I'm now about four or five weeks into the first term of what can possibly be my last year at Stanford, but the eventfulness or uneventfulness of this one of the last few terms of my undergraduate career shall be reserved for a more opportune moment. For now, I want to talk a little bit about a foreigner's observations about English. Before I start though, I want to clarify that I love English a lot and let's face it, English is probably going to remain the language I'm most expressive in for the rest of my life as well.
My obsession with Sinitic languages continues and so, this term I am taking a class on the structure of Modern Chinese. As expected, the professor is Chinese, and so has learnt English as a foreign language, and since we talk about language so much in the class, it is inevitable that comparisons frequently get drawn between English and Chinese (Mandarin Chinese, for the purposes of this entry.) And sometimes I feel that the class name should be altered slightly from "The Structure of Modern Chinese" to "How Modern Chinese totally kicks Modern English's Ass, 'cause Modern Chinese is Fantastic" because the professor can occasionally go on endlessly about how certain things in English just don't make sense (His latest one is "How do 'put', 'up' and 'with' have anything to do with 'put up with' which means 'to tolerate'?") Truly, even though I feel his comments are always a little off topic, they do have some reasoning to them, and even if they don't really teach me anything too useful, they are interesting factoids about a language whose lexicon, grammar and idiosyncrasies I have rarely given much thought to.
The Chinese people have had a history of using ridiculously terse language, with Classical Chinese's syllables-to-meaning ratio unparalleled by any language I know of, and Modern Chinese comes in at a close second on my list. Whenever you want to introduce someone to Chinese grammar, you first have to introduce that person to what all Chinese grammar does not have, and this list includes: conjugational inflections, adjectival/adverbial agreement, plurals, gender and tense. Or, at least, that's all I could think of off the top of my head. So, this professor of mine argues as to why English also can't be the same way. If Chinese people manage to get along perfectly well without all those language features and still communicate just as well as any other people, why are other languages so complicated in this respect?
For example, if you have grown up speaking Chinese, you will wonder why English has this almost fanatical obsession with having a subject for every sentence. For example, take a sentence like "I should go to sleep", which is not only a perfectly good sentence but also a very natural one. The same sentence translated in the most natural way into Chinese would be "gāi shuìjiào le", which translates word-by-word to "Should sleep le", where "le" is a marker that conveys any of change in situation, when it is placed at the end of a sentence. English, as you saw, had the subject "I" in the sentence, while the Chinese didn't require it. Sure, English was more wordy in other senses but the sentence can be shortened down to "I should sleep" if one wishes. The "I", however, is fundamentally necessary. If someone said "Should sleep" out of the blue to me, I'd think the sentence sounded a bit incomplete.
Another example of English's determination to have a subject is sentences like "It is raining" and "There is a car outside". First of all, what baffles most foreign learners is "it". Most of them, after having learned English for years, still can't get over the "it" and wonder what the hell it refers to. I, certainly, don't think of anything in particular as being the "it" when I say "It's raining" or "It's hot outside". I just say it. It's part of the construction. In the end, I feel it stems from English's obsession with having a concrete subject at the beginning of every sentence. The Chinese would say "Xià yǔ" ("Falls rain") instead of "It's raining", "Tiānqì hěn rè" ("Weather very hot") instead of "It's hot" and "Wàimiàn yǒu chē" ("Outside has car") instead of "There is a car outside". Many English speakers these days also tend to mess up and say "There's five cars" instead of "There're five cars", and both forms are accepted in colloquial speech. This points to the fact that "There is/are" has become such a set phrase that 'there' is no longer looked upon as the 'subject' of the sentence.
And that's just the beginning. You don't have plurals in Chinese, so "shū" could mean both "book" and "books". So, it baffles my professor why one needs to add the 's' at the end of 'book' when "five book" leaves no ambiguity in the fact that there are five books. And if you say a sentence like "Book are expensive these days", you'll note that 'book' doesn't agree with 'are', so it sounds awkward. But, if it's a matter of pure communication, there are no two meanings you can interpret from this. It is clear that the sentence is simply "Books are expensive these days".
Then you can take it to the next step and question why the verb 'to be' needs to be conjugated. This concept of conjugation is completely alien to a Chinese person. For them, the most natural sentence would be "Book be expensive these days". Since no particular book was pointed out, it's obvious that books in general are expensive.
Then there's also the thing about "pointing things out" which leads me to the topic of articles, such as 'a', 'an' and 'the'. Let's not even talk about the fact that there are two articles 'a' and 'an' simply because it's unfashionable to say "a umbrella", why in the world would you need 'the'? I know that some people reading this might know Hindi, and so you can relate to the fact that Hindi doesn't need 'a' or 'the' either. The context makes it pretty darned clear whether you're talking about a particular thing or a thing in general. And you'll see that if you want to draw attention to a particular thing, you can use the word for 'that' in English, Hindi and Chinese. "The car is parked" would go into Hindi and Chinese as "That car is parked" and "A car is parked" would go as "One car is parked". So, the reason as to why English and many other European languages need articles is a mystery to many foreign learners. Unsurprisingly, they mess it up quite often as well.
Then there's pronouns and their myriad complex uses. For example "I drive a car", "That is my car", "The car is mine" and "Give the car to me" all involve the person 'I' and yet they all have a different form of the pronoun. In Chinese, they'd go "Wǒ kāi chē", "Nà ge chē shì wǒ de", "Chē shì wǒ de" and "Gěi wǒ nà ge chē". In Chinese, all the four sentences have the same form for 'I', i.e., 'Wǒ'. The same thing goes for 'you', 'he', 'she' and 'they'. I have to note that even many native English speakers get confused about the conjugation of certain sentences, such as "It's me" or "It's I"? "My friends and me went to dinner" or "My friends and I went to dinner"? Unsurprisingly, both are accepted forms, the former more accepted in colloquial speech and the latter in formal speech.
Another thing with pronouns, besides conjugation is why English differentiates between the pronouns for humans and non-humans. For example, "It is ugly" can never refer to a person (unless derogatory), while Hindi and Chinese both use the same pronouns for 'It' and 'He/She' ('Vo' in Hindi and 'Tā' in Chinese.) Interestingly, in spoken Chinese, there is also no differentiation at all between 'He', 'She' and 'It', just as there isn't in Hindi. Context makes it all so clear that native speakers might not even notice this.
Then of course there's also tense. I don't think there's any native English speaker that hasn't written a story or an essay in which he discovered half way through that the tense he had chosen for the starting line somehow shifted from the past tense to the present tense or past perfect tense by the end of the paragraph. Then the author invariably has to pick one or the other and go back to change the entire paragraph such that it has the same tense and everything matches up. In Chinese, there is no tense! How do they tell when something happened, is happening or will happen? Let's take the example "She went to the market yesterday". If you change it to "She go to the market yesterday", does that change the meaning at all? No. And that's how you would say it in Chinese. In fact, there exists a particle in Chinese which can be added after a verb to show that the action has completed, but in sentences in which a time word has been mentioned, that particle is optional. So, for example, one could say "Zuótiān, tā qù le shāngchǎng" or "Zuótiān, tā qù shāngchǎng" and they would both mean the same. The 'le' is the "completion marker". However, this 'le' is not a "tense marker" because it means the action has been completed; however, it could have completed in the past, present or future. For example, "Míngtiān, tā xià le kè, jiù qù kàn yīshēng", which is "Tomorrow, as soon as she is done with class, she will go to see the doctor". Here 'le' is used in the future 'tense'. So, there are no 'be', 'am', 'is', 'are', 'was' and 'were'. It's all one word. And no 'go', 'goes' and 'went' either.
In short, even though English is nowhere near losing all of its various grammatical idiosyncrasies (and I don't think I even scratched the surface), the take-home lesson for now is that Chinese is a ridiculously easy language to learn for a foreign learner, while English is the exact opposite.
My obsession with Sinitic languages continues and so, this term I am taking a class on the structure of Modern Chinese. As expected, the professor is Chinese, and so has learnt English as a foreign language, and since we talk about language so much in the class, it is inevitable that comparisons frequently get drawn between English and Chinese (Mandarin Chinese, for the purposes of this entry.) And sometimes I feel that the class name should be altered slightly from "The Structure of Modern Chinese" to "How Modern Chinese totally kicks Modern English's Ass, 'cause Modern Chinese is Fantastic" because the professor can occasionally go on endlessly about how certain things in English just don't make sense (His latest one is "How do 'put', 'up' and 'with' have anything to do with 'put up with' which means 'to tolerate'?") Truly, even though I feel his comments are always a little off topic, they do have some reasoning to them, and even if they don't really teach me anything too useful, they are interesting factoids about a language whose lexicon, grammar and idiosyncrasies I have rarely given much thought to.
The Chinese people have had a history of using ridiculously terse language, with Classical Chinese's syllables-to-meaning ratio unparalleled by any language I know of, and Modern Chinese comes in at a close second on my list. Whenever you want to introduce someone to Chinese grammar, you first have to introduce that person to what all Chinese grammar does not have, and this list includes: conjugational inflections, adjectival/adverbial agreement, plurals, gender and tense. Or, at least, that's all I could think of off the top of my head. So, this professor of mine argues as to why English also can't be the same way. If Chinese people manage to get along perfectly well without all those language features and still communicate just as well as any other people, why are other languages so complicated in this respect?
For example, if you have grown up speaking Chinese, you will wonder why English has this almost fanatical obsession with having a subject for every sentence. For example, take a sentence like "I should go to sleep", which is not only a perfectly good sentence but also a very natural one. The same sentence translated in the most natural way into Chinese would be "gāi shuìjiào le", which translates word-by-word to "Should sleep le", where "le" is a marker that conveys any of change in situation, when it is placed at the end of a sentence. English, as you saw, had the subject "I" in the sentence, while the Chinese didn't require it. Sure, English was more wordy in other senses but the sentence can be shortened down to "I should sleep" if one wishes. The "I", however, is fundamentally necessary. If someone said "Should sleep" out of the blue to me, I'd think the sentence sounded a bit incomplete.
Another example of English's determination to have a subject is sentences like "It is raining" and "There is a car outside". First of all, what baffles most foreign learners is "it". Most of them, after having learned English for years, still can't get over the "it" and wonder what the hell it refers to. I, certainly, don't think of anything in particular as being the "it" when I say "It's raining" or "It's hot outside". I just say it. It's part of the construction. In the end, I feel it stems from English's obsession with having a concrete subject at the beginning of every sentence. The Chinese would say "Xià yǔ" ("Falls rain") instead of "It's raining", "Tiānqì hěn rè" ("Weather very hot") instead of "It's hot" and "Wàimiàn yǒu chē" ("Outside has car") instead of "There is a car outside". Many English speakers these days also tend to mess up and say "There's five cars" instead of "There're five cars", and both forms are accepted in colloquial speech. This points to the fact that "There is/are" has become such a set phrase that 'there' is no longer looked upon as the 'subject' of the sentence.
And that's just the beginning. You don't have plurals in Chinese, so "shū" could mean both "book" and "books". So, it baffles my professor why one needs to add the 's' at the end of 'book' when "five book" leaves no ambiguity in the fact that there are five books. And if you say a sentence like "Book are expensive these days", you'll note that 'book' doesn't agree with 'are', so it sounds awkward. But, if it's a matter of pure communication, there are no two meanings you can interpret from this. It is clear that the sentence is simply "Books are expensive these days".
Then you can take it to the next step and question why the verb 'to be' needs to be conjugated. This concept of conjugation is completely alien to a Chinese person. For them, the most natural sentence would be "Book be expensive these days". Since no particular book was pointed out, it's obvious that books in general are expensive.
Then there's also the thing about "pointing things out" which leads me to the topic of articles, such as 'a', 'an' and 'the'. Let's not even talk about the fact that there are two articles 'a' and 'an' simply because it's unfashionable to say "a umbrella", why in the world would you need 'the'? I know that some people reading this might know Hindi, and so you can relate to the fact that Hindi doesn't need 'a' or 'the' either. The context makes it pretty darned clear whether you're talking about a particular thing or a thing in general. And you'll see that if you want to draw attention to a particular thing, you can use the word for 'that' in English, Hindi and Chinese. "The car is parked" would go into Hindi and Chinese as "That car is parked" and "A car is parked" would go as "One car is parked". So, the reason as to why English and many other European languages need articles is a mystery to many foreign learners. Unsurprisingly, they mess it up quite often as well.
Then there's pronouns and their myriad complex uses. For example "I drive a car", "That is my car", "The car is mine" and "Give the car to me" all involve the person 'I' and yet they all have a different form of the pronoun. In Chinese, they'd go "Wǒ kāi chē", "Nà ge chē shì wǒ de", "Chē shì wǒ de" and "Gěi wǒ nà ge chē". In Chinese, all the four sentences have the same form for 'I', i.e., 'Wǒ'. The same thing goes for 'you', 'he', 'she' and 'they'. I have to note that even many native English speakers get confused about the conjugation of certain sentences, such as "It's me" or "It's I"? "My friends and me went to dinner" or "My friends and I went to dinner"? Unsurprisingly, both are accepted forms, the former more accepted in colloquial speech and the latter in formal speech.
Another thing with pronouns, besides conjugation is why English differentiates between the pronouns for humans and non-humans. For example, "It is ugly" can never refer to a person (unless derogatory), while Hindi and Chinese both use the same pronouns for 'It' and 'He/She' ('Vo' in Hindi and 'Tā' in Chinese.) Interestingly, in spoken Chinese, there is also no differentiation at all between 'He', 'She' and 'It', just as there isn't in Hindi. Context makes it all so clear that native speakers might not even notice this.
Then of course there's also tense. I don't think there's any native English speaker that hasn't written a story or an essay in which he discovered half way through that the tense he had chosen for the starting line somehow shifted from the past tense to the present tense or past perfect tense by the end of the paragraph. Then the author invariably has to pick one or the other and go back to change the entire paragraph such that it has the same tense and everything matches up. In Chinese, there is no tense! How do they tell when something happened, is happening or will happen? Let's take the example "She went to the market yesterday". If you change it to "She go to the market yesterday", does that change the meaning at all? No. And that's how you would say it in Chinese. In fact, there exists a particle in Chinese which can be added after a verb to show that the action has completed, but in sentences in which a time word has been mentioned, that particle is optional. So, for example, one could say "Zuótiān, tā qù le shāngchǎng" or "Zuótiān, tā qù shāngchǎng" and they would both mean the same. The 'le' is the "completion marker". However, this 'le' is not a "tense marker" because it means the action has been completed; however, it could have completed in the past, present or future. For example, "Míngtiān, tā xià le kè, jiù qù kàn yīshēng", which is "Tomorrow, as soon as she is done with class, she will go to see the doctor". Here 'le' is used in the future 'tense'. So, there are no 'be', 'am', 'is', 'are', 'was' and 'were'. It's all one word. And no 'go', 'goes' and 'went' either.
In short, even though English is nowhere near losing all of its various grammatical idiosyncrasies (and I don't think I even scratched the surface), the take-home lesson for now is that Chinese is a ridiculously easy language to learn for a foreign learner, while English is the exact opposite.
Labels: English
7 comments
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Criticism of English is something up with which I will not put.
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Also, while Chinese might be incredibly easy to learn grammatically – since, well, what grammar does it have? – that doesn’t help Westerners trying to learn the ideographic writing system or the very concept of tones.
So your arguments boil down to the fact that, yes, Chinglish is very easy. ;^) -
I share your sentiment about the Chinese writing system, in that it is extremely difficult to learn, and is viewed by many to be quite impractical and a hindrance to both native and foreign learners of the language. However, do note that I have written perfectly acceptable Chinese sentences in this post without a single one of these "ideographic" characters and without any ambiguity in meaning.
As to your comment about tones, they are a language feature unique to some of these East Asian languages and yes, they do take getting used to. But then again, if you learn Hindi, you suddenly have to distinguish four T sounds that you never knew existed or four D sounds, along with long and short vowels. All this is just the phonology of the given language and, in learning most foreign languages, the phonology is the initial and most difficult step. However, the structure of the language is a completely different topic and it was the structure that was my primary focus in this post. -
This post has been removed by the author.
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Great entry! This entry made me think about how we love words in the English language compared to Chinese where structure often relies on directness and simplicity. Our highest income earners and socialites include lawyers, consultants, and politicians, whose eloquence over words is probably the most important piece of their economic success. These members of our society embrace the fact that communicating in English is a complex exercise full of nuances. As Americans, we think of math and reading, analytic thought and it's expression, as roughly equal priorities when we talk about educating our children. Could this explain why we prioritize different sorts of knowledge differently in societies as different as China and the West? I agree that a shorter solution is often elegant, but is it truer for geometry than for the spoken word? Perhaps, being verbose makes it possible to achieve in English what can't be achieved in a terse language such as Chinese. Right now, I'm not convinced either way. How do you think the terse structure of Chinese affects being tactful or being able to weigh one's words carefully to convey the right tone and meaning especially when conveying a reality that's difficult to absorb or react positively to for the listener?
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I thought you were busy with CS140?
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I think the difficulty is more that you have to learn language features so different than those of your native language. For those of us who grew up knowing (to some extent) a tonal language, things like tones don’t really trip us up. Similarly, you wouldn’t find it hard to pick up another language’s retroflex consonants, since Hindi is so abundant in them, but most others would.
So I don’t think the issue is that English or Chinese is difficult in an absolute sense. Whenever someone learns their second language, they have to learn certain skills, like circumlocution and metacognition, that likely haven’t come up since early childhood. If it’s an English speaker learning a Romance language, they have to relearn conjugation. A polyglot who dabbles in a diverse array of languages probably wouldn’t find learning English, Chinese, or Latin to be more difficult than the others.
I often sell people on learning Vietnamese by telling them there’s no conjugation (tense, person) and no declension (case, number, gender), and any word can be any part of speech as-is. What I don’t tell them is that pronouns in Vietnamese are diverse beyond disbelief, and that the /ng/ sound is notorious for Westerners. Every language has its rough spots.
There are quite a few Vietnamese words and expressions for which I don’t know the English equivalent, and English is my native tongue. That’s why I feel sorry for someone who knows only one language: they’re missing out.
