my neurons to grow into a useful framework that someday will support that magical skill I posess in English of knowing exactly what people are saying and exactly what I want to say.<p>No amount of "hard work" is going to make that happen ... I can't force my neurons to develop no matter how hard I grit my teeth and study. It just takes repetition repetition repetition, immersion and lots and lots of time for those neural pathways to develop.

A language being highly synthetic is actually a liability in the case of non-delimited written languages (which is the case with Chinese and Thai, the latter of which I have some fluency).<p>While Thai is more logical in one sense (subway = electric vehicle under ground, transliterated: rotfaidaidin) trying to read a sentence with no separation between those words just adds to the confusion.<p>When most words in a language are combinations of other, complete words, it really raises the bar for being able to read something and get the gist of it, which is critical for moving on to true fluency.

Classical Chinese is very difficult<p>here is a list of Chinese words about horses:<p><a href="http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8273127/" rel="nofollow">http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8273127/</a><p>马 骎 騤 駉 驵 骜 骥 骀 驽 騑 骖 驷 骃 骅 骆 骊 騧 骐 骠 骝 骢 骓 牿 驺

<i>Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"?</i><p>It's amazing how much this sounds like Newspeak. Evidently you can translate Newspeak into Chinese.

Read <i>Asia's Orthographic Dilemma</i> by William Hannas. Apparently, not only is there a ridiculous number of symbols to learn, the dogma that all the spoken versions share the same written language is <i>not</i> true.<p>Also, writers commonly make up their own written forms of words on the fly, especially for technical and academic writing, so even an experienced reader is left struggling, trying to figure things out.

I never knew this was the case. It actually makes me want to learn Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese etc.) now because it sounds like a very neat system.

It's all just a matter of abstraction. "In Chinese, a bus is called a "public wagon"..."<p>Ok. What's "public"? What's "wagon"? Would it not be easier to use "all people carrier"? Then, what's "people?<p>Since it's turtles all the way down, the article is picking an arbitrary (and comfortable) turtle to stop at and say, "this is the right spot".

<i>I say, you european languages, using 26 or slightly more alphabets, you had a great chance to make your language simple and easy to learn, why do you make it so complicated?</i><p>Except, of course, most European languages are intermingled with other languages so intrinsically that they don't stand on their own.<p>Look in an English dictionary at how many times you see "from &#60;some other language, like French&#62;" in the source.<p>English itself is descended, as I recall from old German. It split off from Middle English and left Scots (The lowland language, not the Gaelic of the highlands) still looking and sounding much like Middle English well into modern times. Hell, American English shares a whole bunch of words from Scottish English which don't exist in "standard" English (such as Janitor, Pinkie, and I believe "Proven" is a quirk of "proved" which is specific to these two offshoots).<p>Core English itself is heavily influenced by French, which is descended from Latin. It has, especially for technical things, a huge amount of borrowings from Greek and Latin in and of itself.<p>Again, I can't speak for other European languages as apart from American English I only know some Scots &#38; Irish Gaelic and had a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. But part of what made <i>English</i> a lingua franca was the willingness to take and borrow words from other languages. Why come up with a "Local" word for something when the other language's word will suffice? (I can't find examples of the words or remember how to spell them, but Scottish Gaelic in particular lately has been absorbing "Modern" words like Computer and Internet and applying a Gaelic-sounding inflection and spelling to them. Same word, just ... "Gaelicized")<p>Further, <i>Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"?</i> ... I'm taking a wild stab here, but the ability for European languages to absorb arbitrary new words that people come up with is part of what has led to such a flexible growth. It's frustrating for new learners to adapt to the language but the flexibility of the written word to introduce new concepts is astounding.<p>Yes, we could have called the Internet "Network-of-connected-computers" but coining a word for it made it somehow more concrete, and real.<p>In a "Hacker" context take an article from yesterday which talked about how Scala is not a better Java.<p>I'm paraphrasing from memory but the author argued that Java's beauty comes from it's simple structure, small list of keywords, etc etc.<p>Scala allows huge flexibility, defining your own keywords, internal DSLs and a lot of things.<p>Java has power in it's rigidity and stricture. Scala is incredibly flexible and adaptable. There are good things about both - but I can make Scala code read like prose (Oh god, I just had reminders of "Literate Programming") because I'm free to define new syntax that fits my needs.<p>_EDIT_: When I say <i>a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America.</i> I mean that I at one point had a fairly good knowledge of Spanish.<p>When I moved to Miami after high school (I grew up in Philadelphia - wasn't a lot of exposure to Spanish in the day-to-day at the time), I couldn't understand a word people were saying or vice versa. The syntax, accents, etc were so drastically different from what I was taught that I was lost. I've since more or less let my Spanish knowledge atrophy (I can remember how to conjugate but damned if I can remember much of the actual words/word roots).<p>This itself is actually an argument aside from my previous statements. I don't know much about Chinese but I'm curious as to how locality affects the language. Is syntax and accent so drastically different from one region to another so as to make two people practically unable to communicate?<p>English has cases like that - there are a variety of regional dialects where two native English speakers from distinct regions might swear neither was speaking English. I'm to understand that fragmentation is getting greater since England stopped pushing "Received Pronunciation" (An "official" way to pronounce words taught in schools up through at least WW2). I'm from Mid-Atlantic US which to me seems a fairly "neutral" accent (I have a few quirks of speech specific to my region of birth - I'll often pronounce Water as "wood-er" [whereas in NY where I now live it's "Watt-er] or Creek as "crick"]). But some Southern accents can be practically inscrutable. I won't even begin to go into trying to understand what the hell people from Canada are saying.

As a half-german when I see this I just think literally wth.<p>&#62; There are German words as long as &#62; "Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft".

it might be simple to say, and it might even be simple to understand, but it's freakin difficult as hell to read and write.<p>I think the author needs to expand more on how he defines simple. Being a native Chinese speaker, I can understand and say most things in Mandarin, but I still cannot read or write well. Even after years of Chinese School and years of my parents trying to make me learn, It's just too easy to forget once you stop using it.

Sounds as if he wants German...