Job Discussion Forums

[Hod]

Fingers? What's wrong with a fork?

You're probably right, but pinyin's fine for now.

Anyway, didn't Tibet got a mention above? And what of all those Malaysians and Singaporeans chatting away in Hokkien, Cantonese and maybe Mandarin, they seem to be doing OK. After all, it's their first language. But many can't read a word of Chinese. Saying that, you're right.

[The Spoon God]

I'd have to disagree that tonality on its own makes a language so difficult. Admittedly, the existence of tones is a enormous hurdle for someone used to speaking English, so too are the sounds that constitute the words. These are problems that once overcome, are done with (I'm not suggesting that this will be easy to over, especially outside of China: the phonetics of Chinese look best mastered with the constant attention of a native speak to train and correct the learner).

There is the problem with having to learn a vocabulary that bears almost no resemblance to the words of English; but this isn't a problem particular to Chinese. You're going to have to go through the trials of learning a completely alien vocabulary whenever you attempt a non-European language.

Compare the difficulties of Chinese to Japanese. Japanese initially is very easy to speak: it's not tonal and all the sounds of Japanese can be unproblematically rendered into a roman script. But I would argue that in the long run it is more difficult that Chinese because: (a) the sentence structure is S-O-V; and the phrasal structure is the mirror image of English. (b) To properly read trhe language, the mastery of an enormous phonetic script is required. But whereas in Chinese, almost without exception, every Chinese character has only one sound associated with it; in Japanese most have at least two, and very rarely as much as a dozen, depending on whether it is used a part of a compound, a noun, an adjective, a verb (sometimes both transitive and intransitive).

Whilst I'm not trying to say that Japanese is the ultimate language, or the most difficult in the world. Rather i'm trying to point out that it shares all the problems of Chinese, except tonality, it excarbates them, and has its own unique problems. I think that one shouldn't overstate the problem of tonality in Mandarin, especially considering, lots of other language, Cantonese for example are more tonally sensitive.