This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated meaning to either. So for those of you who don’t know Mandarin, please read a lot of this with a grain of salt.
Regarding the simple grammar, I’ll say that tenses and plurals are easy for an English speaker to pick up. But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words. Once you move beyond the “simple” grammar, things get complex fast.
Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as a counter there. And while venery terms are not counters, and many of them are unused in modern English, those that do persist occupy a niche that you would notice the absence of, while being decidedly absent in other languages (or in Japanese, I can think off-hand of mure as a catchall for a collective of animals, and it is less specific than English venery terms).
Overall I agree with your assessment of "interesting but a lot of the things are wrong". For instance the statements:
>And some people have used less used English letters to denote specific chinese pronunciations: Eg. in Xi Jinping, "X" is pronounced as "sh", and in Qing, "Q" is pronounced as "ch".
I was always taught that English letter choices in pinyin were not just because "some people had used" them, but as a deliberate choice by Chiense to teach each other proper putonghua, especially speakers of other dialects. And additionally, to accomplish this it borrowed from a Russian perspective on Anglicized sounds, with Russia being both a geographic and political neighbor. I don't know any Russian, but it was taught to me that the "zh-", "q-" and "x-" in pinyin were Russian in origin, albeit in a filtered, haphazard way.
Those aren't counters, they're measure words[0]. E.g. I saw two rolls of film or two films. sticks of dynamite, blades of grass, grains of sand. These function differently than counters in other languages.
Korean (and Chinese, I'm assuming) has actual counters/classifiers [1], that is, separate grammatical concepts. 저는 차 두 대를 봤어요 - Here, (대) is the counter for cars (차/차동차). I saw two [counter] cars. This concept doesn't exist in English, except for measure words which serve a different purpose.
For Korean there are around 30-35 or so [2] used in common speech I believe, with 개 being a general catch all for objects. Other examples include: One has to use 명 or 분 for people, and 달 or 개월 for months (duration).
Sure, but the classifiers are highly analogous to the English "counters". Conceptually, 三個人 ("three people") could be interpreted as "three individuals of person".
You could view Chinese nouns as all being mass nouns like English "sand". In the same way you can't say "one sand", but need to add a counter as in "one grain of sand", in Chinese you can't say "one book", you have to say "one volume of book" (一本書).
Sure, you can make distinctions between "classifiers" vs. "measure words" vs. units of measurement, but it feels like the same construct to say 一位人 ("one person"), 一群人 ("a group of people") or 一斤人 ("half a kilo of human"), as grisly as the last one may be.
The difference is in Korean or Chinese you need to do it with all nouns that you're counting, unlike English which only reserves it for measuring mass nouns or clarifying between nouns, etc. They way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts.
I agree that they are ultimately separate and differentiable in a grammatic sense. Mostly I was taking issue with the sentiment in the GP's summary: "Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English ... [doesn't] even have constructs for, like ... counting words." rather than the linguistic specifics.
I firmly feel that, despite being distinct from measure words, they are close enough to English concepts that it isn't really hard to relate to and learn. Gendered inflections are far more inaccessible to me as a native English speaker than counters ever were!
'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'. Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly. Similarly, it is very hard to Chinese speaker to distinguish some English phonemes.
>'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'.
That is basically what I was trying to relay: That the choices of letters were picked to represent something "different but close enough", borrowed from alternative Anglicizations that were close at hand.
>Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly.
I never had a problem differentiating between the 'q' and 'ch' sounds in Mandarin, and I do not think I am uniquely gifted. Listening to a native speaker pronounce Chongqing for the first time made it immediately obvious. I remember struggling a bit with pronouncing 'zh-' but not because I couldn't hear a difference, it just took a little time. And even despite taking a while to learn the pronunciation, I never struggled in hearing the difference between zhuan and juan.
One doesn't hear letters (or characters for that matter), instead one hears articulations, diphthong, glottal-stops and so forth. I guess you could try to mediate what you hear through an unrelated written language, but that seems like counter-productive extra effort.
I've heard the claim that Charles Bliss, the eccentric inventor of the Blissymbolics writing system, claimed to have learned to read Chinese semantically, but not speak it, during his time living in China. But it's possible that either the degree to which Bliss claimed to be able to read Chinese, or the degree to which he really could read it, has been exaggerated.
I imagine that someone could choose to make deliberate progress on this skill, even though it's not at all a common approach to teaching or learning Chinese. I can report that I know that San Francisco is called 旧金山, and that I know the meaning of each of the three characters as well as their meaning together, but I don't know the sound of any of them. If I heard someone refer to San Francisco in spoken Chinese, I would have no idea what was being referred to, but if I saw it written, I would!
I've also seen Chinese speakers who don't know any Japanese understand the basic meaning of signs in Japanese, and vice versa, because often individual hanzi and kanji continue to share their most basic or common meanings (though by no means always). I realize this is also a far cry from being able to read a newspaper fluently, but I find it very suggestive, since most likely the speakers in question wouldn't be able to read these signs aloud!
Edit: but in support of your intuition about this, Wiktionary, for example, lists 256 Chinese words that use (for example) 市, a huge number of which probably don't have a transparent meaning to a non-Chinese speaker who knows all the individual characters in a given word. And it's a similar situation with other characters, so at least it would require a lot of deliberate study to understand complex texts.
Interestingly, this is only true among Chinese people. In its own official documents (which it has to issue in Chinese), San Francisco uses an entirely different name to refer to itself.
Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not.
Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating".
There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" means "real(ly)". This does not make sense at all.
Still, most of the words are just between these two categories. For example "自然" means "nature", and "自" means "itself" and "然" means "happened". So "nature" means "it just happened itself". This is kind of make sense somehow but it is actually pretty blurred for most people.
Not a native Chinese speaker, but I am a proficient speaker of Chinese as a second language. No dog in this fight except to mention that "天真" does have a "sum of its parts" aspect for me. I sometimes think of it in relation to the Chinese word for "congenital" (天生, tiānshēng). In the case of congenital, the 天 (tiān) part is better translated as "heaven", "God", "fate" or "nature", and for me, carries aspects of all of those English words. 生 (shēng) in this context means "born" as in "was born with". Think "congenital defect", a defect that you had before birth, which you could only blame God, or nature for.
So 天真 (tiānzhēn), along the same lines, roughly translated, means "then sense of reality that you have when you are born or which you are gifted by nature", unsophisticated and naive. Don't know if that makes sense, but I've always thought about these two words together and felt like I understood them better through context.
Completely agree. This is the same kind of understanding that I get when reading these words. I rarely have to translate Chinese<->English, and instead just use them naturally in everyday conversation (wife is Chinese and that’s our method of conversation). As such if you asked me to translate 天真 for example, I would have to spend a few seconds to think of the word “naive”, I would instead come up with a long descriptive English sentence similar to what you did as I feel it better captures the essence of what I’m thinking when speaking Chinese. I think it’s subtle things like this that are important to remember when attempting to gain mastery in a foreign language. I also find it interesting how different languages/cultures evolve to convey similar ideas through such different means.
Something else I find is when speaking to many of my Chinese in-laws I regularly get various stories and explanations for words and phrases. Sometimes they are straight forward and sometimes there are literary or historical references that I would have never been able to derive on my own. :)
While 'naive' translates to 天真, 天真 doesn't just mean naive. Baidu Baike [1] lists three meanings. Going by the cited references, <<庄子·渔父>> is the oldest and my guess is "真者，故受於天也，自然不可易也。故圣人法天贵真，不拘於俗" is the etymology of 天真.
天真 = innocent, why 'sky' or better 'heaven'? 'Heavenly real'. It makes sense, but translation doesn't work. Concept is hard to be translated into another language.
It’s not just a translation issue, but that the composition is just archaic. The constituents had real meaning a long time ago when they became a word, but today you just understand 天真 as its own word and move on. If you didn’t know that word but understood 天 and 真 you wouldn’t be able to figure out the word’s meaning.
The same is true with many English words as well actually: many of them started out as composites that were meaningful in the last but today are not. For example, “understand.”
Yes, 'heaven' is more precise. To reflect 'heaven' usually requires a deeper grasp of the language to twist it a little bit closer for its real meaning.
And your point is great - the concept is hard to be translated into another language. For example, there are so many Buddhism concepts which is very hard to translate.
I'd also point out that English (and other European languages) also use logograms. If you look down at your computer keyboard, there are a bunch right above the qwerty row (and I don't mean the ones you need to hold SHIFT for).
(Additionally, modern English spelling is complicated in ways that (to use the author's other comparison) the Devanagari syllabary used by Hindi (Nepali, Marathi etc.) is not, and is only 'phonetic' in very complicated ways (e.g. often representing Middle English phonology) to the point that English orthography is not entirely dissimilar to Chinese orthography.)
> But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words.
This is overstated. Both of those concepts are present at a robust level in English. As such, English obviously does have constructs for them.
Measure words are the really obvious one. Any treatment of English grammar will mention the distinction between "count" nouns, which have plural forms, and "mass" nouns, which don't. Mass nouns require measure words in exactly the same manner that Chinese nouns do. They are common; some mass nouns that are almost always used to refer to discrete items, but which nevertheless require their appropriate measure words, are "pants" (you can have a pair of pants, but not a pants), scissors (ditto), and bread (which has its own specialized measure word, "loaf").
Change of state is often not marked syntactically in English, though it can be. But it is very commonly marked lexically -- see the distinction between "being married" and "getting married", or "being on fire" and "catching fire".
I think lexical marking of grammatical concepts is an under-studied phenomenon. There is a traditional division of verbs in linguistics into those that express "states", "activities", "accomplishments", and "achievements". You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect (and just look at what they named the concept!).
It's called "lexical aspect" because the different categories are expressed, in English, by choosing different words. But they don't have to be; the difference between an activity and an accomplishment is expressed in Mandarin Chinese with a syntactic marker. Where English says "look" and "see", Mandarin has 看 and 看到. Where English has "listen" and "hear", Mandarin has 听 and 听到. Where English has "search" and "find", Mandarin has 找 and 找到. It's only a lexical distinction if you assume that English is more Platonically correct than Chinese is.
Similarly, Indo-European languages generally have a syntactic distinction between factual conditionals ("if I'm the king, why do I have to wait?") and counterfactual conditionals ("if I were the king, I wouldn't have to wait!"). (Fun side note: for hopefully obvious reasons, where this distinction exists for sentences set in the future, they're called "future more vivid" and "future less vivid" as opposed to "future factual" and "future counterfactual". We use a different word even though the grammatical distinction is identical.) English makes this distinction syntactically, as you'd expect. But it also makes it lexically -- "hope" and "wish" are the more-vivid and less-vivid equivalents of each other.
Of note is that the current mainland govt wasn't the one to start the simplification of Chinese characters, it start with the original Republic of China but was abandoned by Taiwan because it was associated with the Leftist side of the Republic of China as left-leaning and liberal Chinese scholars saw traditional Chinese as inhibiting Chinese education for the masses and promoted simplification.
Singapore and Malaysian Chinese also uses Simplified Chinese.
As someone who learned English from Spanish, this strikes me as totally off:
> In English, if you can speak something, you can write it too
Compared to Spanish, Italian or Japanese hiragana/katakana, this is not true at all in English. It is _more true_ than in Chinese/Japanese (Kanji), but still not much. It is in fact one of the things that English Learners struggle with the most!
One recommendation: When learning Characters, write them out physically (or in an app)
The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes.
This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI).
In my experience, unless you want to be able to write characters without machine assistance, it's faster to just learn to recognize them without spending time on writing them out. Being able to recognize the rough stroke order is a little helpful, but not necessary unless you want to look up characters by stroke count. But since tools for character lookup are fairly sophisticated today, you don't really need paper dictionaries anymore. The only benefit I can see is in the ability to read handwritten characters. The "cursive" script is basically impossible to read unless you know the stroke order really well.
I can read a few thousand characters (I pick up new characters by adding flashcards (using Anki) when reading novels written in Chinese). At this point I rarely encounter characters I can't read (but there are frequently words I don't know).
I can only write a handful of characters (probably less than 100?).
I probably would get the characters mixed up less frequently if I practiced writing them, but I don't think I would have been able to learn so many if I was doing that.
I can read about 6000 Japanese words. I can read NHK News articles with moderate effort if I have access to a dictionary. I'm not sure how many characters that is and I would be hard pressed to give meanings or complete lists of pronunciations for most characters in the words I recognize. Most sources I've read recommend against the study of characters in isolation. Some recommend ignoring characters completely until you're somewhat fluent, but I prefer reading real texts for self-study over working through textbooks.
For Japanese, I think that is good advice, especially because the characters often have Japanese or japanized pronounciations and are assisted by Hiragana.
In Chinese, writing characters, and knowing their meaning helps a lot more, I guess.
Stroke order is also important when writing fast or sloppy. Depending on the stroke order the slants/angles of the strokes will be different, obviously, which lets you deduce a character if someone has written it sloppily (but with the right order). I've had to do this many a time when deciphering quickly-written native korean handwriting.
Beginner learners often write ㅁ wrong, making it almost look like a ㅇ.
Pretty good introduction! The one thing I found a little off was in the larger phrase constructions: the explanation of how larger "words" are formed from characters isn't quite right. For instance the example of "socialism", 社会主义, which he parses as "common production primary virtue", isn't really four words in a row, it's two "words" made of up two characters each: 社会 meaning society, 主义 typically used as an "-ism" suffix.
义 in isolation might mean "virtue", but most characters have a handful (or more) of meanings, and when it comes after 主, 义 takes on more of its "idea" meaning.
Mandarin does have words. Sometimes you can deduce a meaning of a compound word from the literal meanings of the characters it's made up of, but sometimes you cannot.
It also doesn't aid you in pronouncing it because it's not obvious which tone it is, unless you already know it.
I cannot stop helping myself to share a Chinese quiz to you for celebrating our new year - please use 20 different Chinese words to express “I” or “me”.
In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok.
English does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of
A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey meaning, for example to show which word in a sentence is most important, to show whether a sentence is meant as a question or not, and to show certain kinds of emotion. But it doesn't cause one word to turn into another. In Chinese, it often does."
> We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of [施氏食獅史]
To be fair, there is no equivalent of 施氏食獅史 in Chinese either. The text is written in classical Chinese and is not intelligible when read aloud. Obviously, the pronunciation of classical Chinese was different.
Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather than being a pervasive feature of the language.
But feel free to call the thing I’m talking about whatever you want. But calling it “stress” doesn’t make it the same thing as the kind of stress that you were talking about with your example sentences.
In each of these sentences, if you pronounce “contract” as it were a noun describing a legal agreement, you are going to sound somewhat off. Same with the other words listed.
Well, that is, unless you and your listeners don’t know how to pronounce “contract” differently in each usage. But again this is only one of the examples.
I'm assuming your word-pairs are supposed to be examples of differences in pronunciation of the 'verb' vs the 'noun'. Or did you have something else in mind?
That has to do with emphasis, not tones, and it's common with noun-verb pairings like that.
None of those turn into completely different words based on which tone you use to pronounce it; a person would still know what you mean based on the sentence context but it would sound off.
I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.
Punjabi is also classified as Indo-European language and it is also a very strong tonal language. The topic is also a subject of research as none of surrounding languages have such tonal variations.
Regarding the simple grammar, I’ll say that tenses and plurals are easy for an English speaker to pick up. But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words. Once you move beyond the “simple” grammar, things get complex fast.