“Why is English so difficult?” This is a question I often encounter at work. Whenever I start teaching a new class, I’ll do a little research in the first class by asking those who find English difficult or troubling raise their hands. Every time I get a full house of hands. No exceptions, at all.
To comfort them, I’ll sometimes “congratulate” them first for being able to use the most difficult language in the world—the Chinese; to be more specific, the more difficult Chinese--the traditional, but not the simplified. I’ll give examples of how foreigners I met had told me the difficulty they’d gone through in learning the Chinese language, especially the characters.
As to English, it is easier than languages such as French or German, so I told them. Though I speak neither of the languages, I’ll give examples showing that English is “easier” with my limited knowledge of these languages. For example, in French or German, every noun has its “gender” and has to go with the adjective of the same gender. And my only impression about German is the lengthy words. I wish I could give them examples of words with 12 or 15 letters to prove my statement.
Indeed the Chinese characters are hard to learn for those whose mother tongue is alphabetic language. When I went to elementary school, way prior to the computer age, the homework we had for the Chinese class was mainly copy the characters. We had to repeat writing a character for like 20, 30 times (or even 50, 100!). When parents wanted to know if the kids had done with their homework, they’ll ask “Have you finish ‘writing’ your homework?” We said “寫(xie3),” writing, homework instead of “做(zuo4),” doing homework because we did do a lot of writing, even with classes like mathematics.
Can you imagine how a typist worked prior to the computer age?
A Chinese typewriter looks like this:
chinesedigger.blogspot.com You can see from the picture there is a plate about the size of A2, with about 2400 Chinese characters on it and four spare plates, each with 800 characters CA. (http://www.smartinside.com.tw/else/memory2.html) The plate looks like this:
You can tell the characters are left-right reversal.
To type, you have to remember the positions of the 2400 characters on the plate, which are arranged in the order of 部首(bu4 shou3), radicals. (MY!) You locate the word you’d like to type, clip the character, press the lever, and the character is raised by the clip and typed onto the paper with the ink paper. Unlike the English typewriter, you can type downward with a Chinese typewriter.
When encountering a rarely used word that is not included in the 2400 words on the plate, the typist has to pick out the character from one of the spare plates, put it onto the plate of the typewriter and type it. Looking from a bird’s view, you see a typewriter like this:
blog.xuite.netI remember being in a typing office hearing the regular clicking from the typewriter. It’s needless to say how I admired those typists.
There must be 50 ways to prove that English is “easier” than Chinese to my students. I confess that I sometimes encourage them by saying that they are smarter than users of the English language. Don’t slam me for saying that. That’s what a teacher does—inspiring students with white lies; which is also, funny to say, what students do to their teachers—telling them white lies such as how wise or good-looking they are, so that they won’t fail them.
I’ll go on showing you some interesting characteristics of the Chinese language that other languages don’t have.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
寫=写
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