中国文化概论 学习报告Difficulties for Chinese Language learning

XXX 11XXXXXX29 英语（旅游）X班 12/7 Difficulties for Chinese Language learning

Nowadays, more and more foreigners are interested in learning Chinese. As we all know that Chinese language is less complex than most other languages, because it dose not have verb tenses, conjugations, inflections, declensions, genders or moods. That is to say, most of the rules of Chinese grammar have to do with word order rather than word changes. However, it still makes quite a few foreign Chinese language learners’ heads spinning for the tones of Chinese and Chinese characters all seem to be a difficulty. And now, Chinese language has been widely admitted to be the most difficult language for foreign learners. But why is it so difficult for foreigners to learn Chinese? After doing some researches , I think the reasons can be divided into 6 parts and it runs as follows：

1. The foreigners can never figure out the tones of Chinese.

According to our text book, there are a total of 411 syllables in Putonghua, the standard Chinese. They can be pronounced in four different tones, namely, even, rising, dipping or falling-then-rising, and falling. The difference in tones is the deciding factor in the meaning of the word. So it’s one of the most common complaints about learning Chinese. Unfortunately, people cannot learn tones form a book. As non-native speakers, you must memorize along with the vowels and consonants. The real difficulty comes in when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained. One has to hear and imitate them many times before one really grasps their subtle variations.

2. Chinese writing structures are complex and irregular.

We are English major students, so we know clearly about English spelling habits and skills. There are 26 letters and they are written from left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries, which is beautiful and neat. In comparison, Chinese characters has nothing that could relate to an alphabet, though there are recurring components that make up the characters. It can be said that the

components of Chinese characters can be formed form several directions (except left, right, up and down), only the middle part can be squeezed with many other components. It makes it difficult to learn a new word, especially one that has a complex structure.

3. Quite a few characters have no direct or obvious semantic clue in the radical.

The beauty of the Chinese characters is obvious, but these ideograms are not too practical for daily use. We know that as early as the Zhou Dynasty, the Chinese people began to create other ways to construct characters that could express more comprehensive ideas. Hence the characters, namely, pictograph, ideograph, associate compound, indicators, mutual explanatory characters, and characters adapted to represent homophones. Later on, with the simplification of Chinese characters and attenuation of the sense of a word, quite a few characters have no direct or obvious semantic clue in the radical. Sometimes, we remember a word without using any related ideograph or indicators. For example, the Chinese character ‘曦’, we can explain it as ‘sunlight’ in English meaning. To be honest, I always spell it in a wrong way, because I can’t remember its right part of the structures, and its pronunciation doesn’t give me any hint to spell it correctly. Whereas, this word can not be the difficult word in Chinese characters, some words are even too difficult for our Chinese to learn, because there is a huge number of characters and irregular forms. Many people believe that Chinese is not very phonetic, which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character, if there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character.

4. Even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.

I believe that anyone who learns a little English can look up a new English word in the dictionary. We can also get some related information of a single word bases on the alphabetic orders. As for the foreign Chinese language learners, it seems impossible to look up a Chinese character in the dictionary. Not because there are various dictionaries in China, but you can’t even figure out the real pronunciation or components of a word. Besides, even a single word has different pronunciations in different phrases and situation. And if we don’t know the specific component of a

complex word, we can not look it up for an accurate pronunciation. For another aspect, the use of classifiers is also difficult.

5. There's classical Chinese (wenyanwen)

Except Chinese idioms and allusions,the Classical Chinese seems to be the most difficult part for learners to understand, even for us Chinese. Whereas, modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Classical Chinese really consists of tens of centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, it seems like codes that were created for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectual bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards. Although some usages of the words don’t change, it just concludes a small group of words, and most writing skills and speaking habits had been changed.

6. There is a cultural difference in Chinese language learning.

One of the main reasons that Chinese is so difficult for westerners is that there is a cultural difference between the East and the West. Our nation has a long history of civilization. The ancestors had left a lot of invaluable things for us, not only the classical literatures and powerful inventions, but also the manners and customs. In China, different regions have different customs, different peoples have different languages .When westerners and Chinese get together and there is not just a language barrier, but an immense cultural barrier as well. The centuries’ civilization decides our habits and structures of characters. It can’t be changed essentially. Some people think that is too difficult and troublesome to express a certain meaning in an implied way, for they are in favor of a direct way to show their deep feelings. In reality, without the implicit features, Chinese language will lose its beauty and mystery. It is the complicated expressions that intensify our depth of cultural attainment. Chinese character is regarded as a primary part in our history, so, it occupied a significant position in Chinese culture.

As time changing fast, we absorb the western cultures quickly .We add more and more fashionable words into our languages ,which makes it even more difficult to learn Chinese. However, we can’t deny that Chinese language still keeps its infinite

attraction, continuously attracts many foreigners to step into the wide space of Chinese language, although it has many difficulties to learning it well.

References：

Chinese Society and Culture

《文化习俗差异和禁忌》

《语言文化》