Laoshi Dustin teaches Chinese.
(Continued from “Why I Stopped Learning Chinese”)
(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)
For comparison between the two languages, English and Chinese, let’s look at the word “good.” To do so, I will need to begin a new section which anyone who is already learned in the Chinese language will find tedious and unnecessary. I urge these readers to skip past this post and save me the embarrassment of having my mistaken explanations and generalities corrected.
“Good” is a simple word, easily spelled in English, and to write it one merely has to use the letters he has long been master of: g-o-o-d. In Chinese, the equivalent word is written “好.” This is likewise a simple word in the Chinese writing system, which grades written characters according to their complexity (that is, the number of strokes needed to write a word). In Chinese, a complex character can have upward of twenty strokes. For purposes of reader comprehension only, consider the printed English alphabet, wherein all the letters are written with one or two strokes of the pen, unless one is writing for calligraphic purposes and uses three separate marks to make a letter like “k” or “m.”
The relatively simple Chinese word “好” has six strokes. It is made of two symbols set side by side. “女” (three strokes) which means “woman” and is a pictogram, or pictorial symbol, of a woman grown large with child, and “子” (also three strokes) which means “child” and is a pictogram of a baby wrapped tightly in nursing clothes. Don’t ask how these symbols are supposed to resemble a woman and a baby (I think the “woman” symbol looks like a passable stick figure drawing). It is like the rule of constellations: someone discovers a pattern, he gets the right to name it, it catches on with people, and soon everyone points to the sky and says, “Look, a bear!” when everyone knows full well that the stars look nothing like a bear, major or minor.
Chinese writing today developed out of primitive symbols (not necessarily inferior, just primitive) inscribed onto a hard surface (i.e. bamboo, inscribed with a reed pen, and before that the preserved written artifacts came on bones or tortoise shells). Brush and ink were found to be a better writing method, much quicker, and so the characters began to take on their elegant abstract shapes. With words like “好” we get a glimpse into the Chinese mind. A woman with child is a good thing. Hence the characters for “woman” and “child” form an ideogram (a symbol not of the visual world but the conceptual) for the quintessential representation of good. Not surprising then that China is the most populous country on earth and Han Chinese the largest people group. The character for “home” (家) is a symbol of a roof with an abstract pig underneath, so in ancient China, it was a pig that made a house a home.
Not every written word in Chinese can be broken down to find these charming insights. Not by a long shot. And not many words are simple pictographic symbols, like “木” for tree, “林” for woods, and “森” for forest. The majority are a combination of two or three simple characters: a root to give a hint about the sound or meaning of the word, and an accompanying symbol to distinguish the individual word and perhaps further suggest meaning. As an example, the character for bird is “鸟.” Most every type of bird: chicken, turkey, hawk, pigeon, and so forth, has this character embedded somewhere in its Chinese symbol. In the most basic arrangement, “鸟” is paired side by side with a second, distinguishing symbol to give a hint about the word’s pronunciation or specific meaning. “Chicken,” for example, is written “鸡,” and “duck” is written “鸭.” “Bird” is on the right, indicating the category or type of word (birds), and the distinguishing symbol is on the left. These side by side examples are only one basic form though. The root characters might also be stacked above or below others and contained within other symbols, and very commonly it looks more complex and confusing than the clear side by side examples. Their present-day forms have progressed through stages that have seen the words modified and added to considerably. It takes a lot of deciphering to get at the root of the words and understand their etymology.
So, the memorizing of Chinese characters is aided by mnemonics, but still there is the Herculean task of memorizing the symbols for thousands of individual words if one aspires to achieve an educated level of literacy. Word by word must be written stroke by stroke, over and over again until the stroke order and writing motions are lodged in the brain. If the rote practice of writing characters is abandoned, then how to write them is soon forgotten. The eye still recognizes words when reading them, and the mind has a vague memory of the written symbol, but it is indistinct. Attempting to write the word is useless because Chinese characters must be exactly and intricately drawn. Imagine if writing the word “it” was not a matter of remembering “i” followed by “t,” but memorizing “dot, down stroke, horizontal stroke, downward stroke” in that order. Then imagine memorizing stroke by stroke, first through last, in order, for words with one or two dozen strokes, multiplied by the thousands of words needed to build an educated Chinese written vocabulary.
The popularity of computer keyboards and text messaging has given rise to the modern Chinese observation: “take pen, forget character.” Even Chinese students, who have studied written characters their whole life, struggle to recall how to write certain words, especially when they have ceased writing practice in favor of the keyboard. Our resourceful yet stupid American youths can simply make up their spelling based on text messaging: “r u gone 2 tha gym?” Forgetful Chinese cannot ignorantly staple strokes together because the characters need to be written exactly, or pretty near, standard.
And the students in China strive harder than the pupils in any other language to achieve basic literacy and to acquire a working written vocabulary. Even though the Chinese language has only several thousand written characters in common usage, it takes years to master them all. Each of these characters has to be practiced dozens of times in a writing book before it can be used freely. At the height of my personal studies, I estimated that I could write close to three hundred words off the top of my head, and I recognized at least five hundred by sight- which is not enough to be very helpful in real conversation. I rapidly lost the ability to write mostly all of these words after ceasing regular use. Note: while the written language uses a relatively small number of written characters, these characters are regularly combined in Chinese to form new compound words (example: “How much?” is a two-word combination that is literally “Many-few?”), so the number of words used by a speaker or writer of Chinese, like any language, is practically unquantifiable. It all depends.
But how about typing these symbols on a computer? And how do foreign speakers learn the sounds of the written words if Chinese symbols have no phonics? The answer is a writing system called pinyin, which I mentioned earlier. Pinyin (pronounced in Chinese like “peen-yeen,” spoken through the nose with the tongue held against the roof of the mouth and the open lips fixed in place) uses Roman letters to imitate the sounds of spoken Chinese, only the letters have been loosely adapted and assigned new sounds. For example, “qi” in pinyin Chinese sounds like “chee” spoken quickly through a pinched mouth. “Xi” sounds like “shee,” also spoken with a quick, hissing sound.
Additionally, pinyin uses tonal marks over the vowels in a word to indicate which of the four tones to use. The tones are critical in Chinese for meaning and comprehension. Saying “ma” with a high-pitched even tone could mean “mother” or “to wipe,” whereas saying “ma” with a rising, low to high-pitched tone means “horse.” The simple consonant and vowel pairing “ma” can make seven different, common words, using four tones and one neutral tone (no inflection or stress in the voice). Even with four differentiating tones, words still overlap on the same sound, like “mother” and “to wipe.” All the possible syllables in Chinese have these tonal variations which can change the meaning of the word completely. In English, clearly, saying the same word with a different tone does not change the essential meaning, only the emotional tone or context.
Every syllable in Chinese must have a tone, and every word in Chinese is a one-syllable word, a compound of two one-syllable words, or possibly a phrase of several one-syllable words. Also, syllables must be a consonant followed by a vowel, sometimes ending in the open consonant sounds “-n” and “-ng.” Therefore, fa, fan, and fang, are possible sounds for Chinese words, but a consonant-vowel-consonant combination like fal or fat is not.
To understand how this works out, let’s go back to “好,” the Chinese word for “good.” In pinyin, its sound is written “hǎo.” That is one syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel sound, with a tone mark over the “a” to indicate a rising tone. This pinyin script teaches someone familiar with Chinese pronunciation how to pronounce “好” (it sounds like the question word “how” spoken with a low, rising voice from the back of the mouth). Now, if using a computer or sending a text message, pinyin can be used to input “好” or any of the thousands of other idiosyncratic Chinese characters that would never fit on a keyboard. The user would type “h-a-o,” then the computer program would display a list of the common words that are written “hao” in pinyin. “好” is a very common word, so it would probably be in the first slot in the program’s list, so the user would press “1” and “好” would be entered onscreen. There are other Chinese writing computer programs that go by stroke input, but I found pinyin input to be the easiest method and much more user-friendly; it didn’t require a working knowledge of the written characters’ stroke order.
Typing “nihao” (for “hello”) into a pinyin input gives these options. Option 1 is the most likely option; in this case, “hello.” To select Option 1, the user presses either 1 or the space bar.
The list of options for every syllable input might have had you wondering why such a thing was necessary. Again, it is because every possible consonant and vowel combination is differentiated by the four tones, and the words sometimes overlap, having the exact same sound and tone. “Ma” and “hao” can make many different Chinese words. The pinyin letters are the same, but nonetheless the words are written with a different Chinese character. Chinese is very limited in its possible consonant-vowel combinations. Certain consonants can only be paired with certain vowels. Imagine in English if “she” was possible but “show” was not, and you will have a simple abstraction of what Chinese is like. Looking at the pinyin section of a Chinese dictionary, it becomes readily apparent that the Chinese language is a moderate collection of permutations. Nearly all the words are limited, single consonant and single vowel combinations. English allows for most any pronounceable consonant cluster, and consonants and vowels can form whatever syllables are practically demanded. A word like “strict,” for example, starts with “str-,” a three-consonant cluster inconceivable in Chinese, and it also ends in a hard-stop consonant cluster: “-ct.” Chinese words, written in pinyin, cannot do that. They must end in short, open vowels or in an open consonant sound: “-n” or “-ng.”
Having short, one-syllable words and limited combinations of consonants and vowels necessitates that Chinese has far fewer written words (characters) than English. Chinese uses compound words to create new words from its basic building blocks: one-syllable words, so it is not lacking when the people need a new word to express a new concept. It is only that the new words are all compounds of the existing, simple words. A funny example from the modern age: “computer” in Chinese is a compound word combing their words for “electric” and “brain.” Very simple, perhaps charmingly so, from an English speaker’s perspective. But it must be considered that English accepts all comers in its world word buffet, so long as the word works and has a nice feel or pronunciation. So the English language has an unmatchable amount of words by way of its borrowing from other languages. Regardless, the words and sounds of Chinese are nonetheless quite limited. The sounds are very often similar, indistinguishable to the untrained ear, or even actually identical, indistinguishable no matter whose ears you use.
One other thing, besides pinyin, which was implemented as part of the latest stage of the development of the Chinese language, that being Chairman Mao’s cultural reforms and the intent to make the written language easier to use: simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese is basically making shortcuts in the complex, intricate, and numerous strokes of many Chinese words. Taking the pen to write “龍” (“dragon”) requires 16 brush or (commonly) pen strokes in traditional Chinese. Making it simpler, but still somehow recognizable, simplified Chinese writes the same word/symbol as “龙” and only uses 5 strokes. An economical alternative trying to make a written language which is by nature cumbersome a little less so.
One word which could use the simplified treatment, which relates back to one of my original questions on the Chinese language, is the character for “I”: 我. The most common pronoun and most common word in speech is pronounced simply (it sounds like “wuh”), but it is written with seven marks of the pen. These seven marks, while written rapidly, are astonishingly too numerous- at least four or five too many- for such a common word.
I know this passage has been tedious, an informal information dump, but I believe it is relevant and necessary to include in my discussion on the topic.
For those more familiar with Chinese, please forgive me where I have been imprecise or ignorant. I will forgive you for not skipping over this section as I asked you to. And for those unfamiliar, I hope I have provided you with some insight and a feel for my experience with Chinese, which is admittedly very limited. Before I get into my complaint on the Chinese language, I would now like to offer a personal observation, an analogy for Chinese and English that is entirely subjective but I think an accurate and easy way to understand the essential difference between the two languages.
Continued in Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language
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