Musing on the Middle Kingdom & More: The "Terrible" Chinese Language
With a tip of the hat to Mark Twain and admiration to 1.4 billion speakers
In 1880, at age forty-five, Mark Twain published one of his best-known essays, “The Awful German Language.”[1] I wonder what he might have written if he, later in life, had studied Chinese.
I began studying German when I was eighteen, and by the time I was twenty-five, I was almost as fluent in that language as I was in English. To this day, I can still read in German as fast as English. Sadly, my conversational ability has dissipated, but on my occasional trips to Germany, the language comes back to me quickly. Of course, I have to admit, it’s easier to learn a foreign language when you’re eighteen than when you’re sixty-two, which is when I started learning Chinese.
Every week for nine years, I had five in-person lessons and religiously studied for two hours every day. And, at the end of those nine years, I tested at the level of a twelve-year-old. With respect to reading and writing, I was an average twelve-year-old; but in speaking, I wasn’t very gifted. When it came to understanding what other people were saying, I was a linguistically challenged twelve-year-old!
While I’m not particularly gifted linguistically, a number of aspects of this situation apply to virtually every Westerner who goes to China, including you. Chinese is simply mind-bendingly difficult to learn. Let’s start with the number of sounds. When I started learning Chinese, my teacher did what every other teacher of the language does when working with Americans: She started me off with pinyin (spelling out Chinese phrases with letters from the English alphabet) rather than characters. This has both benefits and drawbacks.
A little background: The Chinese that we Westerners consider “Chinese” is Mandarin, a specific dialect. Historically, very few Chinese had access to the written Mandarin language. In part, this stems from the existence of fifty-four so-called minorities that make up 8 percent of the population, each one with its own distinct language. Even the other 92 percent, which are Han and typically speak Mandarin, had a variety of dialects, some of them mutually unintelligible. Since Mao united most of China in 1949, the government has encouraged a “standard” version of Mandarin for mutual comprehension across the vast nation. During Mao’s leadership, literacy—defined here as “the ability to read and write Mandarin”—rose from roughly 20 percent to around 97 percent of the population. Before Mao united China, the literacy rate was probably much lower, largely because it can take a long time to learn characters and only a very small percentage of the population even went to school.
Mao was determined to raise China’s education level. Almost immediately, he implemented a number of initiatives to achieve this goal. He started building schools and training teachers; he made attendance mandatory through about the eighth grade; he made Mandarin the official language of the schools; he standardized Mandarin so that all Mandarin speakers could (in theory) understand each other; he encouraged a simplification of characters to make them easier to learn; and he commissioned a way of writing Mandarin using “Roman” letters, pinyin, to make it easier to learn to read and write.
Although pinyin is imperfect (more on this later), it’s exceptionally helpful to foreign adults trying to learn Chinese. It functions like “training wheels.” Eventually, though, everyone who wants to read and write Chinese must learn characters. If Mao had wanted to replace characters with pinyin, he would have had to use force, because Chinese people love their characters. Learning them requires years of sheer brute-force memorization, but all the Chinese I know are proud of their characters and would gladly endure the pain of learning them. You might wonder why. My theory: partially pride, partially a form of revenge (“If I had to learn characters, well, then, so does everyone else.”), and partially the legitimate desire to avoid impoverishing the language (more on this later as well).
To resume the main discussion: one of the major hurdles of learning Chinese as a Western adult is the number of sounds. English, I’ve been told, has about 12,000 distinct sounds that carry meaning. I can’t prove this, but I believe it. Chinese, on the other hand, has only about 400. But because each of these 400 sounds can “carry” one of four different tones (actually five, if you count no tone at all as a form of a tone), there are 2,000 (400 times 5) sounds that carry meaning in Chinese. That said, until you’ve been learning Chinese for a couple of years, many Westerners (including me) can’t really hear the tones anyway, so for us, there are functionally only 400 sounds. The result: Everything tends to sound alike.
In the first few months that I learned Chinese, and mind you, I was still using pinyin rather than characters, I entertained the illusion that either I was gifted or Chinese was easy. By month three, however, I began to notice that the same word, written in pinyin, would suddenly appear with a totally different meaning. Now this is confusing, I thought. At the time, I was far too inexperienced to grasp the full extent of the problem. Because there are so few sounds, each one has to be responsible for expressing a very large number of different meanings.
Words that sound the same but carry different meanings are called homonyms—for example, “see” and “sea”; or “row” (propel a boat with an oar) and “row” (a linear arrangement). There are a number of homonyms in English, to be sure, but in Chinese there are thousands.
An example is the sound “jian” (one of the 400). Of course, “jian” can be pronounced with any of the five tones, which are indistinguishable to most Americans (including me) until the second or third year of instruction. Each form of “jian” (as, for example, with the first tone) has about 50 different definitions. This creates a quantum leap in complexity. Assuming you can actually hear the tone, then when you hear the sound “jian” pronounced with the first tone, you still have to decide which “jian” the speaker is referring to, out of the 50 possibilities. But if you can’t hear the tones well enough to distinguish them from each other, then you have to decide which of the roughly 250 “jians” the speaker means. By the time you’ve figured this out, the speaker is already 15 or 20 sounds ahead of you (in my case, 150 or 200), and you are 15 or 20 sounds (again, in my case, 150 or 200 sounds) behind.
So how do Chinese speakers do it? There are two answers to that. First, in the spoken language, they figure it out through context. But without knowing all 250 “jians” (or most of them) as well as the meanings of all the other sounds that constitute the context, even native speakers are initially at a loss and can’t figure out what’s going on. Sometimes when a new person (even one who’s Chinese) enters a conversation, I’m told, it can take them a few minutes to pick up on the context before they begin to understand what’s being said well enough to join in. For me, after nine years of study, I am generally lost beyond hope.
Linguists sometimes describe language along a graph based on “context” and “information.” Taking this approach, Chinese and German are almost opposites to each other. German is low “context” and high “information.” German has a host of endings that vary depending on a word’s usage in a sentence, providing a roadmap, so to speak, of how it should be understood. And Chinese is the other way around. I’m not a linguist, but if I understand this correctly, Chinese ought to be an excellent language for poetry, because it is highly evocative albeit vague; while German would be great for science, because it is exact.
Maybe I’m wrong. But as someone who can speak both German and Chinese (in a manner of speaking), I can tell you this: Someone in their first year of studying German, using a dictionary and applying the rules of German grammar, can produce sentences that will be at least understood by a native speaker and may even pass for real German. That is not true in Chinese. Grammar, as we know, it is largely nonexistent in Chinese. Everything is based on context. If you can’t produce understandable context, you can’t make yourself understood. And it’s hard to produce context without knowing a lot of Chinese—so to become even remotely capable in Chinese one had to get up to speed immediately, like entering a freeway from a standing stop. In German, on the other hand, even a novice who masters the rules of grammar (no easy matter, I admit) and owns a dictionary, can create understandable sentences.
But returning to the question of how a native speaker of Chinese can know which of the 250 “jians” a conversation partner is referring to: It’s context for the spoken language. But of course it’s different if you’re writing.
In the written language, it’s the character being used—we’re back to characters again. Each of the 250 “jians” is written using a different character. Whereas English has lots of sounds (maybe 12,000), and Chinese has few (400–2,000), English has an alphabet with only 26 letters, and Chinese has around 10,000 or more characters.
Of course, characters and letters are not 100 percent analogous. We have to string letters together to make words, and we have to string characters together to make words, so in that sense they’re similar. But that’s where the similarities end.
In English, the most complicated letters (if we’re thinking of characters) are W, M, and E, in the sense that each has four “strokes.” The other letters all have one, two, or three. We put them together to make words. The average word in the English language has five letters.[2] Chinese characters also consist of strokes, averaging twelve.[3] What we would call a word requires at least one character, and usually two.
But here’s the big difference: Letters tell us how to pronounce words. If you know the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, you can usually sound out a word, and can pronounce it more or less correctly. If you learn the twenty-six letters and you can sound out a word, you can teach yourself how to read. And if you find a word you’ve never seen or heard before, you can look it up in a dictionary.
Not so in Chinese. You have to memorize each character separately. Not only that, but you’re supposed to memorize not just each stroke, but the order in which they’re written (at least, if you want to be “correct” in the eyes of your Chinese teacher, and especially if your Chinese teacher is strict. Which they all are.) Moreover, there’s nothing in the characters that tells you how to pronounce them. And you need to know about 5,000 (out of a possible 10,000) to be literate. Memorizing 5,000 characters can take years and years, even for native speakers.
Fundamentally, if you can learn the alphabet (twenty-six letters, maximum “stroke” four), if you can sound out words, and if you can remember the order of the alphabet so that you can use a dictionary, you can learn English.
Fundamentally, if you can memorize each of 5,000 characters (including the order of the strokes), and if you can memorize how to pronounce each one (because you can’t sound them out), and if you can memorize what each of the 5,000 characters means (because learning to use a Chinese dictionary is even harder than learning Chinese), and if you can memorize thousands of Chinese phrases (because context is the fundamental building block in Chinese), then you can learn Chinese.
Here are some other interesting aspects of the Chinese language:
• Other Asian languages have adopted Chinese characters—same characters, different language. For example, the Japanese adopted Chinese characters hundreds of years ago. Of course, that doesn’t mean that a Chinese person can read or speak Japanese. This is somewhat analogous to Western languages that use the same Roman alphabet to write totally different languages (for example, German and French use the same alphabet).
• Chinese characters evolved from pictures, and many of them still contain elements of the original picture (or any earlier version of the picture, because no one actually knows what the original picture looked like). In any case, there are “stories” depicted in some of the characters, and this is why many Chinese people feel (perhaps correctly) that their cultural heritage depends upon maintaining the characters.
• In the 1950s when Mao commissioned academicians to simplify many characters, in many cases reducing the number of strokes (so that a character with fifteen strokes may have ended up with only ten), other countries where Chinese is spoken and written didn’t necessarily follow suit. Hence, the PRC uses “simplified” characters, and Taiwan uses “classical” characters. The classical characters are much harder to memorize.
If I’ve confused you, I’m sorry. In any case, it’s better to learn even a little bit of Chinese than none at all. And for many people, learning Chinese—notwithstanding the difficulty—is intellectually stimulating and useful. But I really should have started doing so long before I turned sixty-two.
[1] Mark Twain, "The Awful German Language," In A Tramp Abroad, (Penguin, 1997; original 1880), https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html.
[2] Wylie Communications, https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/11/whats-the-best-length-of-a-word-online/#:~:text=The%20average%20word%20in%20the%20English%20language%20is%204.7%20characters, accessed January 11, 2023.
[3] Language Log, https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=23102#:~:text=Since%20the%20average% 20Chinese%20character,characters%20with%20just%20one%20stroke, accessed January 11, 2023.
Thanks, Ken. Fun and very informative!