High speed Chinese

One of the blogs that I follow is that of Benny The Irish Polyglot, who does missions of learning various languages in three months. In fact, it was partially reading about Benny's experiences that made me decide there is no reason that I should stop at two or three languages. I am dubious of his latest mission, though.

Previously Benny has learned languages with an Latin based alphabet (various romance and Germanic languages, mostly), but now Benny has decided to take on Mandarin Chinese in Taipei. (I'll just refer to it as Chinese from now on.) Although I have a great respect for Benny, I think that he won't make it. The methods and techniques that he uses accelerate the pace of learning incredibly: he learns smarter, and he makes good use of his time. However, I think that the characters of Chinese are going to hold him back. I don't doubt that he will be able to get a decent conversation after three months of intensive work. Times have changed a lot since David Moser wrote Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, and now the dominance of pinyin over other romanization systems and the proliferation of excellent electronic dictionaries nullify a few of his points, but Moser's points about the writing system and the lack of cognates with European languages still hold true. (in fact, if you aren't very familiar with the Chinese language just skip my next two paragraphs and read Moser's article instead: it lays everything out very succinctly)

I agree generally with what is written on Hacking Chinese about Benny's Mandarin mission, that Benny won't succeed, but I have different reasons. Hacking Chinese lists the tones of Chinese and the lack of shared linguistic roots between Chinese and any European language as a point of difficulty, and I would claim that the tones aren't that hard, and the incredibly simple grammar makes up for the lack of shared vocabulary. I bet that I can describe a university in half a dozen European languages fairly easily (unibertsitateko, universitet, universitet, l'université, Universität, and università  in Basque, Bulgarian, Danish, French, German and Italian, according to Google Translator), where as the Chinese term cannot be mentally linked to a sound from any previously known language (assuming the learner has experience with languages which are not related to Chinese, such as is Benny's case). The Chinese terms (Dàxué or Xuéyuàn, depending on context and meaning) have no linguistic relation whatsoever to any previously known terms. In short, learning a language with shared heritage allows one to add on new vocabulary to pre-existing mental knowledge, but learning a language with no (or little, if you count proper names) shared vocabulary forces one to build from the ground up.

However, Chinese is very grammatically simple (no conjugations, no declensions, no grammatical gender), so that once one learns to say I eat a sandwich in Chinese, it is very simple to say will you eat a sandwich?, they ate sandwiches last week, or you (plural) probably didn't make any sandwiches, did you (plural)? Conversely, in any Romance, Slavic or German language saying these phrases would require learning several different morphological rules, so that one could change form of the words to express the desired meaning correctly. To stop being hypothetical and to get a bit more concrete, I will take Spanish as an example: to describe eating in Spanish, one needs to be able to use half a dozen different forms of the verb comer, plus another half a dozen to describe it in the future, another 16 or so forms to describe it in the past, plus another headache full of forms to describe hypothetical or unknown situations. As a regular verb, this is not an insurmountable challenge: there is a pattern, and some forms are repeated and built upon others, but it is a decent example to describe the grammatical simplicity of Chinese: one need only know a single sound (chī) to describe any eating that is going on, in any time period, tense, or mood. Even just speaking in the present tense with a regular verb, ignoring gender and mood, a learner of a Romance language would need to learn 12 bits of information (6 pronouns and 6 verb forms), where as a learner of Chinese would only need to learn 5: first (我), second (你), and third person (他), the plural marker (们), plus the verb (吃). Anyone who has studied both Chinese and a language that conjugates verbs knows how many headaches are prevented by the grammatical simplicity of Chinese. And I haven't even learned the declensions of German or the grammatical titanic of Russian. Compared to those Chinese looks even simpler!

Benny is no amateur, and I think that he will exploit the grammatical simplicity of Chinese to zoom along in conversational ability, and although I have my doubts of him reaching a level equivalent with C1, I have no doubts that he will be able to converse. He also wants to be able to read, though, and I think that this is what will prevent his from achieving his goals. Lacking reliable phonetic markers, learning to read and write (even via computer or text message, since recognition and selection is required) Chinese is an exercise in rote memorization (and in patience). There are strategies to make it better (mnemonics and Anki, for example), but it is still more difficult to learn 1500 characters of Chinese than 20-30 letters of a Romance, Germanic or Slavic alphabet. I predict that Benny will succeed in his conversational goals, and that he will fail in his reading goals such as reading newspaper headlines or menus. I consider myself to speak Mandarin Chinese at a strong conversational level, and there are still plenty of newspaper headlines that I cannot understand. I am cheering for him, though!