This article is pretty accurate description of my experience learning chinese. It’s a pain in the ass. Annoyingly I can’t copy and paste any of it so you will have to read it for yourselves. One thing that has changed since he wrote the essay is how much using computers changes learning chinese. I can probably write about 25 chinese charecters, but I would guess I can probably read around 500 and type about 300, this is because on a computer you can use PINYIN, the PRC romanization method, to type so you only need to remember the sound of charecter and it’s general shape. But besides that making it slightly easier to study chinese is still absuredly hard. It’s nice that a professor of chinese has my back on that
June 6th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
I hope you spell chinese better than you spell english. lol, lol
June 7th, 2006 at 11:21 am
how is it that there was never a normalization of symbols based on phonetics? does that have to do with the cantonese/mandarin and other dialectic differences?
June 7th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
There are several romanizations of chinese, pinyin and wade-giles being the most widespread, and there have been other attempts to make a system like the japanese katakana, but the main way chinese is written is still basically heiroglyphics, the charecters have a vague resemblence to how they are pronounced at best.
I don’t really know why this is, probably because it would be t much of a pain in the ass to change everything. Lu Xun was for abolishing charecters and he is considered the greatest chinese writer of the 20th century.
June 8th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Habib, I think its because chinese people lack general abstract reasoning abilities. So they would be unable to understand the relationship between symbols conveying the sound of an object and the actual object. This is also why they have trouble understanding their own reflection. I have found it beneficial when living with chinese people, to put a large crow shaped silhouette on windows and mirrors to keep them from attacking the glass.
(hunkering down for fuzzy rebuttal)
August 4th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
[...] Yesterday I read an article that Alf linked to a while back written by David Moser in 1991 titled “Why Chinese is So Damn Hard” (PDF) that makes me feel fortunate for the progress that has been made in learning Chinese over the last fifteen years since the article was written. [...]