PS. Let me know when you plan to come to China to pay me that beer…

I’m a student of mandarin living in Australia. The scale of the difficulty of learning the language is quite impressive and never more evident than when I took a year of night classes. The classes got smaller and smaller and eventually they didn’t have enough to continue. The reason, I think, isn’t just difficulty it’s because of a lack of perception of any real progress. That’s something I feel quite intently.

My eyebrows raised at Uln’s earlier claim that one needed three rather tall orders to acquire functional Mandarin. Bag loads of talent and motivation, years of full-time study and then a decade of full immersion.

I don’t really accept that. I can’t accept that, how could I? In fact I’ve made the decision to pack in my very nicely paying job and go back to university full time to study Chinese (and other stuff). I am, however, under zero illusions that the Chinese language component will serve me well enough, I’ll put at least as much effort into it outside of classes and assignments as I do now.

Why do it? Why beat your head against such an incredible obstacle of learning because lord knows there’s not really any good career reason for that. I could become a doctor more easily than I could learn Chinese. Conversely our country has thousands of native Mandarin speaking Australian citizens. So what real value in having a white guy that speaks Chinese?

Well, I’ve only really got one explanation. I like hard things and this literally is the hardest thing I can think of doing intellectually. Furthermore I have an interest in the region, culture, politics and some other motivations around the believe that Australia needs to better understand China and how it can help our industry.

Thankfully, mercifully, learning Chinese is actually fun. In particular I’m utterly captivated by chengyu. The language is so different that I find myself seeing a different way of looking at things, Chinese seems to encapsulate more than a language.

I don’t have supernatural talent (but to be fair I’m a career communicator), I don’t have a knack for learning languages, and I don’t really think I’m inclined to live in China for ten years either. Or probably ever. So really what you’re saying is I have no chance of speaking functional Chinese.

Well, I see that as a challenge. So one day, some years down the track, lets meet up and you can judge for yourself.

The only basis I have for this bold optimism is that I think you’ve overlooked one important aid to learning. The sheer invigorating capacity of finding an endeavor genuinely fascinating. It’s not much, maybe, but I’m clinging to it just the same.

P.S. Lets really up the anti and slap down a wager of one beer. Got to give me something to think about eh?

Whilst I’m at it I’ve always thought the Chinese language to be actually quite a joy to learn, first and foremost because it has incredibly simple grammar. Unfortunately for me Japanese comes with complete with the usual compliment of irregulars, conjugation and everything else which made high-school French such a snooze-fest!

But back to the language loans: you are right, loans are an essential part in the evolution of most languages. They only sound weird when they are pronounced in a foreign accent, but once they are adopted they become as 地道（authentic）as anything else. The majority of Chinese don’t even realize that 咖啡 (coffee) or 社会 (society) are loans, just as English don’t realize for typhoon.

Twitter thing, you are right.The convenience of recording offset by the difficulty.(Or did it?yes,, it did i guess,yes, definitely, i usually type 拼音，so that’s like , 1 字= 3 or more letters, so that’s the catch!)

Another note, in the book i mentioned above, the writers mocks how japanese “kiss the cold ass of english with a hot face”(didn’t know origin) by loaning alot words from it without digesting.I laughed.I don’t have a problem if chinese does the same thing.(or did I?..)And I noticed news words popping up where i was in college, like “销品茂“ as never before, do you know what’s that?

Nice post, always browsing with a joy

But that’s not the point, Putonghua exists, its carefully defined, and everyone’s supposed to know it. It takes very much of its vocabulary from Classical Chinese, and you’re supposed to know that too if you want to sound educated. If you want to sound local you can study the local dialect of your choice (Beijing is the most respected) but thats up to your talent and interest.

Most of the vocabulary in romance languages was imported by the church in the Low Middle Ages wholesale from Latin, and now people don’t even know that. Of course you could argue Chinese classicism is a bit deeper than European, but not that much. All standard languages are artificial to one extent; even low-lives and prostitutes use latin church vocabulary or classical chinese or whatever.

Regarding the efficiency of characters, Twitter, and all that. It is a very interesting topic, and I will write about that soon. But it is a bit different to this post. And in any case, whatever the efficiency of the characters (for example to display more information per cm2 of paper) are completely offset by the difficulty of learning them and all the other aspects mentioned above.