The Ups and Downs of Learning Chinese

Students of the Chinese language often ask: "Why do Chinese people still use characters?"  After all, characters are the hardest part of learning the language, so why not transition to an alphabet system?  Koreans used to have the same ideographs as China, but around 600 years ago their entire society transitioned toward an alphabet for the sake of educational convenience.  Japan also used Chinese characters (and still does to a certain extent), but in the late 19th and 20th centuries began phasing them out in favor of phonetic systems.

It's rather impressive that China still manages to teach hundreds of millions of its citizens to use a writing system that whole countries chucked by the wayside of history.  That impressiveness doesn't make it any easier on a Westerner trying to learn the stuff, and late at night after you've spent half an hour attempting to memorize the 36 strokes needed to write the word "smog" (雾霾), you might turn to your Chinese friend and ask, "Why not just use an alphabet?"

When native speakers offer an explanation, they often cite the fact that Chinese has too many homophones to use an alphabet... too many words have the exact same pronunciation but wildly different meanings.  And there are many homophones in Chinese.  Take the syllable shi when said with a falling fourth tone: the characters that mean world (世), to be (是), market (市), soldier (士), room (室), regard/look upon (视), demonstrate (示), explain (释), promise/vow (誓), and type/style(式) all have this same pronunciation (and I'm leaving out some less common characters).

Of course, you can usually use context clues to figure out which Chinese homophone someone is trying to use.  The same thing happens in English.  When you go to a bank and are asked if you "would like to set up an account?", you know the word "set" is referring to a verb meaning to establish, and not a period of a tennis match, or an array of things that belong together, or a list of songs that a jazz trio is planning to play at their gig (or any of the dozens of other meanings the word has).  But, according to the experts, Chinese has too many homophones and too limited a range of syllables to effectively convey meaning with an alphabet. 

People will also talk about the cultural and historical importance of characters to Chinese, their intrinsic aesthetic value and connection to China's long and storied past.  These arguments clearly weren't enough to stop other countries from reforming their writing systems.  They also weren't enough to keep China from reforming its "traditional" characters into the modern "simplified" ones.

A huge part of what makes Chinese so hard is that it's impossible to know the pronunciation of a new character just by looking at it.  In a language like Korean, which has an alphabet, it's possible to read text after only studying the writing system for a short time and memorizing the sounds each character makes.  In that same span of time, it's simply impossible to learn all the characters necessary to, say, read a newspaper article in Chinese.

There is some order within the chaos of the character system, however.  Many Chinese characters will have two components, one suggesting the meaning of the character, and another that hints at the pronunciation.  For example, the character 清 (pronounced qīng), which means clear, has two components.  The left-hand part (氵) , represents water and gives a clue to the meaning of the character (because water is translucent and clear).  The right-hand part, 青, shows the reader the pronunciation－ that character (青) is pronounced exactly the same way (qīng).

These helpful elements only become useful after you've learned some base characters (you can't know that 清 sounds like 青 if you don't know what 青 sounds like in the first place).  Once you have this base, patterns emerge from the chaos of the character system, a bit like learning basic arithmetic by memorization and then applying it to more advanced math.   But unlike math, which is always consistent, exceptions to these kinds of meaning/pronunciation clues are common in Chinese.  If we take the above example of 青 and look at some of the characters with that base serving as a pronunciation hint, they vary widely from the original qīng: there's 情(qíng) 请(qing3) 晴(qíng) 碃 (qìng)静(jìng) 精 (jīng) 睛 (jīng).  All of these have slightly different pronunciations from the base, 青.

What's worse than any specific language related challenge is the reality that if you want to gain truly meaningful and useful proficiency in Mandarin, the road is longer and harder than for most other languages.  And, late at night, as you painstakingly hammer characters into your brain that will inevitably be forgotten a few days later, the ugly part of your brain wonders, "is this really worth it?"  I would say this is the heaviest millstone of learning Chinese, at least for myself.

I could go on at length about why learning Chinese is so hard, but this is probably only interesting for other people who study the language.  David Moser sums up other challenges with a lot of humor in this essay.

There are some perks and rewards that come with studying Chinese.  The first one I remember noticing was the genuinely awed reaction some native Mandarin speakers have when they hear you speak even mediocre Chinese.  It's pretty gratifying to walk into a barbershop in China, say "Hello, I'd like to get a haircut," and have the barber reply, "Ok, sounds good," pause for a few seconds as you sit in the swivel chair, and then add "Your Chinese is pretty good!"  There is no way for them to really have any idea of your vocabulary range or sense of grammar.  The only thing they might be able to pick up from those few words is how good your accent and tones are.  But it's a welcome surprise for a foreign learner, especially for people like me who are used to the US, where we see foreigners speaking English well as the norm and not the exception.

As with learning other languages, it's rewarding to reach the point where you feel like you're speaking naturally.  You no longer feel like you're decoding other speaker's sentences word by word.  Even when you can't understand all of the more specialized words in a sentence, you can at least identify the verbs, nouns and adjectives.  You're not taking 30 seconds to construct a six-word sentence in your head before speaking it.  I think this is a feeling more than an ability, and may be part of what the ill-defined word "fluency" means.

This "fluency feeling" takes a lot longer to happen with reading and writing thanks to those pesky characters.  I cling to a pipe dream that one day the Chinese government will put its formidable and wide-ranging powers to the task of phasing in a workable Mandarin alphabet in Chinese society.  Until then, I suppose I'll just have to maintain the absurd exercise of studying characters, learning them, forgetting them, learning again and forgetting again.