CHINESE IS NOT THE LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE

1. Improvise

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1. Difficulties of learning Chinese as a student

It is fact that there is a increasing number of students that

start to learn Chinese, but it is also true that Chinese is
considered as one of the most difficult languages in the
world. Therefore, this students will came across with many
problems and probably most of them never achieve an
intermediate level of Chinese language.

 The Chinese writing system is much more difficult

to learn because they do not use an alphabetical
system of writing. There are two ways of writing:
“pinyin” (that is basically the pronunciation of the
word) and “Hanzi” (the well-known Chinese
characters). Both of them are essential when you learn
the language but most of the times the same character
has different “pinyin” and the same “pinyin” can be
written with many characters and have completely
different meaning. To make clear this point, I would like
to show you a Chinese poem.

Here we have the poem written in Hanzi, using Chinese

characters. However, this is the “pinyin” and therefore,
the pronunciation of the poem. Just to show you that this
poem has complete sense and they are not just random
characters with similar pronunciation, this is the
translation of the poem in English.

 Another difficulty that Chinese presents is that it is

hard to learn enough number of characters to
become functionally literate. It is said that you just
 need to memorise around 3,000 characters in order to
read. It is true that, when you look at the character
frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any
newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most
common characters. However, there are still plenty of
unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters.
In other words, in English, knowing the words “up” and
“tight” does not mean you know the word “upright”.
And in Chinese, most of the words are compounds and
the meaning is not always predictable.

 Moreover, the writing is not phonetic, you cannot

guess how a word is written if you have never seen it
written. So Chinese writing is based on memory, which
is not infallible. In fact, Chinese people forget how to
write certain characters, even common words.

 The writing is not the only difficulty when learning this

language. The pronunciation of all this characters is
tonal. That means that each vowel has 4 different
tones, 4 different ways of pronunciation. Consequently,
we have 20 vowels that are slightly different between
them and almost impossible to distinguish for non
native speakers.

For example, the word shi1 is the verb “to be” and shi4 is
the number 10. They practically sound the same and that
subtle difference is even less obvious in a sentence.

Furthermore, the tones can change when they are in a

specific order. The word ni3, that means you is pronounced
with the third tone. However, when the the third tone is
followed by another word in the third tone, for example
hao3. It is pronounced as ni2, second tone. But at the same
time ni2 means a Buddhist monk.

2. Question

To finish, I have a question for our adversaries: Do you think

that a language which is so easily misunderstood because of
slightly different pronunciation and has one of the word’s
most complex writing systems is going to become the
language of the future?