Source: 壹讀(id:yiduiread)
Image from the web
Don't feel lonely! Chinese difficult to learn this matter, it is not a day or two to be spat at by foreigners-
In many languages, to reject a person, you can say, "Wait until you learn well Chinese come back to see me."
And if you can't understand what a person is saying, you can say, "What are you talking about?" Sounds like Chinese."
So much so that the French word "c'est du chinois" (which is Chinese) has become a regular term, and jazz singer Seri Gainsbourg has a song called "Woman, You're Like Chinese."
There is also a French version of the comic strip "Woman's Heart, Needle under the Sea":
There are also countless Chinese learners who have come and gone, meekly lined up and fell on the beach of the Chinese.
Do you find German difficult to learn? Chinese said, "You're so cute. (sneering.jpg)
Honey and bees? The two of them sound exactly the same, but with different meanings?
So why is Chinese so hard to learn? Yi Yujun summarized the following reasons:
Difficult to write Chinese characters
Chinese characters are the first headache for Westerners who are accustomed to writing letters and words.
For Latin (English German French...) For all languages, the most basic unit of composition is the alphabet. How long does it take for an Englishman to learn the 26 letters, as well as punctuation, spaces, all these parts of a sentence? About a day or two.
Chinese?
Chinese, there is no basic unit corresponding to the Latin alphabet. It is necessary to say that the most basic "literals" that make up the language can only be regarded as a side head. However, the number of partial firsts is much greater than the number of Latin alphabets, although the division of various dictionaries varies: the Shuowen Jiezi is divided into 540 parts, the Kangxi Dictionary is divided into 214 parts, the Xinhua Dictionary is divided into 189 parts, and the latest publication has become 201 parts.
No matter which algorithm, it is much more than the number of Latin letters, but this is not the most difficult place for Chinese characters .
Because even if all the partial radicals are remembered, how to combine them is still a difficult problem. English is written in one dimension, with each letter written next to each other from left to right. However, Chinese characters are two-dimensional images: the partial heads can go up and down, one left and one right, one inside and one outside, and three or four parts are twisted together to become a word. What's more, in the process of composing Chinese characters, these radicals will be squeezed, pulled, distorted, and alienated, and finally all of them will be fit into a square character.
So for Westerners whose mother tongue is Latin, learn English, layer yarn; learn Chinese, and separate mountains.
Write or can't read
People who have learned to write and learn to Chinese will encounter a second problem: writing or not being able to read.
At present, most of the world's languages are pinyin characters, and looking at the spelling of a word, you can roughly pronounce its pronunciation.
But Chinese is not due to the lack of thinking halls, the logic of the Chinese language is beyond imagination -
First of all, although most Chinese call Chinese hieroglyphs, according to linguistic classification, Chinese characters are not actually hieroglyphs, but ideographic characters.
Hieroglyphs have appeared in ancient China and ancient Egypt, but after thousands of years of evolution, hieroglyphs have almost disappeared in modern languages.
Are the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt somewhat similar to those of China?
Modern Chinese has evolved from pictograms to ideographic characters, from complete pictures to square characters, each of which is composed of some "characters". Among these literals, some will be intentional, some are elephant sounds, and some... Not sure why it's there.
A small number of Chinese characters can be roughly guessed from glyphs and partial radicals, but most of them are not. So for people whose native language is Pinyin script, learning Chinese is equivalent to learning two languages — one to speak Chinese and one to write. Even people who speak fluently Chinese may not know a word. (This is also the reason why illiteracy rates are extremely high in China, where education is not universal.) ）
Context, everything is context
When you first learn a language, have you ever encountered such a situation, where you recognize every word in a sentence and connect it into a sentence without knowing what to do?
Foreigners who learn Chinese must have encountered it. Because Chinese characters are much more semantically ambiguous than words in Latin, they often look at a word alone and have no way of knowing what they mean.
Often the more commonly used the word, the more possible meanings there are, and the more understanding depends on context. For example, the word "just" in the previous sentence, just take it out, who knows what is being said!
What's more, the difficulty of reading the text of the book is secondary. In colloquial language, not only does each word have many meanings, but each pronunciation may refer to a word that is often ten or hundred, such as a yuan sound, whether it is a park, a human, or an ape, and it is impossible to guess without context.
And the tone?
What is most incomprehensible to crooked fruit people is the four tones in the Chinese. The same pronunciation, different tones can also represent different meanings? (I haven't started speaking cantonese with nine tones yet...) ）
Of all the major languages in the world, Chinese is the only one that uses different tones to express different meanings.
For crooked fruit people, this must be a big obstacle.
McDonald's teaching method on the four sounds of Chinese characters
Fantastic syntax
Everyone speaks their native language and thinks that their native language has no grammar. Is there a grammar for Chinese? With the exception of linguistics students, most Chinese have not studied Chinese grammar. Chinese it seems that "born" is like this, the way of choosing words and making sentences, the structure of sentences, it seems that "born" is so natural.
But foreigners who study Chinese will tell you bitterly that the grammar of Chinese is so difficult that people can't figure it out.
To be precise, the difficulty of Chinese grammar lies not in complexity, but in simplicity: verbs do not distinguish between personal and temporal, part-of-speech conversions do not change, there are no irregular verbs, there is no verb singular and plural distinction, there is no feminine masculinity, there is no need to worry about subject-verb consistency...
"I eat" and "you eat", "eat today" and "eat yesterday", "I love" and "my love", without prefix suffixes, a word is used all over various occasions.
Wouldn't Chinese become simple without these complex grammar rules?
Non also.
Because tenses and semantics that could otherwise be embodied in part-of-speech deformations and verb rules can only be expressed in Chinese through context and a small number of mood auxiliaries. Look at the following conversation -
"Did you eat it?" "I haven't eaten yet." "Then you can eat something." "No, I can't eat it."
The "which" in the first sentence indicates that when completed, the "also" in the second sentence is an adverb, indicating that until now ("not yet" is equivalent to not yet), the "bar" in the third sentence indicates the imperative tone, and in the fourth sentence there is also a "which" word, indicating possibility.
But it really echoes Lao Tzu's famous opening words: "The Tao is dao, the very tao."
Yi Yujun explained here, there is already a feeling of not being able to eat, and the rest of the Chinese grammar can only be experienced by yourself.
But! If you also have foreign friends, please let me finally send a golden and jade good word, so that I can respond to all changes with no change, and be sure to remember it well.
Resources:
1. the chinese language: fact and fantasy, john defrancis, university of hawaii press
2. aspects of chinese sociolinguistics, yr chao 赵元任, stanford university press