Teacher Discussion Forums

I've never tried to learn Chinese myself, so I wondered if anyone had a comment to make on this article from the BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3025796.stm

My Chinese is not very idiomatic, and I really need to go back to basics and find a way to remember the tones better.

That being said, Chinese speakers do not plod along saying only one perfectly pitched syllable at a time, replete with full tone contour (there are processes of simplification at work called "tone sandhi", for a start), so why should learners of Chinese?

There are scant details of the experiment, and it is hard to tell if those details that are given come from the reporter's background research and knowledge or are based on things he or she was told or had explained...but it is easy to imagine that only single syllables="words" were involved in the experiments on the Chinese speakers, vs. multisyllabic words (or at least words with complex consonantal clusters) regarding the English speakers.

Now, whilst that is at heart revealing of the basic differences beteen the languages, it does ignore that Mandarin has a long history of using processes of compounding, and does have discernible word classes and word orders too, thus:

Ni shi meiguoren ma(0)? (You are American?)
Wode ma(1) ya! (My mother! = OMG!)
Ta ma(4) ta yi dun (She scold him one "measure" = give him a scolding)
Ta ma(4) ni shi yige fengzi (He called you a nitwit)

(Numbers in brackets refer to tones, 1=high level, 3=fall then rise, 4=steep fall; 2 would equal noticeable rise)

Probably at a phrasal and sentential level, the differences between the language activity of speakers of different languages might level off or become similar (and who knows, the right side of the brain might even become (more) active in English speakers).

And what of the implications of this experiment? Are Chinese smarter? I doubt it...they just study hard (and their script takes a little longer to learn), and have a respect (I am not sure if I would call it a love or passion) for learning...

From my lowly learner perspective, it really turns me off when I get a teacher who slows things down TOO much and never seems to be prepared to model WHOLE phrases FOR ME (rather than have me repeat SINGLE syllables MYSELF). I for one do not want to sound like a tone-perfect and rather loud Beijing newsreader, but I can't help feeling my teacher might (especially when they come from the provinces where Mandarin is more a lingua fraca rather than the everyday language of choice...which might help explain their apparent inferiority complex and "overcompensating" pronunciation-wise in teaching/trying to teach me).

So, I know that whilst tone is important in Chinese, and can distinguish what would otherwise be total homophones, restricting utterances to one syllable (which is what the above experiment has probably done) is to my mind rather like trying to e.g. work out "bear" (2 senses) vs. "bare", "burr" etc in English without putting them in context and letting the co-text help things along immensely, let alone seeing if they are spelt differently! (bad comparison I know, cos tone isn't a factor in distinguishing English homophones...I am just trying to imply that what helps English speakers realize what meaning is meant probably also works for speakers of Chinese too - which is why Mandarin at least has tended to form compounds as it has lost some of the range of sounds and/or tones in other, more southerly dialects).

Basically, I will be looking, when I start Chinese again, to see which tones in a phrase or sentence's overall contour (should) carry the heaviest stressing in communicating the overall meaning!

I'm curious to know whether non-native speakers of Mandarin would have the same results in the "brain scan" study. I don't think learning the tones in Chinese was necessarily "difficult" but just "different". Once you get the idea, it's just part of the language's complexities. Some things are easier, and some are harder.

Interesting article. Duncan and Lorikeet have made some excellent comments. I am in a similar position regarding Mandarin as Duncan is. While teaching in Taipei, I took a few lessons, and studied quite a lot on my own. In addition, I'm married to a Chinese, with whom I speak Mandarin daily, if selectively (my vocabulary is embarrassingly small). [Bu-how-ee-se]. And his (Duncan's) remarks appear to me to be right on the mark.

The London study cannot be discounted at this point. However, I imagine everyone involved would be quick to agree that much more needs to be done in this area before any statements can be made like, "Does Chinese take more Brainpower?" I rather doubt it, just based on my experiences with the language. But I wouldn't be too suprised if Chinese speakers might access the brain in different ways than English speakers do. That is not to say that it takes more brainpower.

Larry Latham

Haven't the researchers noticed that English speakers need to interpret intonation as well? Their explanation of the phenomenon in the article doesn't make a lot of sense.

There is an interesting site at

http://taiwan.8m.net/study.html

which includes a link to an article "Why is Chinese so damn hard?", a piece which will make any English speaker who ever struggled with Chinese feel a bit better.

As to Chinese being difficult for Chinese people, surely that couldn't be the case in terms of the oral language? Many believe that learning the characters makes it absolutely harder for everyone, there is a mammoth thread regarding this at

http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=1692

I agree with the impressive argument made by the first poster - Chinese characters are just plain hard. On the other hand they have their advantages, the difficulty should not be exaggerated, and to get rid of them would be an act of cultural vandalism.

Good morning all!

I'm afraid that the context of "more brainpower" has been overlooked, though the comments generated have been interesting.

The sub-headline of the article in question says, "Speaking Chinese may take more brainpower than speaking English, a study suggests." Yet, nowhere in the article is the term "brainpower" clearly explained. It can be supposed that it means "become active", "link", "decode", "use" (for interpretation), "process", "learn" and "re-learn". So more brainpower might mean that the brain does more of these things when speaking Chinese than when speaking English, and yet, the study speaks about the subjects hearing English or Mandarin. It also infers that those hearing the English were native English speakers, as those who were hearing the Mandarin were native speakers of that language.

Finally, the article, written for a general audience, grossly generalizes based on an experiment that grossly details and controls. I am highly suspicious of this kind of ascertation, it would be like saying, "playing football takes more concentrated brain-work than dancing flamenco", or "playing the guitar is less brain-demanding than playing the flute". The word that comes to mind is "Poppycock!"

Anyway, at least the links and the comments here have been interesting even though the stimulus for them, in my view, is popular myth making in action. (opinionated disclaimer 3653-7b).

peace,
revel.

Brainpower, how about joules per second. Maybe they're measuring brainpower in Watts Ever heard the expression, he's dimmer than a 40 Watt lightbulb?

Good afternoon!

Yes, Andrew, that must be it, and it might just be me, my light bulb doesn't get much brighter than 60w.

In any case, I wonder if they tried putting the electrodes on Chinese heads with English words or vice versa to observe which part of the brain is involved in not understanding what was being said....

peace,
revel.

Nice idea revel, except it would probably only work (=be revealing) with dumbass English crash-dummy test subjects (those clever Chinese must know English pretty well by now). End result? More drinks all round at The Welldone Trust, yeyyyy!

Lorikeet's idea of experimenting on non-native speakers of Chinese (i.e. those selfless westerners who have learnt some Chinese, and would therefore probably also be willing to be electro-nipple-clamped) has merit, though (and not just scientifically, but for the kink factor too).

Very interesting links, woodcutter, thanks for posting them! That dmoser guy sure knows his stuff and makes some really illuminating remarks, as well as keeping things focused when other people start to drift with their posts. I haven't read beyond the first few pages of the mammoth thread yet, but it'll be interesting to see where it ends up...Siberia?!

By the way, have you read John DeFrancis's The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy? He talks about the possibility of language reform in China, and how a policy of digraphia would seem to be a good idea (if Pinyin is abandoned in favour of making the transition to Chinese characters, native Chinese learners - I seem to recall it being almost illiterate adult learners that he was especially discussing - then cease making the communicative progress they did with writing in Pinyin, and are in danger of sliding back into illiteracy); but he isn't advocating using Pinyin forever instead of characters (have you ever tried reading stuff written entirely in IPA for long? Having some visual, non-phonetic "distinguishers" seems to make a writing system easier/more efficient to read at least), just cautioning against too rapid a switch to characters. Perhaps a poster mentions this kind of thing later in that thread?

DeFrancis also goes on to address the kind of studies where "dyslexic" English schoolchildren are reported to make impressive gains in "reading" Chinese (this was alluded to by one of the posters): he is at pains in his writing to make it clear that there is no full (vs partial) writing system that does not need to make use of at least some phonetic (vs. purely visual, decorative, pictorial or "logographic") elements and decoding processes...which is what the aforementioned study's "system" is clearly missing. I would argue that this kind of "research" condems children who are not being taught adequate phonetic decoding skills and awareness to remain being labelled "dyslexic" (see also Diane McGuinness's Why Children Can't Read) and obviously does very little to help them get to grips with ENGLISH orthography!

Hey Larry (and woody, and Lorry, at least!), seeing as we have all learnt a bit of Chinese, maybe we should get on over to these other sites and start posting there!

Ooh one last thing, Larry, I guess your respelling is meant as a joke, so don't take this the wrong way, but have you guys ever noticed how many Chinese (especially those from overseas, "huaqiao" communities) are such lousy spellers when it comes to Pinyin? It seems a shame, because although Pinyin is an excellent system and doesn't take much to learn, digraphia, international communication etc in Mandarin obviously isn't going to work until people start using it properly (and in this regard, more people should heed DeFrancis's "Call to action" for standardizing Pinyin orthography e.g. capitalization, compounds/word boundaries, fixed phrases etc, printed in the front matter of the ABC (Alphabetically-Based Computerized) Chinese-English Dictionary that he edited).

http://www.wenlin.com/jdf.htm (about John DeFrancis)
http://www.book-info.com/author/John_De ... cs1fToX2Sk (links to reviews of above two books)

Duncan, you'll see some of my comments being sadly ignored after 22 pages, if you make it that far.

So what if Chinese is tough? The place is booming, the characters are pretty, leave it alone. You are right about pinyin by the way, the Chinese, especially in the south, can't spell very well at all. Which is probably because they speak differently. Which is why characters hold the place together, to some degree.

woodcutter wrote:You are right about pinyin by the way, the Chinese, especially in the south, can't spell very well at all. Which is probably because they speak differently.

Hmm I got the impression that their lousy spelling was more due to them just not having bothered to formally learn Pinyin, rather than them being speakers of regional dialects; that is, they could speak perfectly acceptable/respectable Mandarin/Putonghua already, and just needed to know how the Mandarin sounds should be properly transcribed (even if in their speech they might be a bit lazy or inconsistent in making all the distinct sounds of Mandarin).

Also, I am not sure if characters should be "left alone". It is always useful and worthwhile to look at the problems involved in a language's orthography, even if wholesale reform is always going to seem impractical...just so that modest improvements can always be made, step by step...

Duncan wrote:Ooh one last thing, Larry, I guess your respelling is meant as a joke, so don't take this the wrong way, but have you guys ever noticed how many Chinese (especially those from overseas, "huaqiao" communities) are such lousy spellers when it comes to Pinyin?

Um, Yeah, Duncan, I did mean it as a joke, but then I never learned to spell in Pinyin anyway. I learned Mandarin using the Bo Po Mo Fo system, which was in use at my school. So I guess I'm one of those lazy and inconsistent guys. Actually, in my view, Bo Po Mo Fo is a superior system, because Pinyin can only approximate the sounds of Mandarin Chinese. Some of the sounds are not quite describable with the English alphabet. Bo Po Mo Fo is more precise. Pinyin is a convenience for English speakers, but not for the Chinese. (Of course, this is assuming they learn how to read and write the characters. In my experience on Taiwan, everybody did.)

Larry Latham

Hi Larry, I don't know what the "Bo Po Mo Fo system" is but I am guessing it is used in Taiwan more than China (does it look like Japanese katakana?). Anyway, Pinyin has those four sounds and probably 99% of the rest that you have learnt (De Te Ne Le etc), and does actually a pretty good job of closely approximating the sounds of Mandarin ("Bu hao yisi", with appropriate tone marks written in!); and it would seem as if not more convenient for Chinese learners to use as it is for westerners (at least until they have both truly learnt the characters) - I mean, there are still many people in China who are almost totally illiterate and don't have even one orthography under their belts yet!

Another very good reason for learning Pinyin is that it seems to be becoming the standard for data-inputting (see the ABC Dictionary etc). Hey, an interesting thing about inputting is that despite the "bottle-neck" problem with alphabet-based Pinyin, romanji etc, once it is entered choosing the correct character is a doddle and "spelling" mistakes less likely than when typing alphabetically straight into a document.

The Chinese are obviously attached to their writing system and wholesale reform is impractical (as simplified spellings etc are for English), and mixing characters and Pinyin might look ugly...but the Japanese seem to manage fine with kanji and two syllabaries (one of which clearly indicates words are of foreign origin - another point raised in the mammoth thread on the other website!).

I had an idea once for reforming Chinese in an aesthetically pleasing way - by taking the phonetics of e.g. the Soothill syllabary and adding appropriate radicals to distinguish homophones...the end result might be something like the "Chinese" characters that got developed in nations bordering China (possibly there is a picture of some such creations in one of DeFrancis's books).

Possibly so. DeFrancis is quite the definitive scholar of Chinese language, all right. I am aware that the Koreans once used Chinese characters extensively in their written language, but (without really knowing) I don't think that is the case any more. Japanese, of course, still does. Perhaps other border countries did the same, or any of the Silk Road countries that traded extensively with China. It all goes to remind us Westerners how important China's history is, and how powerful a world influence it has been, and for how long. By all appearances, that cycle is preparing to repeat itself.

Larry Latham

I'm already trying to learn the old characters, new characters, bo-po-mo-fo (the phonetic squiggles you sometimes see next to the characters), pinyin and the Korean alternatives. Please don't inflict the Powrie system on me as well!

The reforms made around 1950 have simply meant that everybody has more to learn. However, aesthetically I think they were quite well done.