It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european! Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a native speaker!
The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn?
I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes.
"chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence of the word from the french word for "candlestick"
Both “off” and “out” are translated to „aus“ in German. „Ausziehen” could be translated as “to pull off” (for clothes) or ”to pull out” (for houses and apartments). Hence the two meanings.
When you put your clothes on or move in you don‘t have the same problem. “On” and “in” are translated to „an“ and „ein“, respectively. That’s why there is „anziehen“ (“to pull on”, for clothes) and „einziehen“ (“to pull in”, for houses and apartments).
(To the grandparent: You really should try you luck creating compound words in German even when you are not sure whether the word exists. That’s a very German thing to do :)
Even in the comment you use "langauge", so doubtful I checked if the world "langauge" existed haha.
When he says it's simple, he means to understand. But sometimes you can still guess words. Few examples that you could have find if you're familiar with chinese (because you're learning it for example) :
I'll grant you fly machine. But if a taxi is a rent car, what do I call a rental car? And if a fire-car is a train, what do I say if my car catches fire?
Recently my wife (born and raised in China) was on the phone with her dad. She was trying to tell him something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking insect), but she didn't know the Chinese word.
She looked it up in the English->Chinese dictionary, and that told her what the character is. But since she was on the phone -- voice only -- she was still unable to communicate it, since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word. She tried to describe the strokes in the character to dad, but just couldn't get it across.
EDIT: to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation. That's because Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. A given pronunciation would only address one specific local pronunciation of one specific sub-language, so it's not so useful.
Also, his complaints about not being able to figure out new words aren't really valid. Since so much of English consists of building words from roots stolen from Latin and other languages, if you know those roots, it does get you a good deal of the way toward understanding new words.
> ...since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying the word.
Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of 虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right).
> Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation.
Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up online[2].
> Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing.
Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan).
It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc, and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change soon.
From experience, Mandarin and Cantonese are fairly close to each other, in my opinion. But Shanghainese (and basically the Wu dialects) is not intelligible to me. 我們 (wo men = "us" in english) in Mandarin is not so far from 我哋 (ngo de) in Cantonese, but is pretty far from colloquial Shanghainese, 阿拉 (a la).
It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese nation.
That is nonsense, people are people and will do what makes them happy. If they don't care about Mandarin, nothing will stop them from not using it. Personally, I totally enjoy the fact that there are different dialects, each with it's own flavor in expressing certain concepts(especially profanities!). For example, everyone's favorite profanity in Cantonese, 仆街 (pok gai/pok kai) "go to hell" (transliteration is "go lay on the street (and die because you'll get trampled/ran over)". Over time, this has bled over to English and the English bled back over to Chinese speakers into PK. And in today's Taiwan reality shows (I'm sure mainland China uses this term today as well), we have PK rounds where contestants get eliminated from the shows. In these contexts, PK has turned into a term about competition!
Sure, having a standard is good so that there can be less ambiguity in communication between people, but at the same time, diversity is what breeds new ideas and innovations. Take computers, programming languages, designs as an example; 1 processor to do computation and graphics? "unifying" everyone to C# be such a good idea? Is a centralized versioning system the most awesome?
> Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing.
At least half the TV in mainland China has subtitles. If you can speak and read one Chinese language/dialect well, you can learn another by immersing yourself in TV with subtitles for a few months. I meet many people here who say, e.g. "they learnt Cantonese because they lived in Guangzhou for a year".
Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly
I suspect you have some exposure to Cantonese, then. My experience in discussing this with many native Chinese speakers is that Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Fujianese are all mutually unintelligible. And not just slightly so, but as difficult to convey understanding as I (an English speaker with a touch of French) experience in Mexico.
But don't just take my word for it:
Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) (汉语／漢語 Hànyǔ; 华语／華語 Huáyǔ; 中文 Zhōngwén) is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. [1]
(The above quotation bears this footnote: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) , p. 312. "The mutual unintelligibility of the varieties is the main ground for referring to them as separate languages." )
As you suggest that I may be prejudiced for political reasons, I respond that in this subject I have absolutely no bias. And let me add that the very same criticism could be directed at you.
A final criterion in differentiating language from dialect involves a language's political status, a factor that is external to the form of the language and sometimes even at variance with the culture of the speakers. Do the political authorities in a country consider two language forms to be separate languages or dialects of a single language? Extremely different, non-mutually intelligible language forms may be called dialects simply because they are spoken within a single political entity and it behooves the rulers of that entity to consider them as such: this was the case with Ukrainian and Russian in the days of the Russian Empire, where Ukrainian (called Little Russian) was considered a substandard variety of Russian (called Great Russian). This could also be said to be the case with the so-called dialects of Chinese in the People's Republic of China.
On the other hand, language forms that are quite mutually intelligible can be considered separate languages also for purely political reasons. Such is the case with Serbian and Croatian in the former Yugoslavia. Linguistically, these two language forms are more similar than the English spoken in Texas and New York; linguists, in fact, usually called them both by the name Serbo-Croatian. However, for entirely political reasons the Serbs and the Croats have deliberately invented separate literary standards to render their language more divergent than it really is. Furthermore, the Croats, being Catholics, use the Latin alphabet, while the Orthodox Serbs use a version of Cyrillic. A similar situation pertains is other cases, notably Hindi/Urdu, and Bengali/Assamese. [2]
Finally, you note that Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used in movies, etc. This is true for most of the PRC, but is not true for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and (I think) Tibet. But I don't see what it proves in any case. I will add, though, that in Chinese movies I frequently see Chinese subtitles, presumably put there so that those used to different "dialects" can understand.
But in colloquial Chinese, do they reflect the same zoological classifications that we have in the West? Maybe they just have a generic "bug" or something. This is one of the things that's very easy to assume, but not doesn't really have any strong intrinsic logic to support, much like recent conversations here about color perception.
Also, why do we always orient maps with the North pointing up or away from us, and reference those maps based on that assumed orientation? Why not have East pointing up?
unless the other guy quite literally doesn't have experience/knowledge of a tick, I think one can figure out a way to describe it :-)
north: although ptolemy introduced the convention of north/up, I can easily see how the use of a lodestone could naturally give rise to the custom (north --> lodestone points forward; when you tilt the surface perpendicular to the ground, it is up).
> Maybe they just have a generic "bug" or something.
You have an excellent point there. I remember when I was learning Japanese I asked my teacher what the word for 'rat' was (mouse is 'nezumi') and she said just use 'nezumi', or use a qualifier e.g. 'ookii nezumi' (big mouse)
For what it's worth, I saw an Australian stand-up comic once making fun of American English in which all insects are referred to as "bugs". (Australian English tends to reserve the word "bug" for beetles.)
Seconded. One of the most valuable tools for me in Spanish is the ability to describe things I can't say. I don't know the word for tick, but I could say "an insect that [hmmm, don't know the word for 'sucks'...] eats your blood, and it doesn't fly, and it stays there on your skin for an hour or two, and it gets bigger while it eats..." and the person would say, "oh, a tick!" And I'd learn a new word.
And that's how we got kangaroo, which means, "I don't know."
"Hey, you, what's that... that jumpy thing over there?"
"I don't know."
"Ah! An I don't know, eh? Spectacular!"
(note: it appears that there is reason to believe this old story is untrue, but it still serves to illustrate a real and hilarious problem when speaking across languages)
"to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation"
What? Every Chinese dictionary I've seen says how a word is written in Pinyin, allowing one to pronounce it. Every person in mainland China who has gone to school knows Mandarin and Pinyin. For example Cantonese is just a locally spoken dialect, children learn Mandarin at school.
to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide pronunciation
Depends who's Chinese =P If you buy a dictionary in Taiwan, you can look up words using the Zhuying Fuhao system (Bopomofo). There are 37 characters, with about the first 21-24 can be used as the first sound, 3 as a middle sound, and the last 13-16 as the second sound of words (plus the 4 (ok, 5 sorta) intonations).
But yes, it really depends on the sanctioned system and the dialect. Can't really use pinyin for Cantonese...
For example Cantonese is just a locally spoken dialect, children learn Mandarin at school.
Not completely true. In Hong Kong, Cantonese is written as well as spoken. For example, the English phrase's meaning of "do not have" can be translated into Mandarin as 没有, however, in Cantonese, spoken and written, is expressed more commonly as 冇.
But the fact that characters don't give out pronunciation is a big issue when you come across one in your everyday life (restaurant menu for example) and can't pronounce it, nor can ask someone to explain it to you later (unless you remember how to write it).
One possible solution would be to find a dictionary that has either pinyin or zhuyin fuhao to guide pronunciation. I believe zhongwen.com provides this.
In this case pinyin would have worked, since (afaik) it's a representation of Mandarin pronunciation, which happens to be the language they were speaking at the time.
However, (1) we don't have such a dictionary, and I think demanding such a specialized dictionary violates the argument in the OP; and (2) if they'd been speaking Shanghainese, which is her other Chinese tongue, or another dialect, pinyin wouldn't have helped.
I'm not familiar with zhuyin, but given what I understand about the problem, I imagine the same weakness would apply.
Every language has its difficulties. Chinese grammar is very easy compared to English. However, to get to a basic reading level, you need to know at least 2300 characters (in other languages, the alphabet is very small). There are also tones (mandarin only has 5. Other dialects like Cantonese have 9).
It's also nearly impossible to know the meaning of a character (or how to pronounce it), unless you have already seen it (you can look at the root, but that doesn't always work).
I know more than 2300 characters, and can read stuff and verbalize the correct pronunciation, even recognize which characters go together as words. But I often still don't understand the meaning of what I'm reading because I don't know the meaning of enough two-character words.
The Chinese govt language proficiency test (HSK) proscribes knowledge of 2900 characters and 8800 words for literacy. Learning those 8800 words is the toughie.
This is true. In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun. And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent.
But in reading English and other European languages, those things can be clues to deciphering the stuff you don't know. They help you see how the words of the sentence relate to each other, so without them you've got a little less information for puzzling it out.
"In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and 'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun." The 50+ classifiers can be hard to remember, though admittedly you can just use 个 every time when speaking and it doesn't sound too bad.
"And verb conjugation is pretty much non-existent." When to use each verb modifier (e.g. 了, 过, 正在, 起来, 下去) and how they combine with negators and auxiliaries (e.g. 没, 不, 会, 能) seems more difficult than in English.
Articles are used to distinguish between whether or not you are talking about a specific item, or a general item (which I'm sure you know). This is actually very valuable. I've studied Latin, and sometimes you can't know which is which, because Latin doesn't distinguish. Also, I don't think 'a' and 'an' are fundamentally different. 'An' just has the extra sound to smooth speech over. It doesn't really matter if you write "a apple" or "an apple".
Also, verb conjugation in English is pretty nonexistant, compared to other languages, like Romance languages. There are usually three different verb forms: the standard (write), the past (writed) and the third person singular present (writes). I know there are some irregularities, but generally if you want to say a verb, you use the standard.
> Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%.
Good luck reading sentences where the most important and meaningful word is the one you don't know.
And what's with the interest in characters? Didn't you just get done praising how most words are formed out of a bunch of characters? So now we need to memorize a few thousand characters and memorize how multiple characters form a word/concept. The alphabet looks better all the time...
It looks like the problem the author is struggling with is vocab-as-meaning vs vocab-as-etymology. She complains that english creates new words for everything; "bus", "envelope", etc, but we really tend to re-use words for different but allegorical meanings all the time. I'm sure all the readers here are familiar with at least one meaning of 'bus' that has nothing to with wheels. And the noun 'envelope' would be, I think, a pretty easy word to guess if you saw it in context and were already familiar with the verb 'envelop'.
This is one of the wonderful things about English (and other European languages that I have knowledge of).
My wife (also referenced in this thread here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439092 ) struggled with English at first until an ESL teacher showed her how easy it is to manufacture noun, verb, adjective, or adverb forms from a single base. She had been working hard memorizing every word form that was taught her until somebody showed her that the way English actually works is generally pretty logical. She says her vocabulary tripled overnight.
As someone who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, I've noticed the same thing. E.g., lobster is "dragon shrimp," computer is "electric brain," etc. I wonder if the reason European languages have so many apparently 'unique' words is their inclusion of other older European languages such as Greek and Latin. Chinese, by comparison, seems to have borrowed mainly from itself.
Yes, that's the exact reason. The words mentioned in the article all make total sense if you know Latin and/or Ancient Greek:
* bus (from omnibus, latin for "for everyone")
* shampoo - that's actually coming from the Hindi champo (according to Wikipedia, I didn't know it) where it means "head massage"
* isotope - that's actually Greek, but still not hard to figure out; iso = same, topos (τόπος) = place
* communism - that doesn't even need explanation
* computer - also no explanation needed
My point is, the only thing that makes these words sound "unique" is that they are usually borrowed from other languages, especially Latin or Ancient Greek. Many of these words are just as simply structured as their Chinese equivalents.
The other thing that makes many of them sound unique is the way they are put together (conjugated?), which produces a new sound. To an unfamiliar ear, isotope and iso topos sound like different words.
If you'd like to dig more into this, the key word you are looking for is "etymology", the study of word origins and associated issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology
If you look in dictionaries, especially the more complete ones, all words will have their etymologies spelled out. For instance, the etymology for etymology from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/etymology is:
Etymology: Middle English ethimologie, from Anglo-French, from Latin etymologia, from Greek, from etymon + -logia -logy
For pretty much every word you can think of in English, there's a locally-sensible etymology for it. English's problem is the attitude exemplified in the classic quote:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-499.html
The problem isn't that we don't have roots in English; the problem is that we have three-ish major sets of them (Anglo-Saxon, Greek, Latin, though if you really dig those are all somewhat related too, for instance see m-w.com's entry for "fire"), and will freely borrow any others we need at will.
Of course the practical effect for a foreign learner is that it doesn't look like we have roots.
This is why spelling contests in English can actually be interesting. It is also why, at the higher levels of competition, the contestant always asks for the etymology of the word; it isn't just a play for time, though it is that, it is also a vital question! Spelling an Arabic-descended word like "falafel" with Greek phonetics might come out "phalaphel" and that's just embarrassing. (Compare with the phonetics, etymology, and spelling of "phosphor", with its two "ph"s.)
I prefer http://www.etymonline.com/index.php - indeed, I have a keyword search in Firefox set up for just this. Also, see acre's etymology - also cognates in Sanskrit etc., but seemingly more direct than pyre etc.
Icelandic has some beautiful examples of creative language (purism), e.g. instead of using a word derived from the Greek for electricity, it uses "rafmagn" which literally means "amber power".
Another example is sími, the word for telephone (which comes from the greek "tele" (far) and "phone" (voice)).
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who more or less single-handedly revived the modern Hebrew language, spent a great deal of effort coming up with Hebrew words for modern things. “Telephone” was “sakh-rakhok”, from the classical Hebrew words for “conversation” and “far”. Not all of his suggestions took root: Israelis just call the telephone a “telefon”.
There is a famous article called "Uncleftish Beholding", which is a summary of basic atomic theory, but written in an alternate "English" that uses only Germanic root words, replacing all words from Latin, Greek, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
I was reading about this the other day, and the Arabic word for "electricity" (kahraba, apparently) is also based on the Arabic word for amber.
Chinese, on the other hand, just uses the word for "lightning". This might be a more logical choice, but it indicates that the Chinese didn't have a word for electricity until after it was discovered that lightning and electricity were actually the same thing, whereas Europeans had been using the word "electricity" since 1600ish and didn't prove the connection to lightning until the 1750s (though I assume it must have been suspected).
Finns seem to like coining neologisms as well. The language is extremely productive, with every base word potentially yielding dozens of derivatives. There's even a national "language office" that tries to promote Finnish alternatives to foreign loans. Some fail to catch on, but many do.
For example, the word for telephone is "puhelin" which is derived from the verb for "to chat" using a postfix (-in) that indicates a tool of some kind.
Computers are literally "knowledge machines". The word for electricity is also interesting: It's "sähkö" which I guess derives from "sähinä", meaning buzz.
FWIW before the introduction of electronic computers as we know them, "computer" was a job description (think of folks, usually women, who calculated tables for e.g. artillery).
English is especially problematic in this regard, because modern English is a trainwreck between Anglo-Saxon, a Germanic language, and Norman French, a Romance language.
Except for more modern words. For example, the word(s) for email that my wife uses is a transliteration of the English sounds, resulting in something like "Ee-may-are".
Also, Chinese translations for non-Chinese places and people are frequently impossible to decipher. My wife frequently looks up from her Chinese news paper and says "this article talks about a person named 'blah blah'; who do you think it is?". Americans sometimes insensitively change foreign terms (e.g., "Beijing" becomes "Peking"; "Torino" becomes "Turin"). But the Chinese system absolutely forces them to do this, because of the limited set of syllables the can write. In Mandarin, the only consonant sound you can have at the end of a syllable is "n" or "ng", so if you need a sound other than that you've got to either drop it or add in an extra syllable having that consonant at its beginning.
I don't know about Peking, but Turin is actually the name in the local dialect. Torino is proper Italian. [1] My guess is that Turin is the older name which got established in the English and German language and it was later changed to the proper Italian name Torino.
[1] Both mean "bull" in English, there was something about bull (taur...) already in the name when it was founded by the romans.
For what it's worth, Peking and Turin were both fixed in the English language long before there was an America. And if the Italians want to complain about the "insensitive" Anglicisations of their city names they can go complain to Elisabetta II herself in Londra, Inghilterra.
Ah, but the complainers are the adults who are pretty lazy (& lousy - in relative to children of course) at learning a foreign language. The U.S. especially needs to do a better job of teaching foreign languages. But sadly, most start a second language in schools around high school and are not very good at it either.
As about the european languages argument, the comparison is mostly about vocabulary it seems. That's hardly a justifiable comparison. Sure, words may indeed be simpler in Chinese, but the sad reality is that languages are a cultural heirloom that gets guarded but yet is stolen many times. Part of the gosh-darn specialty of these languages is to strengthen the cultural ties and keep it in. In fact, you might as well compare english with scientific papers written in english...
I am a white American, lived in the US for 29 years and now have been in Taiwan for 3 months with my Taiwanese Fiance. I have been studying Chinese for about a year, with increasing fever since coming to Taiwan. From what I can gather so far, Chinese is much harder to get to a basic level than English.. Let's say a 1st grade level. This is primarily due to the tones, and the characters having no correlation to the words (this is the big one... thank god for flash cards).
My unqualified claim is that Chinese is "Hard to learn, (relatively) easy to Master" due to the reasons stated in the article... English would be "Easy to learn, hard to master", primarily due to the insane vocabulary and tricky grammar. How many chinese born speakers have you heard say "the, than, 's, that, which, at, " and the like, not to mention correctly pronounce all the various english sounds, not to mention American vs British english.
Anyways.. Point is. Chinese is hard. But so are other languages.
Of course, picking up another language that is similar to yours would be much easier. (English -> German), or (Mandarin Chinese -> Cantonese). It's all relative.
Something pretty curious about Chinese, though, is how difficult it is to understand if you don't know it. When being welcomed to a shop, they say 歡迎光臨 (Huānyíng guānglín) which I never noticed until I learned it, after which point I have heard it constantly. For comparison, in Tokyo, I vividly remember countless occurances of "irashaimase"
(I submitted this link, and I should add that I'm not the author.)
I think the commenters who write about distinguishing learning vocab from digging deeper into understanding etymology ( eg skermes, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131 ) have hit the nail on the head (translate that one!). At that point, learning vocab, whatever the language, becomes more fun for me.
Back to the cooking thing though...
I'm surprised that most comments I see so far are about the language, because what drew me to the article in the first place is the author's connection between the Chinese language and Chinese cooking with non-specialised tools, and how that contrasts with western cooking.
I think both Chinese and 'western' cooking tools have specialized, though interestingly in opposite directions. The Chinese specialization towards one wok, one cleaver, one chopping board (prep hygiene, anyone?), chopsticks (and food cut and cooked to size) and green tea minimizes the toolset.
The 'Western' way specializes in a different way: specialize the tool to what's being cooked and eaten - a fish pan, a medium sized knife to prep, a fish knife to eat, and white rather than red wine.
I'm not saying one is better than the other - I'll happily eat both Chinese or western food (or any other) if you're cooking for me! ... I'm just interested in studying the differences and similarities.
Also, when eating out in Western culture you are more prone to just ordering your own meal, whereas in Chinese culture it's typically family style.
It is also, with few exceptions, acceptable to grab food in the 'center' with your own chopsticks. I guess chopsticks don't get dirty :)
One thing that drives me crazy about chopsticks is when you want to cut something, you have to do that X trick and sort of cross the chopsticks, or use the spoon. I'm a wiz with chopsticks, but a knife and fork is the ultimate combo. It wins at every category except noodle soup and sushi.
Those chopsticks and communal sauces do get 'dirty', but hey, a few germs keep your immune system on its toes! There may well be an aspect of group bonding there in saliva-exchange.
If you have to cut food, that's someone else's failing before it gets to the table - tough cheap meat, cut too big, or cooked badly. But yes, I've often had to cut meat with a blunt china spoon too!
Yes, the spoon - glad to hear you're one of the few non-Chinese (I presume, from your name) who uses it. Always amusing to watch people eating rice 2 grains at a time with chopsticks...
I always have the idea that the westerners are more aggressive because they use knife on the dinner table. If you cut your own food, and sometimes see blood dripping out from it, you tends to think making others bleed is more or less a pleasure, or even a daily need.
As a programmer, I think the cooking process should be well encapsulated, and the knives should be left in the kitchen. The eaters should care about sending the food to the mouth, rather than having to postprocess it.
> Chinese like everything simple, doesn't have to be too exact
Oh, don't start. "I don't know what the bug was, but I fixed it." - verbatim quote. This was a mode of operation of disturbingly large number of Chinese devs I have worked with. After several bugfixing iterations of this kind it was easier to throw the code away and redo it from scratch than to understand how that managed to work. So, yeah, "don't have to be exact" is certainly there.
LOL Anyone who's ever worked with a Chinese PhD's, grad students or serious developers (such as in finance) knows this is complete horseshit...
But you're right, this thread is the perfect place for some casual racism to vent your frustrations in working with third-rate developers foisted upon you by your company's outsource policies.
My primary experience stems from working for a Canadian-based company with 200+ developers (located in Canada), 80% of which were Chinese programmers. The CTO of the company was Chinese and he had an obvious preference for hiring graduates from his own university and/or country. Top picks, but few with more than a couple of years of non-Chinese experience.
Just to emphasize - EIGHT PERCENT of my coworkers came from Chinese software development companies and they quite naturally brought their work ethics with them. My four years in this company is a basis for my original comment.
If it's not obvious, I am not talking about Chinese nationality, I am talking about developers with Chinese way of working in a software development environment. The way that revolves around never saying No to the boss, which in turn is deeply rooted in their cultural heritage. If the project manager says that the bug needs to be fixed today, it will be fixed today. Meaning that it will no longer be reproducible. How it will be fixed and what else is going to broken along the way is secondary. This will create another bug that can be taken care of later in the same manner.
And this was the company that developed sophisticated networking software including their own embedded OS down to the kernel level. Moreover most of these guys were perfectly capable of NOT cutting corners and doing a splendid coding job if forced. But god forbid if they would ever do it on their own accord. Everything was always done in a rush and sketchy-patchy way. I don't have any other explanation except for it to be a cultural thing.
You can certainly call it a horseshit and a casual racism if you'd like. However that's how things are in reality.
No, that's how things are in your reality, which is not necessarily anyone else's reality.
You've just perfectly described under-skilled, over-worked, under-paid H1b-style immigrants who get deported if they're fired. Not talented people working at the top of their game in finance, biotech, startups, etc.
When you're at the bottom of the pond everything looks like shit. You even said yourself they're fresh grads with very little experience. Dumbass.
I think the central claim about Chinese isn't that it's hard to speak; it's that it's hard to read and write. Although the wonderful article "Why Chinese is So Damn Hard" (http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html) does mention the lack of cognates and the difficulty of tonal languages, which are clearly a matter of perspective, there is little doubt that the Chinese writing system is more difficult than alphabets in absolute terms.
I took Chinese in college and the problem for me was the tones. If you don't grow up hearing them then they are very hard to pickup as an adult. The characters you an learn with effort. But the tone shifts just didn't register.
You're absolutely right. It's just that, at least in the case of isotope, most people wouldn't realize that "iso" and "tope" have meanings. They might notice that "iso" also occurs in "isolate" but probably wouldn't look much beyond that. The author's point is that the Chinese use simple, everyday words instead of archaic words from dead versions of languages.
From OP Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958 for 90% and 2377 for 99%.
Anyone know where I can get my hands on this list? This would help tremendously while learning chinese.
A language where a spoken word has completely different meanings depending on how hoarse you are that day can be a lot of things, but "simple" is not one of them, imho.
The author doesn't understand that most european words aren't just made up on the spot for new things, they are built with the same process as he describes for chinese: pick an existing term and adapt it for a new use, or pick several terms and join them up. Of course, you probably have to go back a few hundreds or thousands of years to get at the root of the thing.
otoh, I could say that the advantage of having a small non-meaningful alphabet is that you're not stuck with the symbolism of existing characters, so you're free to actually make words up if you want to.
The advantage of having a (for the most part) neutral tonal system in european languages combined with a small neutral system of characters, combined with the rich heritage of the small number of base languages that created all these languages (latin, greek, etc) and the freedom to synthesize words whenever appropriate is what is making english the lingua franca that it is, and what keeps all other (let's not say euro, but western) languages up there on the importance chart.
I wonder if it would be easy for chinese speakers to understand how western languages work if we say that each character in the latin alphabet is the equivalent of a single stroke in chinese...
Every language has its quirks and pluses; otherwise, it won' survive.
For Chinese vs English (or other alphabet-based languages) in term of semantic representation, the main distinction is semantic GRANULARITY of a base term. English has 26 alphabets as base term, which have no meaning. The 26 alphabets are combined to form words, which have meaning. When a new thing comes along, a brand new word has to be invented.
On the other hand, Chinese has couple thousands (or more) root words as base term that have meaning, which can be used by themselves alone or they can be combined as two-word or three-word phrase as new terms for things. The mixing of root words into new words happen in both Chinese and English. E.g. Firetruck comes from fire and truck, and provides some semantic description of what the term is. It's just that in Chinese, the word combination is the 95% of the language because of large root word set, while only a very small percentage in English due to the inconvenience of combining long words.
In Chinese is very easy and cheap to build new term (2-word or N-word phrase) to describe new thing and got accepted by other people since the semantic of the new term has strong relationship to its composing root words. As in English, firetruck is probably related to fire and truck. You won't call a firetruck as waterboat.
After two years studying Mandarin quite intensely I've stopped thinking of the language as "hard" and recognize that it just takes a long time to get where I want to go. Driving to the next big city is not hard but it does take longer than driving to the corner store.
Learning any language involves rewiring the brain and, for a westerner, learning Chinese involves a lot more of that rewiring because almost nothing from English is transferable. When I say 'rewiring' I mean coaxing my neurons to grow into a useful framework that someday will support that magical skill I posess in English of knowing exactly what people are saying and exactly what I want to say.
No amount of "hard work" is going to make that happen ... I can't force my neurons to develop no matter how hard I grit my teeth and study. It just takes repetition repetition repetition, immersion and lots and lots of time for those neural pathways to develop.
A language being highly synthetic is actually a liability in the case of non-delimited written languages (which is the case with Chinese and Thai, the latter of which I have some fluency).
While Thai is more logical in one sense (subway = electric vehicle under ground, transliterated: rotfaidaidin) trying to read a sentence with no separation between those words just adds to the confusion.
When most words in a language are combinations of other, complete words, it really raises the bar for being able to read something and get the gist of it, which is critical for moving on to true fluency.
Read Asia's Orthographic Dilemma by William Hannas. Apparently, not only is there a ridiculous number of symbols to learn, the dogma that all the spoken versions share the same written language is not true.
Also, writers commonly make up their own written forms of words on the fly, especially for technical and academic writing, so even an experienced reader is left struggling, trying to figure things out.
These are the books that taught me that Chinese writing is more usable and more adapted to the particular needs of the Chinese language than we in the West tend to believe. In particular, the phonetic element in Chinese characters is much more important than I imagined.
Also, while it is true that the road to fluent reading is much longer for the Chinese than for readers of phonemic scripts, this is partly compensated by the higher reading efficiency of fluent Chinese readers.
One way to look at Chinese writing is to see it as a highly defective phonemic writing system with semantic annotations. In other words, Chinese characters constitute a morphophonemic writing system, much like English (for/four/fore) but with a much stronger emphasis on the morphemic aspect.
I say, you european languages, using 26 or slightly more alphabets, you had a great chance to make your language simple and easy to learn, why do you make it so complicated?
Except, of course, most European languages are intermingled with other languages so intrinsically that they don't stand on their own.
Look in an English dictionary at how many times you see "from <some other language, like French>" in the source.
English itself is descended, as I recall from old German. It split off from Middle English and left Scots (The lowland language, not the Gaelic of the highlands) still looking and sounding much like Middle English well into modern times. Hell, American English shares a whole bunch of words from Scottish English which don't exist in "standard" English (such as Janitor, Pinkie, and I believe "Proven" is a quirk of "proved" which is specific to these two offshoots).
Core English itself is heavily influenced by French, which is descended from Latin. It has, especially for technical things, a huge amount of borrowings from Greek and Latin in and of itself.
Again, I can't speak for other European languages as apart from American English I only know some Scots & Irish Gaelic and had a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. But part of what made English a lingua franca was the willingness to take and borrow words from other languages. Why come up with a "Local" word for something when the other language's word will suffice? (I can't find examples of the words or remember how to spell them, but Scottish Gaelic in particular lately has been absorbing "Modern" words like Computer and Internet and applying a Gaelic-sounding inflection and spelling to them. Same word, just ... "Gaelicized")
Further, Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"? ... I'm taking a wild stab here, but the ability for European languages to absorb arbitrary new words that people come up with is part of what has led to such a flexible growth. It's frustrating for new learners to adapt to the language but the flexibility of the written word to introduce new concepts is astounding.
Yes, we could have called the Internet "Network-of-connected-computers" but coining a word for it made it somehow more concrete, and real.
In a "Hacker" context take an article from yesterday which talked about how Scala is not a better Java.
I'm paraphrasing from memory but the author argued that Java's beauty comes from it's simple structure, small list of keywords, etc etc.
Scala allows huge flexibility, defining your own keywords, internal DSLs and a lot of things.
Java has power in it's rigidity and stricture. Scala is incredibly flexible and adaptable. There are good things about both - but I can make Scala code read like prose (Oh god, I just had reminders of "Literate Programming") because I'm free to define new syntax that fits my needs.
_EDIT_: When I say a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America. I mean that I at one point had a fairly good knowledge of Spanish.
When I moved to Miami after high school (I grew up in Philadelphia - wasn't a lot of exposure to Spanish in the day-to-day at the time), I couldn't understand a word people were saying or vice versa. The syntax, accents, etc were so drastically different from what I was taught that I was lost. I've since more or less let my Spanish knowledge atrophy (I can remember how to conjugate but damned if I can remember much of the actual words/word roots).
This itself is actually an argument aside from my previous statements. I don't know much about Chinese but I'm curious as to how locality affects the language. Is syntax and accent so drastically different from one region to another so as to make two people practically unable to communicate?
English has cases like that - there are a variety of regional dialects where two native English speakers from distinct regions might swear neither was speaking English. I'm to understand that fragmentation is getting greater since England stopped pushing "Received Pronunciation" (An "official" way to pronounce words taught in schools up through at least WW2). I'm from Mid-Atlantic US which to me seems a fairly "neutral" accent (I have a few quirks of speech specific to my region of birth - I'll often pronounce Water as "wood-er" [whereas in NY where I now live it's "Watt-er] or Creek as "crick"]). But some Southern accents can be practically inscrutable. I won't even begin to go into trying to understand what the hell people from Canada are saying.
That was a false comparison in the borrowing words from other languages. The European languages are similar and thus make it easy to borrow from each other. When is the last time you see English borrow from Chinese straight stroke by stroke? The borrowing is usually at the phonetic level, which happen quite frequently in Chinese, borrowing foreign terms phonetically.
In your analogy of Java vs Scala, you got it reverse; may be not what you hope for. Java as small keyword set is English with 26 alphabet. Scala has large building set and can build DSL, that's Chinese.
Considering phonology... Mandarin Chinese has 400 syllabic sounds, each with 5 tonal choices (4 tones plus unstressed). English has 170,000 possible sounds (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Total_number_of_syllables_in_Engli...), each either stressed or unstressed. So the phonology of English seems more like Scala's in allowing symbols, not just alphanumerics, for names.
As for graphology... Chinese has 3000 commonly used characters, >50,000 counting all historic characters, compared to English's 54 (26 uppercase, 26 lowercase, hyphen, and apostrophe), so at first sight looks more varied. But most Chinese characters are made up of components, e.g. 蜱 being composed of 虫 and 卑 in a left-to-right pattern. Depending on how you count them, there are about 400 to 600 hundred of these components in all Chinese characters, including historic ones. It's better to compare 54 English tokens to 600 in Chinese, more but only 10 times more.
As for lexis... Last year English reached one million words, the most words in any known language (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5454273/1000000-wor...). Not sure how many 'words' Chinese has, but it seems until recently Chinese never defined the concept of 'word' in their language, only of 'character', so there's no (intra-word) morphology in Chinese, only (inter-word) syntax. So perhaps it's best to leave the comparison at the phonological level.
'Yes, we could have called the Internet "Network-of-connected-computers" but coining a word for it made it somehow more concrete, and real.'
Using a new words makes it less concrete, in the sense of not being tied to one specific definition. Our notion of what makes the Internet "The Internet" is broader than the hardware + protocol specs.
Much like the word 'hacker'. Were it coupled to, say, "person who uses computers for unintended purposes", we would have a hard time referring to gene-splicers or culture jammers as hackers. Even if you disagree that the current word should be applied in those cases, you at least easily pick up what the speaker intended to communicate, whereas a word that was literally its own rigid definition would fail.
My system dictionary has supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes.
it might be simple to say, and it might even be simple to understand, but it's freakin difficult as hell to read and write.
I think the author needs to expand more on how he defines simple. Being a native Chinese speaker, I can understand and say most things in Mandarin, but I still cannot read or write well. Even after years of Chinese School and years of my parents trying to make me learn, It's just too easy to forget once you stop using it.
The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn?
I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes.
"chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence of the word from the french word for "candlestick"