Learning Chinese: A Professor’s View (News)
“Washington Post, March 14, 2006
Chinese is harder to learn than Western languages partly because Chinese characters, of which an educated person needs to know at least 3,000, are much more complex than Western alphabets…”
Complete article archived here in .pdf format. (To view, you can download Adobe Reader for free).
April 29th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
The writer of this article makes some good observations in comparing tones between the English and Chinese languages… such as the rising tone “what?” (second tone in Mandarin Chinese) and the falling tone “no!” (fourth tone in Mandarin Chinese).
Though he makes some presumptions on who a “Westerner” really is. I, for example, am a Westerner… I was born and raised in the U.S… but I am bi-lingual. Not everyone is of the mainstream uni-lingual, Latin-based language-speaking (e.g. English) variety.
Having said that, when the writer says that “Chinese is harder to learn” for Westerners… I agree that it MAY be for those mainstream English-only speakers who have limited exposure to tones. But I fundamentally don’t believe it is for those Westerners (such as myself) who are bilingual in another tonal language (such as Vietnamese, Norwegian, Thai, etc.)