LEARNING CHINESE

On my recent trip to the U.K., I stayed with a friend, who has adopted a Chinese girl, Katie. She was two and a half when they got her, and so already spoke Chinese, which she gradually forgot as she learned English. Now aged seven, she is re-learning Chinese; and we had an interesting chat over breakfast about how she is doing.

I have always thought that Chinese (and other character-based languages such as Japanese) must be phenomenally difficult, not just for foreigners but also for the Chinese themselves. Not the language as such, but the writing. I have a friend who is a linguist, and has a first-class degree from Oxford University (i.e. she is a very bright woman). She had one on one teaching from a Chinese teacher for two years, but eventually gave up; it was simply too difficult.

One reason is that there are in fact two sets of characters; the classical ones, still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the simplified ones used on the mainland, which were introduced by Mao. Furthermore, words made up of more than one character can mean completely different things from the individual characters themselves. Kindergarten is made up of the two German words Kinder (children) and Garten (garden), so kindergarten is some sort of place for children. In her book one of written Chinese, Katie showed me the character for mother and the character for child. Put the two together, and you get the character for good. That's "sort of" straightforward to understand (even if the individual characters are nouns and the combination an adjective); but there is a further complication, in that the word for good is not said anything like mother-child. It's as if the written word kindergarten were in fact pronounced as lawnmower.

One of the great advantages of alphabetic languages is that it is easy to discover the meaning of unknown words. If you don't know what antidisestablishmentarianism means, you go to a dictionary, find the a's, then the an's, and keep going until you come to the word in question; all you need to know in advance is the 26 letters and the order in which they organised. Chinese has dictionaries, but they are much more complex. Finding a character in the dictionary is almost as difficult as knowing and remembering the character in the first place.

Since Chinese people obviously have no difficulty learning to speak Chinese, the questions must be asked why they have developed a written script which is almost impossible for themselves to master; and what that means for a future world in which Chinese-speakers are likely to be one of the dominant forces. The development of "prompt" technologies, in which you write a phonetic sound, and the screen churns out the character, allows Chinese to communicate easily enough today on mobile phones and computers. But can a written language really survive, if its native speakers aren't fully literate in it? Might they instead choose another language (English being the obvious choice) for their written communications?

I don't know the answers to these questions. But I suspect that they will have great importance for the world in (say) 2111. In the meantime, I will follow Katie's progress with more than a passing interest.

Walter Blotscher