Some Interesting Facts About Learning a Foreign Language

Article One - Good Learner Characteristics:

Article Two- A Language That Is Radically Different

Article Three - Chinese Characters-Why Are They Written That Way?

Article Four - Writing Without Spelling

Article Five - Do You Want to Learn a Foreign Language?

Article One - Good Learner Characteristics

If you possess all or some of the following characteristics, you will be able to master any foreign language quickly:

  

 

Mario, who works as an interpreter in Brussels, speaks nine languages fluently.  How is he able to do this?   He keeps each language lively and fluent by ¡°talking¡± to an imaginary Martian on his shoulder and explaining everything in sight to this inquisitive alien, switching languages frequently.  This conforms to the Good Learner Characteristics list --a personal style or learning strategy, an ordered and separate reference system, and learning to think in it.  For nine languages it is probably a must if you are not to become hopelessly mixed.

 

At SpeakChineseInWeeks, we teach techniques as much as language.  Technically, no one can teach you a language, just as no one can teach you to bicycle.  You LEARN to bicycle by falling down and then getting up, and in this same way you¡¯ll LEARN to speak Chinese.  We stimulate learning and encourage errors.  The faster you fail, the faster you learn.  If you are not learning, you aren¡¯t failing fast enough.

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Article Two - A Language That Is Radically Different

INSTEAD of simply learning twenty-six letters as in the English alphabet, how would you like to memorize thousands of picturelike characters? How would you like to write a letter, not by typing at speeds of fifty to eighty words per minute, but by laboriously drawing each character by hand? This is part of learning Chinese, both written and spoken.

Chinese is reputedly one of the oldest languages in the world, and perhaps the most difficult. The difficulty lies mainly in the fact that the Chinese language does not have an alphabet. Instead, it has thousands of different characters. While a standard dictionary for high school students may contain only about 10,000 characters, a comprehensive dictionary contains over 40,000. However, it is generally estimated that if a person knows from 3,000 to 4,000 characters, he should do reasonably well in reading publications of general interest.

Characters are the basic units or symbols of the written language and are all monosyllabic. While each has its own meaning, two or more characters may be combined to form new words. For example, the character "ren" by itself means "a human"; when combined with the character "min" , the resulting word "ren min" means people of a country.  In the language spoken today, usually two or three separate characters are required to denote a single concept or term.

Most Chinese characters are made up of (1) the radical, which often provides a hint to the meaning, and (2) the phonetic, which gives a key to pronunciation. For example, the "heart" radical or is found in characters that express thoughts, emotions, personal characteristics and the like. There are 214 radicals listed in most dictionaries, while the number of phonetics varies according to the preference of the individual scholar. Though such phonetics originally were used to indicate the pronunciation of the word, owing to changes in pronunciation over the years, these are no longer reliable. Thus you may find that two characters with the same phonetic part have no similarity at all in their pronunciation nowadays.

The Chinese Writing

Though living in a land where another language is used, you may very well have seen Chinese writings somewhere, perhaps on signs outside a Chinese shop. To you, they may look like some weird drawings. As a matter of fact, a number of characters were originally drawings or pictographs of things they represent, although today the resemblance cannot be seen. For example, the word for sun was originally a circle with a curved line across it , while the present form is a rectangle with a stroke across the middle . The character for river was originally three curved lines , obviously depicting the meandering of streams, but now the character has become just three straight lines . Sometimes two characters written in proportion are combined to form a new character representing abstract ideas. Thus the one character for brightness is formed by combining the two characters for sun and moon . The word for "good" is made up of the characters for female and child , thus revealing the high regard the ancient Chinese had for family life. But the majority of the characters are formed by combining a radical with a phonetic.

When you examine the Chinese characters, you may notice that they are made up of different strokes. According to W. Simon in his book How to Study and Write Chinese Characters, there are at least fifteen different strokes. The number of strokes in a character can be as few as one to as many as thirty-five or more.

Using a Chinese Dictionary

Since one usually has little idea of how an unknown word should be pronounced, the best way to make sure is to consult a dictionary rather than making a guess. A number of different systems for arrangement of characters are in use. The most popular system arranges the characters according to their radicals and number of strokes. Thus you must first be thoroughly familiar with writing the characters and recognizing the radicals.

The characters in the dictionary are arranged under the radical they contain and the radicals are arranged according to the number of strokes, which may be from one to seventeen. So, you first must decide which of the 214 radicals is contained in the word and then count the number of strokes in the radical. Complicated? Well, finding the radical is not always a simple matter either, so most dictionaries give a list of characters the radicals of which are difficult to find. These are arranged according to the number of strokes they have.

Another difficulty is that some words may contain two or even three parts, each of which is a radical. So after trying in vain to locate it under one radical grouping, you must look under another radical grouping. The matter of finding the right radical is further complicated by the fact that the position of the radical in characters varies. It can be at the right, left, top, bottom or even right in the middle.

Once you have found the right radical, then you count the number of strokes in the rest of the character, as all characters having the same radical are arranged according to the number of strokes they have, excluding the strokes of the radicals. This is further complicated when one stroke appears to be two. Thus it can readily be seen that it is quite a laborious task to look up words in a Chinese dictionary.

The Spoken Language

Foreigners learning to speak Chinese often have trouble with the so-called tones, which are inflections of the voice, serving the purpose of distinguishing one word from another. In the national language of China, called Mandarin, there are four tones, namely, the upper even, lower even, rising, departing, though some authorities add a fifth, the entering. But in Cantonese, a dialect spoken in Canton and Hong Kong, there are nine tones. The difference between one tone and another is usually very small and difficult for foreign students to distinguish. However, the slight difference in pronunciation sometimes can mean a world of difference in meaning. For example, in Mandarin the word for "lord" is "chu3," while the word for "pig" is "chu1." So when a foreigner wants to say "tien chu3" (heavenly lord, the term Chinese Catholics use to refer to God), if he is not sure of the right tone, he can easily say "tien chu1" and refer to a heavenly pig instead, much to the puzzlement or amusement of the Chinese listener. Understandably, a foreigner learning the language must keep his sense of humor to avoid discouragement.

This peculiarity of the Chinese language-a great number of words having very similar or identical pronunciation-makes it very difficult for foreigners to master. For example, in Mandarin there are 69 words pronounced as i (short), 7 of which are in tone 1 (upper even), 17 in tone 2 (lower even), 7 in tone 3 (rising) and 38 in tone 4 (departing). While in English two different words with identical pronunciation, such as dear and deer, are exceptions, in Chinese they are extremely common. So when listening to Chinese being spoken, one has to rely heavily on the context to decide the meaning of the words used.

As expected in a big country like China, there are scores of dialects spoken by the people in different parts of the country. In some parts of the country, especially in the south, a traveler may come across different dialects in villages only a few miles apart. Sometimes even people of neighboring villages may have difficulty in understanding one another. Some dialects are similar to one another, such as the ones spoken in northern China, while others do not even sound remotely similar, such as the Cantonese dialect and the Shanghai dialect. These two dialects are completely different not only in their vocabulary, but also in the pronunciation of various characters used in the written language. Also, some dialect words are only spoken but have no written form. Indeed, but for the written language, people from different parts of China would have serious difficulty in understanding one another. Fortunately and amazingly, although the Chinese speak many widely different dialects, they all read one common language, the written Mandarin. With the exception of the Mandarin-speaking persons, all Chinese speak one way and write another way. But if two Chinese cannot speak with each other understandably, they can at least communicate in writing.

Efforts at Reform

Because the Chinese is such a difficult language to learn, especially for foreigners, in modern times efforts have been repeatedly made to simplify it by various methods. Some advocate simplifying the characters, as Communist China has done, so that they can be learned more easily. However, such effort is not at all favored by the Nationalist government in Taiwan, nor by the more conservative-minded and older Chinese. Others have tried romanization, replacing the characters with romanized letters. The first ones to do this were the Catholic missionaries who came to China during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 C.E.). But the literature they wrote in romanized letters was used only by the missionaries themselves. In the nineteenth century, missionaries of Christendom translated the Bible into a number of dialects, such as the Soochow, Shanghai, Ningpo, Amoy and Cantonese dialects, in romanized letters. In 1867, the English scholar T. F. Wade published his own system of romanization, which has been widely used by writers of Chinese textbooks and dictionaries.

Then in 1918 the Chinese government published a set of forty phonetic symbols to help readers to pronounce the characters correctly. These are printed alongside the characters instead of replacing the latter. This phonetic system is used simply as an aid to pronunciation and is not meant to take the place of  characters.

In 1934 a Latinized Chinese alphabet was published. It was a rather simple system without any attempt to indicate the particular tones of the words. As a result, it could easily cause confusion and did not prove to be very popular with the people. It has since gone into complete oblivion. Attempts have also been made by Communist China to Latinize the Chinese language, but the matter is still very much in the experimental stage.

Future Prospects

Though repeated efforts have been made to simplify the Chinese language or even change to an alphabetic style, so far such efforts have not achieved any great success. The one peculiarity of the Chinese language mentioned previously, that it has so many words with very similar or even identical pronunciation, certainly makes it very difficult to be expressed clearly and accurately in an alphabetic style. Besides, it would understandably be a formidable task to change the vast amount of classical literature into a romanized language, not to mention teaching 800,000,000 persons a new method! This may partly explain why the Chinese people are still content to use their very difficult language and have their children spend many long hours copying, reciting and memorizing the thousands of characters needed to be literate.

Looking at the hundreds of languages spoken in different parts of the earth, one can readily see how all these different languages have been a divisive force in preventing free communication among the inhabitants of the earth. One only needs to travel to a foreign land without knowing its language to realize how helpless and frustrated one can feel when not able to understand what people say and when not understood by them.

BY "AWAKE!"

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Article Three - Chinese Characters-Why Are They Written That Way?

THE little boy sitting at the desk is the very image of concentration. His left hand is holding down a sheet of rice paper with large grids printed on it. His head is cocked slightly to the left, and his eyes are focused on the tip of a brush with a slender bamboo shaft, held vertically in his right hand. Moving the brush in a slow and controlled motion, punctuated by an occasional dip of the brush in an inkpot, he is painstakingly trying to learn how to write-Chinese.

What comes out on the paper may look impossibly complicated and hopelessly confusing to the Western eye. Yet, by endless practice and repetition the little boy, like millions of other young pupils in China, is being taught, in perhaps the only practical way, the rudiments of written Chinese.

A Record of Ideas

What sets Chinese apart from most other languages is the fact that it does not have an alphabet. Because of this, Chinese characters are not written by simply spelling out the sounds with letters, as one does in English or in other alphabetic languages. Basically, written Chinese is not a record of spoken sounds; rather, it is a record of ideas.

In the parlance of the linguists, written Chinese is ideographic writing, or idea writing. Each word or character, by its shape and appearance, conveys to the reader a certain idea. If the idea is a simple one, the character may just be a simple picture of it. The linguists call this type of character pictographic, or picture writing. They include words for common objects that are familiar in everyday life, such as

Looking at the words above, you may or may not recognize them as pictures. This is because through the years, these picture words have gone through successive stages of simplification to make them easier to write. But if you were to examine the older versions of these words, the picture element is quite apparent. In the accompanying chart, you will see the changes some characters have gone through, from the purely pictorial characters at the left to the stylized form in use today.

Obviously, a system of writing made up of picture words alone would be very limited because there are only so many ideas that can be depicted by simple pictures. Thus, for more complicated and abstract ideas, the characters are usually made up of several of the simple picture words, put together in such a way that people, out of their common experience, can recognize the ideas. For example, the "sun" and "moon" together means "bright," the "man" leaning against the "tree" means "rest."

+ =

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It is perhaps easy to see why these two characters are formed in those particular ways. In the simpler way of life in times past, there was probably nothing brighter than the sun or the moon, and a brief pause under a tree would be most restful.

Some Unusual Ideas

There are, however, some words that appear to have the most unusual stories behind them, stories that seem totally unrelated to the common, everyday experience. Take, for instance, the character for "ship." This is surely not a particularly complicated idea to express. Yet, surprisingly, the character is quite complex. It is made up of three simple characters:

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The third part, "mouth," is a very common character that can also mean "people," much as it does in the English expression "another mouth to feed." So the character for "ship" is derived from the idea of "eight persons in a vessel." Curious, is it not? Where did such an idea come from?

Consider another example. The character for "greed" or "greedy" is written with two "tree" characters above the character for "woman" or "female."

+ + =

The top part of the word, two trees side by side, is itself the character for "forest." Nevertheless, pictorially, the entire character seems to represent a woman in front of, or perhaps looking up to, two trees. Why would the idea of "greed" be represented this way?

Many other characters can be analyzed with similar results. They tell fascinating stories that appear to be totally unrelated to the common, daily experiences of the people. They seem to reveal a background or source of ideas quite different from what most people, especially the Chinese themselves, would consider typical. Where did such ideas come from?

A Controversy

There is really no agreement on how the language of China developed. And opinions among scholars are divided as to whether Chinese writing developed in China or it was imported, at least initially.

For example, I. J. Gelb in his book A Study of Writing states: "The direct derivation of the Chinese writing from Mesopotamia, suggested by some scholars on the basis of formal comparisons of Chinese and Mesopotamian signs, has never been proved by rigorous scientific method." Similarly, David Diringer wrote in his book The Alphabet: "The attempt of some scholars to prove the Sumerian origin of the primeval writing of China, implies at least great exaggerations."

It is not surprising, therefore, that Diringer, quoted above, after stating his objection to the theory that Chinese writing was derived directly from Sumerian writing, conceded that "the general conception of writing might perhaps be borrowed, directly or indirectly, from the Sumerians."

What May We Conclude?

Our brief examination of the ideas behind the ideographic Chinese characters brings to the fore the question of their source. As we have seen, scholars find it difficult to accept the proposition that Chinese writing is derived from an outside source. But their objection is based on the lack of formal or outward similarity. Until more archaeological evidence is available, the issue may remain unresolved.

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Article Four - Writing Without Spelling

TEN-YEAR-OLD Lin Yung-hsiung sits at his desk in Taiwan. His small hand grasps firmly a slender bamboo-handled brush, almost straight up and down. He painstakingly draws black marks on his paper. Millions of other children in the cities, towns and villages of the Orient do the same thing each day. What are they doing? Are they painting pictures for an art class?

The answer is both Yes and No. The children are learning the art of writing without spelling. It is an art that reaches back, some 3,000 years or more, to the Shang dynasty of China.

But how can there be writing without spelling? Let us illustrate with the name of the young boy mentioned above. In Mandarin Chinese his family name is Lin. The character for this means "forest" or "thicket." Can you see the two trees that convey the idea? His given name, Yung-hsiung, is made up of two characters that mean something like "permanent valor" or "everlasting manliness."

But while the characters reveal the meaning, they do not spell out the pronunciation of the word. The reader must sound out the word according to the particular type of Chinese that he speaks. For instance, a Cantonese-speaking person whose name is written with the same characters set out in the previous paragraph would pronounce the name, not Lin Yung-hsiung, but Lam Wing-hung. Yet the meaning would be the same in both cases. All who read Chinese can communicate with one another in writing, though speakers of one dialect may not comprehend the spoken language of another.

Efforts to Promote Mandarin

Recently, efforts have been made to make Mandarin the national spoken language of all China. To facilitate this, experts formulated what are known as National Phonetic Symbols, a set of thirty-seven symbols that can spell out accurately the Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese characters. These phonetic symbols are used to teach Mandarin pronunciation. They are also used alongside characters in publications for children and people with limited education. This enables them to read without knowing many thousands of complicated characters.

Since early in the twentieth century a second campaign has further affected written Chinese. How so? During the previous eighteen centuries Chinese writing appeared in the style known as wenyen. This is a very terse method of writing, with only one single-syllable character for each word. A person reading out loud such monosyllables would be little understood. To illustrate the problem: The character for "loyal" is pronounced chung1 in Mandarin. Yet this very same spoken sound can also mean "center," "clock," "finish" or other things. English has similar examples of words that sound alike, yet have different meanings, as in "bare" and "bear," "ware" and "wear."

In conversation a Chinese person often overcomes this problem by adding an extra syllable to certain words in order to convey to his hearer the exact shade of meaning intended. For instance, when a Mandarin-speaking person is talking, instead of using one character for "loyal" (chung1), he says chung1-hsin1, adding an extra syllable (hsin1) so that his hearers would know that he meant "loyal" rather than "center," "clock," or something else. The paihua method adds the extra syllables in writing, making it similar to daily speech, which is what the term paihua means. This makes reading much more intelligible to the less educated person. These campaigns to employ phonetic symbols for teaching Mandarin pronunciation and the principles of paihua when writing Chinese have encouraged many persons to learn to read and converse in Mandarin.

Writing Without Spelling

Writing Chinese characters is quite an art. A schoolboy must first learn the correct order of the strokes. Balance and proportion are necessary too. As an aid, beginners use paper printed with small squares. Our young friend Yung-hsiung first practiced on squared paper with pen or pencil. Eventually he developed ability to write a character containing up to thirty-three strokes in a small square. Later on, Yung-hsiung mastered the art of writing the characters with a brush.

Writing without spelling presents problems. But the Chinese have devised ingenious ways to cope with these. Interesting is the way in which Yung-hsiung finds names in a telephone directory. Since Chinese has no alphabet, the names are listed according to the number of strokes used in writing the first character of the name, which, in Chinese, is the family name, or surname. His first step in finding the name is to write the character, counting the strokes as he does so. Yung-hsiung's own family name, Lin, requires eight strokes; so he finds it in the eight-stroke section of the directory.

What about the relationship of Chinese to Japanese? Actually the two languages are not closely related. Japanese grammar and sentence construction are entirely different from Chinese. Yet the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters to write their language.

Borrowing Chinese characters for Japanese has produced one of the most complicated forms of writing in the world. Since all Chinese characters in Japanese have both Chinese and Japanese pronunciations, some may be read in up to nine or more different ways, depending on their context. And while Japanese students can get by with about 1,850 basic Chinese characters, they must also master two different phonetic methods of writing the forty-eight basic Japanese sounds. And that is not all. To complicate matters further, reading Japanese requires getting acquainted with tens of thousands of different combinations of two or more characters in order to know their correct pronunciation in various settings.

The Chinese system of writing without spelling is indeed a complicated art. But its value to the human family has been great, for Chinese writing makes it possible for some 800 million persons speaking different Chinese dialects to communicate clearly with one another.

By "Awake!"

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Article Five - Do You Want to Learn a Foreign Language?

    "Easier said than done!" That is what many say about learning a foreign language, especially after giving it a try. Granted, learning another language is challenging, to say the least. But those who have succeeded say that it is well worth the effort.

Tthere are many different reasons for learning a new language. Andrew, for example, planned to spend a vacation in France, and he wanted to be able to converse with the local people in their own tongue. Guido was born in England, but his family background is Italian. "I was only familiar with a dialect," he says, "so I wanted to learn to speak Italian properly." Jonathan's brother recently moved abroad and married a Spanish girl. "I wanted to speak with my new relatives in their native tongue when I visited my brother," Jonathan says.

But learning a foreign language can have other benefits. "It taught me to have empathy," says Louise. "Now I understand how foreigners feel when they arrive in a country where the language spoken is different from their own." For Pamela the benefits hit closer to home. Raised in England, she knew little Chinese-the language of her family. As a result, Pamela and her mother grew apart. "There wasn't much communication between us," Pamela confesses. "But now that I can speak Chinese, we are closer and our relationship has improved."

Aids to Success

What will you need in order to succeed in learning a foreign language? Many who have done so stress the following.

¡ñ Motivation. You need an incentive-a reason to pursue your goal. Students with high motivation generally do best.

¡ñ Humility. Don't expect too much of yourself-mistakes are inevitable, especially at first. "People are going to laugh," Alison says, "so keep your sense of humor!" Valerie agrees: "You're like a child learning to walk. Often you stumble, but you just have to get up and try again."

¡ñ Patience. "For me, the first two years were difficult, and at times I felt like giving up," admits David. Still, he acknowledges: "It gets easier!" Jill feels much the same way. "You don't think you've made progress until you look back," she says.

¡ñ Practice. A regular routine will help you to become fluent in the new language. Try to practice every day, even if for just a few minutes. As one textbook puts it, "'a little and often' is preferable to 'a lot but seldom.'"

Helpful Tools

Are you ready to accept the challenge of learning a foreign language? If so, the following tools can enhance your progress.

¡ñ Flash cards. Each one has a word or a phrase on the front and the translation on the back. If these are not available where you live, you could make your own set, using file cards.

¡ñ Instructional audiocassettes and videocassettes. These can help you to hear the language spoken correctly. For example, while driving in his car, David learned the rudiments of Japanese by listening to an audiocassette of a tourist phrase book.

¡ñ Interactive computer programs. Some of these allow you to record your voice and compare your pronunciation with that of native speakers of the language.

¡ñ Radio and television. If there are radio or television programs broadcast in your area that use the language you are learning, why not tune in and see how much you can understand?

¡ñ Magazines and books. Try reading printed material in the new language, making sure that the comprehension level is neither too high nor too low.

Mastering the Language

Of course, sooner or later you will have to converse with those who speak the language. This does not require that you travel to a distant land. Instead, perhaps you can visit a foreign-language congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses in your own country.

In any event, your goal should be to learn to think in the new language, rather than simply to translate words and phrases from your mother tongue. Likely it will also help if you try to learn something about the customs and habits of the people who speak your new language. "There can be no real learning of a language without understanding something of the patterns and values of the culture of which it is a part," says language expert Robert Lado.

A final thought: Do not be discouraged when your progress seems slow. Learning a new language is, after all, a continual process. "I never stop learning," says Jill, who learned sign language 20 years ago. "The language is always developing."

So do you want to learn a foreign language? If you do, be ready to embark on a most challenging-yet richly rewarding-endeavor.

BY AWAKE!

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