Simplicity of English

[Peter A. McGraw]

So far the contributions seem to have missed two crucial points, except
perhaps for a "glancing blow" or two.

1) The difficulty of learning another language is less a matter of
complexity in some absolute sense than it is of the relationship of the
learner's native language to the target language.  Thus, for example,
speakers of Dutch (one of the closest living relatives of English) usually
learn English more easily than speakers of French, and presumably speakers
of Chinese have a harder time still, since, for example, the very concept
of inflection is strange to Chinese speakers--or at least to hitherto
monolingual ones.

1) As some have indicated, Chinese at the level of tourist survival skills
seems at first glance like a piece of cake--no inflections, no genders,
whee!  However, as soon as you need to do something as basic as counting
objects (one car, three apples, two pieces of paper, etc.), you realize
that Chinese in fact does have something like genders, and that what's more
there are six or seven of them (maybe more, I'm very rusty by now).  Other
complexities soon crop up as well.

But the main obstacle to a foreigner learning Chinese (except for a
foreigner whose language uses Chinese characters as its orthography) has
nothing to do with the complexity of the language itself or its
relationship to the learner's native language.  The main obstacle is that
the orthography only imposes an extra memorization chore--for every single
word--without providing a single clue to pronunciation!  With any
alphabetic orthography, once you have learned what sounds the letters
represent, the spelling will at least give you a clue as to the
pronunciation of an unfamiliar word, and that in turn may even give you a
clue as to its meaning.  Pinyin is a pretty good alphabetic transcription
system for Chinese, but it's used only in a very limited range of
situations, so you have to learn the characters.  That means that for every
new word, you have to learn a pronunciation and a unique character, and the
two are not mutually reinforcing.  Furthermore, inexplicably Pinyin itself
normally doesn't use the diacritics that indicate the tones, so if you ask
a Chinese to fill in the tones in a name transcribed in Pinyin, they will
normally be helpless unless you can also provide the characters.

Peter Mc.

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                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu