"More Brain Power Needed for Mandarin Than English"

[P. Kerim Friedman]

I agree that the BBC's reporting is often below par - especially their
science reporting which is almost uniformly dismal. What the BBC has in
its favor is generally better international coverage - especially in
the former English colonies. While I agree that this story would not
have gotten the same attention were the language in discussion Yoruba,
it is true that the BBC covers stories from Africa much more than the
US press ever does. I'm not sure the US press even knows where Africa
is on a map. Considering that Nigeria is one of our largest trading
partners, it seems like this oversight is not based on economics. A
comparison of news coverage on SARS and AIDS shows just how deep this
bias runs.

What interests me here is the claim about Mandarin being harder to
learn. Obviously this generalization only applies to monolingual
speakers of Western European languages. I doubt that Mandarin is as
difficult for speakers of other languages. But, the Defense Language
Institute does have some guidelines as to the difficulty of learning
different languages, presumably based on their experiences training
people in these languages. Of course the numbers might be heavily
influenced by their teaching methods:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/howhard.html

Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean are all grouped together as the
most difficult languages to learn. Of these only Mandarin is a tonal
language. This would imply that the difficulty in learning these
languages comes not from the phonology, but from other factors, such as
differences in grammar  with English (Japanese and Korean), lack of a
similar words (as with French and English), and the difficulty in
learning to read and write (Chinese and Arabic). Unfortunately, there
are no African languages on the chart (unless you count Afrikaans) so
it is hard to say where Yoruba would fit in. I could not find a more
complete or up-to-date chart. If anyone knows of one please let me know!

A few years ago there was another study widely reported in the press in
which speakers were asked to read a list of words in a random order.
Then, several weeks later, they were asked back to read the list again.
What was interesting was that Chinese speakers (I think many were
Cantonese) would read the list of English words back in exactly the
same tones that they had used several weeks earlier, while the English
speakers did not. Of course, the press blew the whole story out of
proportion, reporting that Chinese had "perfect pitch" - which I
believe to be an incorrect inference, since they were testing
performance, not reception.

- kerim


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