Chinese is Easy!

Chinese people are normally shocked when they hear a foreigner speaking Chinese. Many of them will tell me that it's the hardest language in the world. I tend to disagree for a couple reasons.

First, there is no such thing as the hardest language. I could learn French in a year, but it would take me at least three or four to even be functional in Japanese. A speaker of Chinese, on the other hand, could get Japanese down relatively quickly and toil for years trying to figure out when to use the subjunctive in French.

Second, Chinese isn't unfathomably hard. For example, vocabulary acquisition is a lot faster in Chinese than other non-European languages.

The other day I was fed up with my bug infestation (gnats) and marched to the supermarket to buy pesticides, forgetting to bring my dictionary. I searched in vain and realized I was going to have to ask someone for help finding it. After contemplating what the Chinese for pesticide might be, I asked the stock boy for "kill bug medicine"(杀虫药). He didn't hesitate and took me straight to the Raid shelf. Sure enough, the Raid cannister had "kill bug medicine" written on it in big characters.

You might be thinking to yourself, "well pesticide means 'bug killer' in Latin too." But what ESL student knows Latin?

This happens all the time in Chinese. A very basic example is the word foreigner. Who knows the root of that in English? 外国人, Chinese for foreigner, literally translated is 'outside country person.' Virtually every word can be broken down like this, making learning vocab incredibly easy.

Another example of relative ease is the grammar. There are no conjugations, no plurals, no declensions, no annoying irregular verbs and tenses. Every sentence is subject-verb-object or occasionally object-subject-verb. You don't even invert word order in interrogative sentences. You toss on a modal particle "ma" and then you're done. Sometimes you don't even have to put a subject in. "Do you want to eat lunch?" would be translated as, "Eat lunch ma?"

Another thing that people often imagine would be hard are the tones. The tones themselves aren't particular hard to get used to if you actually try, and even if you don't it may not make a difference. People who don't speak perfectly standard Mandarin (and hardly anybody does) often mess up the tones habitually because they're different in their native dialect (most Chinese dialects are more like languages). Furthermore, most Chinese will be able to figure from context. Horse, yell at, weed, and mother are all pronounced the same with different tones. If I said, "I miss my horse," "I miss yell at," or "I miss weed," a Chinese person would immediately think I said, "I miss my mother." (Unless he knew about my drug and equestrian predilections.)

So if Chinese is so easy, why does it still take so long to learn (2200 classroom hours according to the US Department of State)? I've given a lot of thought to this recently and realized that a lot of time is wasted on learning to write characters, which a waste of time because everyone uses computers now. This reason obviously isn't the only one and I'd like to hear some of your thoughts.

Note: Since blogger.com was blocked in anticipation of June Fourth, I have had trouble getting back on this blog. When I used tor, it wouldn't let me make posts. Now using a proxy seems okay, but slower.