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THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

Many Kiwis think that Chinese is so hard to learn that, unless you are born Chinese, there is no point in even trying. Some educational managers and decision-makers think that Chinese is so hard that it shouldn't even be introduced into our schools except for the brightest of pupils.

Among the things they have heard and actually even believe are:

1. Chinese is a tonal language, so that if you don't have a musical ear, you will never be able to master the language. This assumes that all Chinese are musical, and that there is not a single Chinese who is tone-deaf! It also seems to imply that you don't have to pay any attention to intonation if you want to speak English well, or French, German or any other European language, for that matter!
2. The Chinese script is non-alphabetic, and so you have to learn hundreds of thousands of pictures, each of which tells a story, before you can read even a simple text in Chinese. So that if you don't draw very well or don't have a memory big enough to hold all these picture stories, it will take you a lifetime to learn the language!

3. Chinese is not just one language but a whole lot of different languages, as distinct from one another as French and German so that even if you succeed in learning one of them, such as "Mandarin" for instance, you still won't be understand any of the other ones, such as Cantonese!

These conclusions are quite false!

But false ideas like these have been spread, are are still being spread in our English-speaking media by journalists, reporters and even academics who seem to know little or nothing about Chinese, and have probably never made any serious effort to learn it.

As Alexander Pope said:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing!"

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This page last reviesed: 8 December, 2000