Learning Chinese

Great post on Lost Laowai from LL-newcomer Matt, about the fallacies of Chinese learners. Learning Chinese is so completely different from learning a Romance language (or even an Indo-European language, for that matter). I think I picked up as much Italian in my few weeks in Rome as in my first six months in China. Reading a menu in Italian, or most European language, isn’t impossible, there are enough similar words to guess what you’re ordering and the alphabet’s sounds are close enough to the English sounds that you can pronounce words well enough to be understood. But a Chinese menu? It’s hard to know what “line squiggle squiggle curve” means OR how to pronounce it.

Anyway, if you’re planning to travel to China, this is an informative post.

3. I just need to learn how to identify #### characters- then I can read a newspaper.

For some reason, a lot of people believe that if you can master a certain number of characters (a few thousand or so) then you’ll be able to get the gist of a typical article in a Chinese newspaper. This, alas, is a myth. Granted, if you do know several thousand characters, you’ll probably be able to read quite a lot- but that’s putting the cart in front of the horse. Let me explain.

Most Chinese words are made up of combinations of two or more individual characters, characters that have meaning in and of themselves. For example, you might know that the word 机 means something like “machine” and that 会 has to do with “ability”, but you still might not know (unless you’re a genius with lateral thinking) that 机会 means “opportunity”. There are countless other examples of whole phrases or sentences comprised of simple characters that are nonetheless somewhat difficult to understand entirely.

The Chinese language is pretty logical, but learning characters in isolation won’t do the trick. So while you might be looking forward to boasting about how many characters you know (as if you could ever be sure in the first place), forget about it. It’s the words that matter, not the characters.

I think Matt’s right about all three fallacies, but I also think that the worst toneless attempt at terrible Chinese is better than hanging out solely in the Westernized areas of town.