Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
15 years ago, David Moser, then a Ph.D. student majoring in Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, wrote an essay titled Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. Upon receiving the degree, he moved to Beijing, married a Chinese, and had since conquered the damned language.
He became a sort of celebrity in China, often appearing in the Chinese TV scenes as a poster boy for “Big Nose” Laowai—foreigner—speaking flawless Chinese. He can entertain Chinese by performing Xiangsheng, a traditional Chinese folk art similar to standup comedy. It requires an adept spoken skill challenging even to the most Chinese.
Around the same time Moser penned the essay, I was in China cursing why English was so damn hard. If I had read his essay back then, I would be much less self-pity and much more sympathetic to him. By birthright, I didn’t have to learn how to speak Mandarin. But understand, or try to speak, several dialects was no less different from learning a second language.
While venting his frustration, Moser consoled himself with a vindication that it’s even hard for Chinese themselves to read and write Chinese. In the list he came up for explaining why it’s so damn hard, I can add one more: the boring learning materials; while in school, I rarely read a book or an article in Chinese that’s interesting enough that I could finish it in one take.
Let me skip the period of elementary school. It’s nothing but the period of massive coercion and senseless repetition to memorize hundreds of characters, mainly drawn from the slogan like “I’m a young pioneer with a red heart, ready to defend our motherland”. But from middle school and on, the textbooks leapfrog from slogans to mainly three genres.
The first: the essays written by Chairman Mao and his comrades; typically the thoughts of communism’s moral superiority, the eulogies to revolutionary martyrs, and occasionally the poems that's supposed to reflect the great leader’s romantic spirit while in dire hardship.
The second: non-fiction accounts of the heroes who died in wars; a 16-year-old girl killed for not yielding the Party’s secrets to Kuomintang, a soldier in Civil war who threw himself on a machine gun to spare the mass casualties, yet another soldier in Korean War burned live while remaining absolute still and silent in order to keep the battalion’s camouflage intact.
The third: the tedious description by a few famed writers; the colorful clouds changing to various shapes, the unpredictable rains falling in four seasons, and the breathtaking scent of the lotus in a pond.
If still not bored to death yet, then take a crack on classical Chinese literature, or Wenyanwen, mandatory in every textbook. No one had talked or written like that for at least a hundred of years.
Learning it, as we were told, would remind us of the proud cultural heritage of our motherland; reading it, however, only made me wished that Emperor Qinshihuang had burned them all thousands of years ago.
He became a sort of celebrity in China, often appearing in the Chinese TV scenes as a poster boy for “Big Nose” Laowai—foreigner—speaking flawless Chinese. He can entertain Chinese by performing Xiangsheng, a traditional Chinese folk art similar to standup comedy. It requires an adept spoken skill challenging even to the most Chinese.
Around the same time Moser penned the essay, I was in China cursing why English was so damn hard. If I had read his essay back then, I would be much less self-pity and much more sympathetic to him. By birthright, I didn’t have to learn how to speak Mandarin. But understand, or try to speak, several dialects was no less different from learning a second language.
While venting his frustration, Moser consoled himself with a vindication that it’s even hard for Chinese themselves to read and write Chinese. In the list he came up for explaining why it’s so damn hard, I can add one more: the boring learning materials; while in school, I rarely read a book or an article in Chinese that’s interesting enough that I could finish it in one take.
Let me skip the period of elementary school. It’s nothing but the period of massive coercion and senseless repetition to memorize hundreds of characters, mainly drawn from the slogan like “I’m a young pioneer with a red heart, ready to defend our motherland”. But from middle school and on, the textbooks leapfrog from slogans to mainly three genres.
The first: the essays written by Chairman Mao and his comrades; typically the thoughts of communism’s moral superiority, the eulogies to revolutionary martyrs, and occasionally the poems that's supposed to reflect the great leader’s romantic spirit while in dire hardship.
The second: non-fiction accounts of the heroes who died in wars; a 16-year-old girl killed for not yielding the Party’s secrets to Kuomintang, a soldier in Civil war who threw himself on a machine gun to spare the mass casualties, yet another soldier in Korean War burned live while remaining absolute still and silent in order to keep the battalion’s camouflage intact.
The third: the tedious description by a few famed writers; the colorful clouds changing to various shapes, the unpredictable rains falling in four seasons, and the breathtaking scent of the lotus in a pond.
If still not bored to death yet, then take a crack on classical Chinese literature, or Wenyanwen, mandatory in every textbook. No one had talked or written like that for at least a hundred of years.
Learning it, as we were told, would remind us of the proud cultural heritage of our motherland; reading it, however, only made me wished that Emperor Qinshihuang had burned them all thousands of years ago.
posted by Lingual Bee at 10:24 PM
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