Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)

This essay has circulated in the Chinese learning community for a long time, and David Moser is both highly respected as well as obnoxiously skilled at Mandarin. As someone who has learnt Chinese to a high degree of proficiency, I agree with many of his points, but it paints a picture that is a bit too grim in my opinion. The first thing one should note is that Moser started studying Chinese in the late 80s. Things have changed. There…

This article is great fun to read and overall very informative. Yet I had a few gripes about it. * Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols directly refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term. The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they…

...one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. ... I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that…

To boil that down, Chinese is So Damn Hard due to: 1. the writing system 2. the lack of cognates 3. tones Comments: (1) could be argued applies to all learners of Chinese, regardless of background or age, but it should be obvious that a Japanese student would not find characters so daunting--in fact, they would probably find some comfort relative to western alphabets. Characters do form a system--highly irregular yes--but there are definite systematic qualities that can be leveraged…