Congratulations, you will now all have Avril Lavigne stuck in your head for weeks. (Of course, if you're like me and had a younger brother who was obsessed with Weird Al for a while, you may know it better in this form:)
In any case, on the drive home I had both versions playing through my head and alternating between lyrics--with very odd results, I might add. (Though, in my defense, I had forgotten the gross-out lyrics and skipped to the cousin stanza.)
Anyway, back to Chinese. It's complicated! But you know, even its complications are complicated; to be honest, I can't just say it's complicated and leave it at that, because every thing that makes Chinese hard also makes it easy, and vice versa. Check it out:
Hey look, a pros and cons list for learning Chinese!
PRO #1:
Chinese has a limited, and definitive, set of sounds--21 initials, 35 finals. All Chinese words consist of a combination of these, meaning there are really on 411 sound-combinations available in Chinese--infinitely fewer than English, if you think about all the different ways you can combine our 26 little letters (I'm not a mathematician; if anyone wants to tell me how many sound combinations there are in English, feel free. I found my Chinese stats online :) Alternately, of course, you can just pick up a dictionary and see how many unique words you can find in there, but I'm guessing theoretical math is easier in this case..). But 411 sound combinations is puny--anyone should be able to knock through those in no time flat! Which leads us to...
CON #1:
INFINITE HOMONYMS. For the non-grammar-minded among us, a homonym is a word which sounds exactly like another word, but which means something entirely different. In English, these are usually spelled differently, as well; some examples would be heir and air, wood and would, eight and ate--I'm sure you can think of more if you want to. In English, you pick up which homonym is being used by the context--if someone says they're going to give their gold ring to their heir, for instance, you can pretty well guess they mean their next of kin, not the oxygen which happens to be floating past their face. Homonyms are confusing, to be sure, but at least in English, they're a fairly limited set.
Not so in Chinese. As Pro #1 pointed out, in Chinese there are only. 411. Sounds. Possible. Just try listening for context when almost every word is the same. As a result of this homogeneity, in my most recent Chinese unit, for instance, we learned "zai" twice--with the same tone (I'll get to tones in a second--for now, just realize that they're usually what's used to make 411 sounds stretch to fit a language full of words.) So, in the simple question-and-answer of "Where is the post office located?" "Go straight, then turn right," you use "zai" twice, once to mean "located" (郵局在哪裡?) and then to mean "then" (直走, 再右轉.) Even typing those two sentences was difficult--I have pinyin input installed on my computer, so I type each word phonetically and indicate tone by number, yet even so I had to scroll through several pages of choices to find the right characters to use--and not just for zai!
As you can see, the characters for each "zai," 4th tone are different, but that just leads us into our 2nd con...
CON #2: So. Many. Characters. As part of solving the whole every-word-sounds-the-same problem, maybe, Chinese has more than 80,000 characters; you need to memorize at least a few thousand to be considered literate in the language. According to Wikipedia, educated Chinese-speakers know 4,000. Wait, 4,000? Out of 80,000? And these are the educated people??? Annnd here we run into how very very difficult and--wait for it--COMPLICATED the Chinese language truly is. It's not unimaginable at all for a very well educated Chinese-speaking person to run across completely unknown characters while reading something slightly more obscure. Sure, this happens to English-speakers, too, but at least with a phonetic language and a basic knowledge of linguistic etymology (such as the educated person in our scenario would have), you would have a pretty good shot at pronouncing it at least in the ballpark of correctly. Not so in Chinese-- from what I can tell, at least, a new character is a new character: you may be able to derive the meaning from the radicals (patterns based on meaning which get repeated across characters), but there's absolutely no guarantee that you could pronounce it. Maybe that's just my flawed understanding of the language, but so far as I can tell, that's it: a new character is absolutely unknowable, even for a very educated person. So good luck when you run into those lesser-used 76,000 words, I guess.
But at least you know to expect them. Which brings us to...
PRO #2: You can't change the characters. No, really, you can't change them. So, you know that whole irregularity thing you get in most languages, things like verb conjugations, pluralizations, all that crap? Throw it out the window. A word is a word is a word. "I go" is the same as "He goes" is the same as "She goes" is the same as "They went." (Man, where did English come up with those screwy changes, anyway? "Go" to "went"? Almost as bad as Spanish's "voy" to "fuí," from a verb called "ir." Almost.)
It's kind of refreshing in Chinese, coming from a language chock full of verb- and tense-confusion and irregularities: suddenly, "I go to the beach;" "Yesterday I go to the beach;" and "Tomorrow, he and I go to the beach" are all perfectly correct. Lovely for a new learner, especially when there are so many/so few words to work with all of a sudden. Just add a modifier like "de" (的) to most anything and it's possessive/adjectival (我 is "me/I," 我的 is "mine;" 中山路 is "ZhongShan Road," 中山路的 is "on ZhongShan Road"); add "le" (了), or just specify a time like yesterday, and you've made it past tense. And that's glorious.
And another glorious fact brought about by unchanging characters is...
PRO #3: They started combining words to make more words--and their compound words actually make SENSE. This is actually probably the single best thing about Chinese: if you know what each of the characters in a compound word means, you can probably figure out what the word means as a whole. Conversely, if you have absolutely no idea what the word you're searching for is, you can talk your way around the unknown word and, chances are, you might actually hit on the right one. As an example, the other day Rachel and I went out looking for a helmet store; on the way there, Rachel (who actually knows Chinese, unlike me) told me she didn't know the word for helmet, but she knew the words for head, scooter, safety, and thing. So, the plan was to ask if they had any "scooter head safety things." And sure, that strategy might also work in English, but the likelihood of actually guessing the word in English is infinitely smaller than in Chinese.
I mean, come on, just look at English compound words. There's neither "pine" nor "apple" in a pineapple, for instance. Chinese is much more sensical: the word for "school," for instance, "學校," is literally "study school;" an elementary school is "小學校," or "small study school;" and college is "大學," or "big study." As a language learner, there's no way not to love how literal it can be.
BUT...
PRO/CON #4: It's ironic that this is my fourth and last pro/con--and odd for me that I even have a fourth point--because what I'm going to talk about here is TONES, and there are four regular tones in Chinese (technically 5, but the 5th is a non-tone). And I don't quite know where to stick them.
On the one hand, tones are great--they provide a great non-context way out of the sticky homonym situation, and they make you sound super animated all the time.
But on the other hand, they're terrible--for English-speakers who are used to infusing our daily speech with tone to convey emotion, not meaning, the prospect of accidentally putting that question-mark tone (the 2nd tone in Chinese sounds like us asking a question in English) on a word accidentally, AND CHANGING THE ENTIRE MEANING OF THE WORD, is terrifying. Take the seemingly innocent and wonderful word "love"--in Chinese, pronounced "ai" (as in "eye;" 愛), with the fourth tone (which goes down from high to low, and sounds like a very serious definitive--not very loving in English). BUT the 4th tone is absolutely crucial here. Say "ai" with a first tone (like singing) and it means "sorrow;" with a second tone (question mark) and it means "cancer;" with a third tone (dropping and rising) and it means "low."
And that's just one example--and, for that matter, just one set of what each of those tones can mean, because, as I mentioned earlier, the same sounds and the same tones can have different meanings. Just, you know, for fun.
Maybe I do know where to stick tones--in the "cons" category. Because no one wants to accidentally tell someone that they "sorrow" them.
So yeah, that's my pros and cons list. I'll likely add more as I learn more, but now I'm still at an extremely low level of study. How low, you ask? Well, today during my breaks at Han-Min I was studying the words 圖書館 (library), 花店 (flower shop), and 銀行 (bank), amongst others, at my desk--and all three of those words were in our lesson for the 6th graders today. What's more, most of them were able to volunteer other locations when prompted, places like the swimming pool or the department store. I don't know how to say swimming pool.
But I'll learn! Because, for all its complications, Chinese is worth it, and I'm loving growing in my knowledge of it daily, however slowly.
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