'7 Conclusion

No living language can be learned without effort, and Chinese is no exception. Similarly, there is no such thing as a living language which is incapable of being learned by any but a gifted few, and once again, Chinese is no exception. This is clear from the mere fact that Chinese is the single language used by the largest social grouping in the world as their mother tongue. The question that we are led to ask is how and why so much misinformation and so many misunderstandings and misconceptions about the Chinese language came about in the first place; and why, in spite of having been refuted by scholars for so long, they persist and continue to be spread to this very day.

The answer may not be a simple one. But what does seems certain is that they have been spread not only by writers who know little about the language, but also some authors whose knowledge of the language is considerable. It is perhaps understandable that those with an inadequate knowledge of the language can be led to wrong conclusions, especially if they have never read Alexander Pope=s warning that Aa little knowledge is a dangerous thing!@ This little knowledge has resulted in European authors such as Stephen Keeler, whose Passport to China has already been quoted above, writing that:

"The 26 letters of the Roman alphabet represent sound, not ideas. They produce millions of words in hundreds of languages. They are also easier to remember than 10,000 Chinese characters.@

Surely he and others like him cannot really believe, knowing just the 26 letters of the alphabet is enough to enable one to read English, Spanish, or French, without first learning the hundreds of thousands of words that are made up from these 26 letters. Any linguistics expert writing on German who had only the most rudimentary knowledge of German would not be taken seriously, yet anyone with a smattering of Chinese can, it seems, be accepted as an instant expert at the drop of a hat. Moreover, such writers can justify their ignorance, by claiming that it is not worth spending precious time and effort on trying to learn such an impossibly difficult language.

Unfortunately, the myths about Chinese have been spread not only by relatively ignorant popularisers, but also by reputable and knowledgeable scholars, and one can only wonder why. For instance, while it is factually correct to say that there are over 50,000 characters in existence, it is certainly wrong to say that these constitute the writing system and so imply that all 50,000 or more of the characters have to be learned before literacy can be attained. Who would expect an English learner to learn the whole of the Oxford Dictionary! The alleged difficulty of Chinese has become such an established fact that the French will even say AIt=s all Chinese!@ where an English-speaker would exclaim that Ait was all Greek to him.@ By grossly exaggerating the alleged difficulty of Chinese, such scholars have succeeded in putting off many of those who might otherwise seek to master the language.

Although false ideas about the Chinese language continue to be spread to this day, Huc, in The Chinese Empire, as early as 1855, after pointing out many of the false ideas current about the language, wrote:

AThe Chinese characters amount to thirty or forty thousand in the Chinese dictionaries; but two-thirds of these are seldom used, and by cutting off the synonyms, five or six thousand characters would amply suffice to understand all original texts.@

He also pointed out that it was wrong to say that Chinese writing was purely ideographic, for, he explained:

AIt is ideographic and phonetic at the same time, and philologists have found out that Chinese may be learned as easily as other foreign languages.@

Even earlier, in 1840, Sir John Davis, the first governor of Hong Kong wrote:

AThe rumoured difficulties attendant on the acquisition of Chinese, from the great number and variety of characters, are the mere exaggerations of ignorance, and are so far mischievous as they are calculated to deter many from the pursuit, whose business takes them to the country, and would no doubt be greatly promoted by some practical acquaintance with its language.@

And still earlier, in 1794, Lord Macartney wrote:

AAs to the great difficulty of learning Chinese.. I am persuaded that it is much exaggerated. Sir George Staunton=s son, a boy of twelve years old, learned, in a few broken lessons from a very cross Master, and by his own attention, not only to understand others when he arrived in China, but acquired such a facility within writing the Chinese character that he copied all our diplomatic papers for the Chinese government.@

Unfortunately, the words, of Macartney, Davis, Huc and others have been ignored for some two hundred years, and continue to be disregarded to this day. Why? C it is difficult to understand. This is a question that requires further research.

In 1965, R.A.D. Forrest was moved to write:

AThe neglect of Far Eastern languages, had it remained a merely negative phenomenon would have been regrettable enough... But positive mischief has resulted... and where accurate knowledge fails we get statements (in works from which we have the right to expect better things) which are misleading, when not definitely false.@

Some NZ students of Chinese, questioned at the end of a year's study on their reaction to learning Chinese, explained, that they had thought, from their initial reading, that it was going to be a tremendous task, requiring an enormous amount of very hard work. However, they had been prepared to take the task on, because of their long-term goals. To their surprise, however, they had soon found that the grammar was remarkably simple, the word-building extremely logical, and the learning of intonation was not nearly as difficult as they had been led to believe. Even the learning the characters, once they got over the initial hurdle and could see how the system actually worked, had proved to be not difficult, so much as time-consuming. Although Chinese is as unique as every other language, it is not uniquely difficult.

It is not true, for instance, that French or German are easier than Chinese. This may be the case for an English-speaker, who shares a similar linguistic background, and a common cultural background with French and German-speakers through their common Judaeo-Greco-Roman heritage, but it is not true for a Japanese-speaker who shares not only a vast written vocabulary with the Chinese, but also a common background in thought and culture. The difficulty of a language does not come from the nature of the language, but from the background of the learner, and the learner=s experience with other languages, and his access to education and competent teaching. While Chinese has its difficulties, they are not worse than those of other languages, but simply different. Moreover, they are compensated for by other aspects of the language such as its simple grammatical structure, making the language comparatively easy for beginners to grasp. And so, Chinese can be learned in the same way as any other language, namely, by hard work and effort.

Bibliography

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This page last revised: 27th December, 2000