I believe the author should have explored another reason: English.
One of the legacies of the British Empire is that a lot of the educated people in the world use English. Even in Europe, it is the lingua franca for business and academia. (In mighty Germany, the top institutions publish in English).
I think the applications and work would have to be done in English for China to effectively attract global talent.
Is learning tones much harder than learning all the weird vowel and consonant sounds that English has? I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds and languages like Spanish and Japanese as easy in terms of sounds.
In my experience, if you're sorta close in English, you can sort of get your point across, even if you mispronounce words, because the mispronounced word means no sense so you start thinking about a possible explanation.
In Chinese, a different tone actually is a valid word with its own meaning, so it's a bit harder for you to get your point across.
To be fair though, if you nail all the other parts of pronunciation/speaking correctly and only get the tones wrong, a Chinese speaker will be able to infer your meaning the vast majority of the time.
Half of Korean vocabulary is Chinese, with pronunciation based on ancient Chinese pronunciation, but Korean has no tones and their writing system has recently become more or less completely phonetic. Disambiguation is still not a huge problem for them.
I've met foreigners who have had TERRIBLE tones but still manage to get their point across in Mandarin because of context. Your explanation for why English works despite mispronunciation is the same reason why Chinese works: context. For example, let's assume we were talking about our families. You want to say: 我爱我妈 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my mother". But if you said 我爱我马 (wo ai wo ma) "I love my horse", I would assume you meant you love your mother because of the context.
> I'd always though of English and China as examples of hard languages in terms of sounds
Glad you mention this. I don't think most native English speakers are aware how complex English phonetics are. There are subtleties that only native speakers can distinguish. That is why many not-native speakers mispronounce some sounds. It is not that we are dummy. Our brain is just unable to hear (and produce) the exact sound.
English is a strange language, but I wouldn't say especially difficult. Chinese is much harder to learn because it's so inconsistent between what you're supposed to say and the way people actually talk. In addition to using tones that are very unfamiliar and then you also need to learn the written language which is very difficult and requires a Chinese-Chinese dictionary for strange words like manticore and sometimes you can't even find them.
I'd put English at around Russian difficulty, hard, but easy to get going. English also has the advantage of having a simple character set (less letters than Russian, French, etc) and English also has a ton of cultural artefacts (songs, movies, etc) to sink your teeth into.
My problem with Russian (unlike say, French, which I've also studied) is that I can't even find music to listen to that's anywhere close in production value to English and there are a couple of good movies (Leviathan, for example) but you can only watch them so many times. I don't know of a single Russian TV show that is anywhere close to HBO or Netflix quality. I'd love a recommendation though if someone here knows of one.
English does have a great many more sounds than Chinese, and very complicated grammar relative to any Asian language. (The tones make up, to some degree, for the paucity of sounds in Chinese.)
A native English speaker, I have always been perplexed by the tendency of foreigners to use "the" incorrectly. A space ship orbits "the Earth" but not "the Mars", for example. But then I tried to find a guide to using "the"...it is one of our most mysterious words.
It has more vowels (and more frequent consonants), but tone doesn't change the word in English. It can change the meaning (denote sarcasm, sadness, or questioning) but using a higher or lower pitch doesn't change the way you'd write out the word. Remembering tones is like adding imaginary numbers to your math, it's something you never thought about that you need to now account for everywhere. Learning new individual sounds is hard (and I have to do it with Russian) but I don't think it's as hard as the tone business in Chinese.
As for filler words in English: I totally agree it's madness. The word "set" has like 20 definitions. But you can mess them up and people will still understand you. "I break into car" (the way a Russian learning English would say it) vs "I'll break into the car" are both understood the same; whereas in Chinese if I mess up a (to my ears minor) tone, the information is completely lost.
Tonality and use of filler words are not really relatable.
Mistaken tonality is more like saying "tree" instead of "three".
Tonality is another feature of a speech sound like aspiration or voicing. Although it is not easy for English speakers, there no reason in principle to single it out as especially difficult.
I can try and guide you around good Russian music, drop me an email to alamar at my.com or friend ilyak on last.fm - that's me. Note that I'm a fan of all things DIY, production value doesn't mean as much to me as actual content.
Regarding movies, you can always go for a huge layer of Soviet films. They take some using to I suppose, but then the supply is endless.
Yes, but English is still phonetic. If the speaker slows down it's much easier to understand the person, even (or especially) if they speak in monotone, and even if they don't insert breaks in their speech. Inflection in English primarily serves to assist rapid processing, but especially in business communication it can be dropped entirely. Something similar can be said for word order, and to a significant degree even grammar.
As an American I find it very difficult to under British, Irish, and Australian accents. The inflections really throw me off. But the remedy is easy--ask the speaker to slow down. When they speak slowly, I don't need to rely on inflection. (Except in Cork, Ireland. My Spanish is horrible, but I found it easier to converse with people in Guadalajara, Mexico than in Cork, Ireland. At the bus station in Cork I didn't understand a single word coming out of the clerk's mouth. I know she was speaking English--and not Irish--but beyond that I was clueless.)
Likewise, when I've traveled in Asia and South America, understanding somebody with only basic English skills is relatively easy as long as they speak slowly. As long as I can identify the stream of words, I can reconstruct meaning with high fidelity. English grants huge freedoms in terms of inflection, word order, and grammar. Lurk on any linguistics forum and you quickly learn that it's _really_ difficult to commit a bone fide, uncontestable, error in English. Most of the rules in English are basically regional preferences. I suspect that half of what is taught in ESL classes aren't rules, per se, but merely an attempt at the formalization of the contemporary American English accent (i.e. television speech). The added structure missing from the vague rules of English aids the process of instruction. Much the same can be said for English instruction in primary and secondary school in America.
By contrast, after 15 years of hearing Cantonese on a regular basis I still can't make heads or tails of it. I learned some Korean phrases while on the plane; I still have trouble saying Happy New Year in Cantonese.
It's really difficult for people who have a good ear for tones (whether or not they're musically inclined) to understand what it's like for the rest of us. Many people don't even realize they have a good ear for it, probably because they nonetheless had to work hard at it. But the objective research suggests that if you're a native English speaker who picked up a tonal language, you're not normal, no matter how hard you had to work at it.
One thing I have learned in my cross-cultural experience is that Americans, British, and to some extent Australians heavily abuse sarcasm and cultural references.[1] It's only relatively recently that I've realized how sarcastic I can be (which is less sarcastic than many Americans), and how much confusion and miscommunication it has caused with foreign borne co-workers, friends, and family. And maybe part of the reason Americans rely on sarcasm and cultural references so much is because it's difficult to reliably encode signals in English speech. Emphasizing certain syllables, for instance, often only works regionally. The manner in which a New Yorker draws out a vowel to signal emotional content might actually be the normal mode of articulation in the Deep South. And so almost all Americans, even ones who don't abuse sarcasm, have become adept at recognizing secondary meaning based purely on the word content of speech, not the manner in which it is spoken.
[1] I suspect Germany and maybe even France might be similar in that regard. I doubt the phenomenon is unique to Anglophone countries; it's probably partly a function of modern Western culture. But the nature of English probably plays a part, too. Anyone care to confirm or contest?
> One thing I have learned in my cross-cultural experience is that Americans, British, and to some extent Australians heavily abuse sarcasm and cultural references.[1]
> [1] I suspect Germany and maybe even France might be similar in that regard. I doubt the phenomenon is unique to Anglophone countries; it's probably partly a function of modern Western culture. But the nature of English probably plays a part, too. Anyone care to confirm or contest?
The British make more use of sarcasm or irony than the Germans on average, I think this is were the stereotype that Germans have no humour originates. Still sarcasm is used here quite a lot, too, the Germans just have a harder time witching contexts. I have read an interview with a British guy living in Germany once (unfortunately forgot who it was) and he noticed in Germany, humour almost always is presented by some sort of a clown, so the audience can switch easier.
The connection between language and humour is an interesting topic, and brings to mind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or more generally, linguistic relativity [1]).
It can be difficult to tell how much of a cue (or "clown" as you mention) is required/necessary for the joke to be understood. For example, even American comedians often deliver the punch-line in an overt/exaggerated way.
I've noticed (possibly broader) Chinese and Dutch humour depends much more on slapstick and stereotypes. Of course I probably wouldn't even register the more subtle humor from those cultures.
I've often wondered if there are unique (semantic & syntactic) qualities of the English language that lend themselves to more to particular kinds of (deadpan or sarcastic) humour, such as semantic ambiguity (cf. double entendres), variations in phrasing & tone), etc.
Even the German language can be abused for a similar purpose, as the following quote from [2] illustrates:
> Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German language which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the construction of subordinate clauses in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions are difficult to duplicate in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same (or at least equivalent) effect found in the original text.
Maybe "hard" isn't exactly the right word, but it's certainly different. The sounds aren't hard to make, but using the wrong tone is like using the wrong vowel. You _have_ to speak each syllable with the correct tone or people won't understand you. This can be frustrating when you're learning the language because the difference is very subtle if you haven't grown up speaking a tonal language. If you say something that sounds correct to your ears, but native Chinese speakers give you blank stares, it's not that they're being obtuse or dense. They really have no idea what you're trying to say. Also there are relatively few sounds in Chinese, so if you make a mistake, you're likely to actually say something different from what you intended.
One thing that I've always wondered about tonal languages is whether they would be easier for musicians to learn (especially if they have perfect pitch) than for non-musicians.
There's a difference between register tones and contour tones. Chinese Languages (such as Mandarin) are contour toned languages - nothing at all like musical notes.
The difference is, I grew up learning English ;-) Seriously though, I tried learning Chinese, but for the life of me I couldn't tell the difference between the tones. They all sounded the same to me. I don't know if it's related, but I don't have an ear for music (Music does nothing for me so I have never listened to it by choice). Spanish on the other hand is amazing. I know an handful of languages, but Spanish by far had the fewest oddities. It is amazing how regular it is.
first is to notice the difference of the pronunciation for foreign languages, I believe same as music singer, for word "Porshe", french will read "e" as "ei", English just mute, German says in the middle, but that's hard for me to memorize it in the middle, Chinese has same sound as "ei". Brain is not getting use to the iconic differences of the sound.
second is to correct pronounce the sound, pronunciation of "th" took me one week to practice, because Chinese does not have "th", only "s", that's why lots of Chinese says "sank you" instead of "thank you", that muscle to pronounce that is simply not trained since was born.
Much to the disappointment of her mother who thought "fumb" was cute, I once taught a 3-year-old how to pronounce "th" by telling her to stick her tongue between her teeth and breathe out. Maybe a similarly position-focused (rather than sound-focused) approach would help non-native speakers as well?
Noun genders and never-ending verb endings are the drawbacks to Latin-based languages, for a second language learner. Perhaps Spanish with a single gender and English style verbs would be the simplest.
I find Spanish grammar very easy but it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to understand certain accents -- for example Dominican Spanish is really hard for me to understand.
I've found certain Spanish accents, in English, very hard to understand as well. The way Cubans can drop whole consonants[0] ("Smith's" can become "hmi'") is particularly vexing.
Honestly if you just write characters over and over while listening to Chinese TV you'll be fine. That's how I studied and when I presented in my Chinese class, the two students from Chongqing (who were taking the class to learn traditional characters) were so surprised at my pronunciation their jaws were on the floor.
No I just wrote whatever characters we were studying in class that week over and over while I watched streams of Chinese TV. I watched with Chinese subtitles but I didn't actually try to understand every word. It was mostly about framing my mindset towards a Chinese style of speaking and writing.
I spent maybe an hour or two a day, a few days a week. That was my most productive study method for calligraphy and pronunciation. Grammar and other subjects had to be studied in separate ways, but keeping the Chinese tv stream on helped either way.
For me, it wasn't the tones or sounds that made Mandarin tricky - once you get used to letting your mouth/tongue make shapes/be places you've trained it not to be the vowle/consonants aren't that bad, and fi you've ever played an instrument/sung, tones are manageable. It was the stupid pictographs. You're literally just memorizing shapes that didn't correspond to anything was the absolute worst. It got better once you learned to recognize the basic forms that were getting composed into parts of other characters, but that really discouraged me/was the hardest part. I basically gave up on written Chinese and focused on pinyin, because that made sense to my head.
Source: took two years of Mandarin and lived in Taiwan for a few months
David Moser wrote an essay telling people to focus more on Pinyin and not stress about characters until much later. I totally agree with him. Maybe one day the CCP will force everyone to Pinyin and I can finally read without having to look up half a sentence.
Moving everything to pinyin probably would introduce a different set of difficulties for a foreigner: while a native Chinese speaker knows the spoken language and context well enough to disambiguate homophones, it's unlikely a Chinese learner would have the same ability.
Just curious, what are some examples of difficult/weird vowel or consonant sounds that you think English has? And why do you think Spanish is easy in terms of sounds?
IMO Mandarin is pretty difficult since it has both tones and weird vowels/consonants - I feel like in English most people struggling tend to only have significant trouble with articles and the "th" sound.
For example, the 'i' in 'bright' is a dipthong that sort of glides from 'uh - aye' very quickly.
Many languages have very few dipthongs -- e.g. Japanese and Spanish come to mind, and Mandarin has some, but they're mostly different from English. If you go from a language that has 5 pure vowel sounds like Spanish to something like 15-20 in English (depending on the dialect), it's hard to keep track of them all and pronounce them correctly [1], especially since English orthography hinders rather than helps you, whereas dipthongs in Spanish are pronounced exactly as they're rendered (e.g. cauda is like ca-u-da spoken fast).
Maybe theoretically Spanish has no diphthongs. But rapid speech definitely sees diphthongs develop as sounds merge together -- a very much Spanish thing.
Sure, but here Spanish orthography is actually representative of the sound, whereas English orthography is a mess (plus English has more than 5 base vowel sounds to begin with).
No matter how you cut it, English's vowel phonology is much more complicated than Spanish or Japanese. One misconception that native English speakers have is they think their language is simple to pronounce, when it really isn't.
In English in The South in the USA, often "can" and "can't" are pronounced the same ("can") with a minor difference in the way the "a" and "n" are held.
And just as badly, "can't" and "cunt" just vary the vowel length without changing the vowel or consonant sounds (in some English accents). Many languages don't use vowel length to signify changes in meaning, and it is obviously hard to teach.
This reminds me of Gough Whitlam, former Australian Prime Minister ~1975:
...Gough also took aim at Sir Winton Turbull when the rural MP shouted: 'I am a Country member'. Whitlam quickly responded with 'I remember', which earned an applause from both sides of the house.
I don't know Korean, but Spanish is amazingly regular. Once you learn the 27 letters of the alphabet you can read anything. I'm not saying you can comprehend anything, but you can sound out all the words. It's not like English where you can't tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at it (for instance "though"). In Spanish you always know how to pronounce a word just by looking at it.
On top of that, Spanish feels like a pragmatic language: it foregoes French's formality and resistance to borrowed words (e.g., computadora versus ordinateur). It also helps that Spanish speakers tend to be forgiving of gender errors in the rare cases where the spelling misleads (mostly just masculine words that end in -a).
hangul is probably my favorite writing system, but I wouldn't really consider it any simpler than an alphabet type system. Can't speak for abjads, though.
Also, converting spoken Korean into text can be tricky for non native speakers (e.g. 맛 is pronounced 'Mat' although the spelling would indicate 'Mas')
for the most part Korean still follows simple rules though. 맛 -> 'mat' only if it is followed by a consonant, so 맛는 -> matneun, whereas 맛있어요 -> masisseoyo.
The Korean alphabet can easily be learnt in a few hours.
It's an "artificial" alphabet, meaning that it wasn't born organically over hundreds of years but created by a group of koreans. It's very simple by design, as it was created to allow the general populace to write and read (until then they were using some kind of chinese dialect, too complicated for those in the working class).
Arabic and Korean both possess phonetic alphabets. If you define a glyph as a pictogram then you'd have to consider Arabic to be under the same umbrella.
>>Arabic [has] different start/middle/end forms [...]
As far as I'm aware, Korean doesn't have different characters (forms) for the same sound, and doesn't omit vowels in the same manner that written Arabic does sometimes.
However, in the grand scheme of things, China has invested too much culturally, traditionally and publicly to walk away from their (relatively recently) simplified writing system and language.
You are completely wrong on your first sentence. Hangul has fewer letters in the alphabet, fewer consonants, and virtually no different forms. It's also a phonetic language written as it's spoken more or less, unlike Arabic which leaves out vowels usually making it ambiguous far to often. Lets also not forget that there's many dialects of Arabic depending on region. Further, Arabic is often written in a script that makes it harder to read, especially from a distance, whereas Hangul is pretty unambiguous even with very small print.
(Reply biased a little based on my own experience reading both languages, but still should be pretty factually correct for most)
little ambiguity? I beg to differ. no one writes with vowel marks in Arabic and the same word can be interpreted in many different ways without context. even with context but lacking vowel marks the same word can mean different things.
The problem would be way way smaller if the language were more phoenetic. I've gotten into arguments with Chinese language speakers, and they insist that the language has phoetic elements, with certain ideograms giving clues on how to pronounce words.
That's all well and good, but phoentic implies the other way around too. After hearing a word, you'll have to be able to write it. For instance, "kill", "sand", and the "shark" word in the phrase "shark" all have exactly the same tonal pronunciation, but with completely different ways of writing it.
And don't get me started on traditional vs. simplified.
In this case parent is referring to the phoneme [shā] which map to the characters 殺，沙，and 鯊. (using traditional) and mean "kill", "sand", and "shark" respectively.
Note that the last one, 鯊 is composed of two components 沙 and 魚.
So the top component is the phonetic hint and the bottom is semantic, as 魚 means "fish". Many characters for types of "fish" (I use "fish" loosely as things like whales 鯨魚 are considered fish) use the fish radical, as the characters are called when used as a component of a character.
鯉魚 carp the 里 is phonetic
鮑魚 abalone 包 is phonetic
Of course, this is just a small sampling and there are plenty of things that are inconsistent. I typically just use it as a mnemonic.
And to the point of tones, I leave 傻 [sha3], which means stupid.
Thanks for your input. I think my main point is that a phonetic language goes both ways.
Without any context, or meaning, you should be able to write a word just by hearing it. Similarly, without any context or meaning, by seeing a word, you should be able to pronounce it.
Now, of course it's a sliding scale.
But I think Chinese is on one end of the scale, where if you're just given the phenome shā without context or meaning, it's literally impossible to figure out how to write the word.
In English and all romance languages, you can try to spell it somewhat, and then give it to a native reader to see what it means. This helps a lot when you're reading subtitles for television programs or listening to the radio. If you're reading subtitles, you can sorta figure out what matches up to what. If you're listening to the radio, you can make a best guess on how to spell a word and ask somebody what it means.
What. I am a native english speaker. I don't find the tonal character of various chinese dialects to be significantly more difficult to understand than other tonal languages, like spanish.
Spanish isn't tonal. It contrasts stress, but not pitch. Words with the same syllables but a different stressed syllable are different in Spanish, but in tonal languages the same syllable pronounced with a different pitch and pitch change is different.
That said, as a native-English-speaking Chinese learner I don't find the tones of standard Mandarin to be particularly hard (Hokkien, on the other hand…). Standard Mandarin phonology is also pretty easy (some parts are tricky for native English speakers like contrasting aspiration but not voice (English is the opposite), but overall it's not terribly complex).
Cyrillic is not an abjad as far as I know. I'm a native of a country that uses Cyrillic, but it's possible that I misunderstood the meaning of "abjad".
That's not the same thing. That's an inconsistent mapping of sounds (phonemes) to symbols (and one of the reasons English can be so frustrating to learn). Tones when referring to linguistics are changes in pitch to distinguish words. Given that these differences in pitch (tonemes) are created with the same system (mouth, tongue, lips, vocal chords, &c) as phonemes, you can argue that they're the same, but it's an important enough distinction that linguists find it meaningful.
Having tones does not make a language inherently easier to learn, nor does having ideographs. If China would truly be better off using a non-tonal language with an alphabetic script, it's only because the language of the British Empire was non-tonal with an alphabetic script.
Actually, the mess that is English orthography is hardly more "manageable" than Chinese script. There are loads of phonetic elements in Chinese characters.
It's unquestionable the Chinese script is more difficult to learn than alphabetic scripts. This is directly reflected in the amount of time children and language learners have to spend on it, and the resulting reading ability.
Because the talent the US attracts started learning English before they came to the US. English is the lingua franca of global communication and is taught in almost every country. The same cannot be said of Chinese.
1. You are usually effective and comfortable in the language you were educated in.
2. If you want to do business with a person in another language, you usually both default to English because it is usually second language if it is not their first.
I mean look at your own situation. I assume that you are fairly well educated (on Hacker News, decent grammar, and asked a good question). Suppose you had to leave the US, where would you go?
Your top choices might be other English speaking countries (Ireland, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand).
Your next set of choices would be places you could do business in English (Berlin perhaps).
Globally, a lot more educated people know English than Chinese. Its not impossible but it is a far larger barrier to entry than, say, blocking youTube.
After Ireland, Canada, UK, Australia, NZ, I'd probably go for Scandinavian countries and Iceland. They have smaller native-speaking populations, a high level of exposure to English, and great foreign language training. Then I'd probably go for countries like Latvia, Romania, etc.
I'd consider Germany and France to be third-tier in that sense because they have large native-speaking populations and a greater expectation that people know their language.
I agreed with you about English vs Mandarin from education perspect and business trade perspect.
What I am saying is that China attracts talent who live in China and why don't communicate with others in Mandarin? Learn Mandarin isn't a binary choose for these talents who live in China -- they can still learn stuffs in English and do business with other people around world in English.
From my experience that learn English is not only about helping me to communicate with others, but also, help me to learn a different mindset and culture.
Because up until very recently, very few people outside of China that were not ethnic Han spoke Chinese.
The concept of "Chinese" is fairly inaccurate anyways. I'd like to flatter myself that my mandarin is ok (I won't starve and I generally can make myself understood) but I can't understand most Cantonese. Cantonese is classified as a dialect of Mandarin, but it's really not mutually intelligible.
Whether we like it or not, English is the defacto "business" language. Most (if not all) places in the world conduct business in their native languages(s) and English.
So why would I want to learn Mandarin, which I've been told is super hard to learn and is for most purposes, useless elsewhere in the world?
Following the Second World War, but even before, there was massive world-wide investment in instruction in English; and it has worked its way into the infrastructure. Air traffic control is in English -- and in feet and knots -- all over the world, for example.
Centuries ago, the same thing happened with Chinese; and that is why a Chinese can visit Tokyo and find their way around the train station without knowing any Japanese. Maybe it can happen with Chinese again. Many Asian people learn a little Chinese; and more western people learn it now, too.
I'm sure you thought it was very funny but as the person who has to deal with the messes such comments provoke in large internet communities, I read the guidelines differently.
Please err on the side of posting civilly and substantively when commenting here.
It is true. However there are valid reasons for most of us to learn mandarin, or at least for our children. You cannot ignore 1/5 of the world's population.
One of the legacies of the British Empire is that a lot of the educated people in the world use English. Even in Europe, it is the lingua franca for business and academia. (In mighty Germany, the top institutions publish in English).
I think the applications and work would have to be done in English for China to effectively attract global talent.