|
Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you're just sunk. And you're sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.
This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling. One might forget whether "abracadabra" is hyphenated or not, or get the last few letters wrong on "rhinoceros", but even the poorest of spellers can make a reasonable stab at almost anything. By contrast, often even the most well-educated Chinese have no recourse but to throw up their hands and ask someone else in the room how to write some particularly elusive character.
这些就意味着，你常常会完全忘记怎么写一个汉字，完毕。如果字根上没有语义的明显线索，也没有什么表音构件来帮忙，你就完蛋了。即使中国人自己也是如此：跟普遍的迷信正相反，中国人并没什么天生的记忆字迹的能力。实际上，一个外国学习者最感安慰的时候，就是看到一个中国人被要求写一个常见汉字时一个笔画也写不出来。看到一个母语人士遇到你每天经历的困难时，你真是感到那些委屈得到了莫大的伸冤和解脱。
事实上，这种经历如此令人宽慰，以至于我干脆记了一个单子，上面列着我看到的中国人提笔忘掉的汉字（提笔忘字？）（一个有病的，强迫症的行为，嗯我自己也知道……）。我见过很有学问的中国人忘掉如何书写“罐头”的“罐”，“膝盖”的“膝”，“改锥”的“锥”，“捻拇指”的 “捻”，“胳臂肘”的 “肘“，“姜”，“垫子”的“垫”，“鞭炮”的“鞭”，等等。我说的忘，指的是他们常常连第一笔画都不知道怎么写。你能想象一个教育良好的英语人士完全不会书写“膝盖”或者“罐头”么？（译者注：分别是knee和tin can）或者哪怕“scabbard”或“ragamuffin”这种少见的词，他们也不会忘。我有一次和三个北京大学中文系的三个博士生吃午饭，他们三个都是中国人（一个来自香港）。我那天正好感冒，打算给一个朋友写个纸条取消我们一个约会。我发现自己想不起来怎么写“喷嚏”中的“嚏”了。于是我问那三位该怎么写。结果吓我一跳，他们仨都尴尬而难为情地耸耸肩。谁都不能正确地写这个字儿。各位同学！北京大学常常被认为是中国的哈佛啊。你能想象三个哈佛大学英文系的博士生不会写“sneeze”（喷嚏）？然而这种情况在中国绝不少见。英文就是大大地比中文容易书写和记忆。不管这个词频率多低，拼写多奇怪，英语人士总能整出点儿什么来，就是因为拼写和发音是有一定对应关系的。你可能不记得“abracadabra”里面有没有连接符，或者 “rhinoceros”最后几个字母不会拼，但最糟的家伙也能差不多点儿的拼出来几乎任何词。与此相反，即使是教育最好的中国人在写某些特别难记的汉字时也可能束手无策，只能问问别人。
As one mundane example of the advantages of a phonetic writing system, here is one kind of linguistic situation I encountered constantly while I was in France. (Again I use French as my canonical example of an "easy" foreign language.) I wake up one morning in Paris and turn on the radio. An ad comes on, and I hear the word "amortisseur" several times. "What's an amortisseur?" I think to myself, but as I am in a hurry to make an appointment, I forget to look the word up in my haste to leave the apartment. A few hours later I'm walking down the street, and I read, on a sign, the word "AMORTISSEUR" -- the word I heard earlier this morning. Beneath the word on the sign is a picture of a shock absorber. Aha! So "amortisseur" means "shock absorber". And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur". Before long I can retrieve the word easily, use it in conversation, or write it in a letter to a friend. And the process of learning a foreign language begins to seem less daunting.
When I first went to Taiwan for a few months, the situation was quite different. I was awash in a sea of characters that were all visually interesting but phonetically mute. I carried around a little dictionary to look up unfamiliar characters in, but it's almost impossible to look up a character in a Chinese dictionary while walking along a crowded street (more on dictionary look-up later), and so I didn't get nearly as much phonetic reinforcement as I got in France. In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and never know how to pronounce any of the characters unless I first look them up. And even then, the next time I pass the shop I might have to look the characters up again. And again, and again. The reinforcement does not come naturally and easily.
作为一个表音书写系统优势的平凡例子，我在法国时常常遇到这样一些情况（再一次地我用法语作为“容易”外语的经典例子）。在巴黎有天早上我醒来打开广播，听到一个广告，其中有个词儿“amortisseur”出现了几次。“amortisseur”是什么意思？我想了一下，不过由于当时正要见人，我匆忙离开的时候忘了查字典。几小时后我正好在街头一个标志上看到了“amortisseur”，这个我早上刚听过的词。“amortisseur” 这个词下面是一张减震器的图片。哈哈，看来“amortisseur”的意思是减震器。就这样，我学了一个新词，快捷无痛。仅仅是因为我试图读这个词儿的时候发音是和我早上听到的词一样的。两者互相印证。接下来一周我几次看到这个词，每次我都能通过照字面阅读而找到它的发音“a-mor-tis- seur”。没多久，我就能轻松想起这个词儿，在对话中使用，或者在给朋友的信里写出来。这样一来，学外语的过程就没那么可怕了。
当我第一次去台湾呆几个月的时候，情况则完全不同。我被汉字的大海完全淹没了，它们看起来很有趣，可是完全不给什么发音线索。我带了一个小字典来查陌生的字，不过在拥挤的街道上查中文字典实在是不可能的任务（后面还会说关于查字典的事儿）。所以我一点儿也没得到类似在法国的那种发音的帮助。在台湾，我可以走过一个卖减震器的商店，却完全不知道该如何发任何一个汉字的音，除非我先查字典。即使查了一遍，下次走过的时候我还得再查一遍。然后，再查，再查。记忆增强的过程一点也不自然易行。
4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates.
I remember when I had been studying Chinese very hard for about three years, I had an interesting experience. One day I happened to find a Spanish-language newspaper sitting on a seat next to me. I picked it up out of curiosity. "Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've never studied Spanish in my life. I wonder how much of this I can understand." At random I picked a short article about an airplane crash and started to read. I found I could basically glean, with some guesswork, most of the information from the article. The crash took place near Los Angeles. 186 people were killed. There were no survivors. The plane crashed just one minute after take-off. There was nothing on the flight recorder to indicate a critical situation, and the tower was unaware of any emergency. The plane had just been serviced three days before and no mechanical problems had been found. And so on. After finishing the article I had a sudden discouraging realization: Having never studied a day of Spanish, I could read a Spanish newspaper more easily than I could a Chinese newspaper after more than three years of studying Chinese.
What was going on here? Why was this "foreign" language so transparent? The reason was obvious: cognates -- those helpful words that are just English words with a little foreign make-up. I could read the article because most of the operative words were basically English: aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia, etc. Recognizing these words as just English words in disguise is about as difficult as noticing that Superman is really Clark Kent without his glasses. That these quasi-English words are easier to learn than Chinese characters (which might as well be quasi-Martian) goes without saying.
Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor's office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork ("diabetes" is just "diabetes" and "insulin" is "insulina", it turns out), you're saved. In China you'd be a goner for sure, unless you happen to have a dictionary with you, and even then you would probably pass out while frantically looking for the first character in the word for insulin. Which brings me to the next reason why Chinese is so hard.
4. 因为你不能取巧使用同根词。
我还记着，当我刻苦学习了中文三年的时候，有过一次有趣的经历。有天我正好在旁边座位上找到一张西班牙文的报纸。我好奇地拿起来看，“嗯～”我想说，“我从来没学过西班牙语。看看我到底能懂多少。”我随机挑了一篇关于空难的小文开始看。结果我发现稍微猜一下就能获取大部分的文章信息。空难发生在洛杉矶附近，186人遇难。没有幸存者。飞机起飞后一分钟后即坠毁。飞行记录上没有什么特殊状况的提示，而塔台则并不知道任何紧急情况。飞机三天前刚维护过，也没发现什么机械故障。等等等等。看完文章后我突然沮丧地意识到：从没学过一天西班牙文，我读起它的报纸却比学了三年的中文报纸还容易……
这到底是怎么回事？为啥西班牙这个“外语”这么容易？原因很明显：同根词。这些同根词跟英文词汇相比只有小小的改造。我能读懂文章，因为绝大多数关键词基本都是英文：aeropuerto, problema mechanico, un minuto, situacion critica, emergencia,等等。认出这些词儿不过是一些英文词穿了马甲，这难度大约和发现超人不过是肯克拉克不戴眼镜的难度差不多。不用说，这些类英文词比中文汉字好学（中文汉字则多半是类火星文……）。想象一下，一个糖尿病人在西班牙发现自己需要注射胰岛素。他跑进诊所，只需很少的西班牙语和猜测的过程，他就能获救（其实，英语"diabetes" 翻成西班牙语就是 "diabetes" ， "insulin" 等于"insulina"。）在中国呢，他肯定完蛋了。除非他带了一本中文字典，即便如此，他多半也会在字典里疯狂地查胰岛素第一个汉字时不支晕倒。这正好说明了我下一个要说的中文难的原因。
5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated.
One of the most unreasonably difficult things about learning Chinese is that merely learning how to look up a word in the dictionary is about the equivalent of an entire semester of secretarial school. When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up contests in the junior high schools. Imagine a language where simply looking a word up in the dictionary is considered a skill like debate or volleyball! Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile.
Figuring out all the radicals and their variants, plus dealing with the ambiguous characters with no obvious radical at all is a stupid, time-consuming chore that slows the learning process down by a factor of ten as compared to other languages with a sensible alphabet or the equivalent. I'd say it took me a good year before I could reliably find in the dictionary any character I might encounter. And to this day, I will very occasionally stumble onto a character that I simply can't find at all, even after ten minutes of searching. At such times I raise my hands to the sky, Job-like, and consider going into telemarketing.
Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on earth. I currently have more than twenty Chinese dictionaries of various kinds on my desk, and they all have a specific and distinct use. There are dictionaries with simplified characters used on the mainland, dictionaries with the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and dictionaries with both. There are dictionaries that use the Wade-Giles romanization, dictionaries that use pinyin, and dictionaries that use other more surrealistic romanization methods. There are dictionaries of classical Chinese particles, dictionaries of Beijing dialect, dictionaries of chéngyǔ (four-character idioms), dictionaries of xiēhòuyǔ (special allegorical two-part sayings), dictionaries of yànyǔ (proverbs), dictionaries of Chinese communist terms, dictionaries of Buddhist terms, reverse dictionaries... on and on. An exhaustive hunt for some elusive or problematic lexical item can leave one's desk "strewn with dictionaries as numerous as dead soldiers on a battlefield."
For looking up unfamiliar characters there is another method called the four-corner system. This method is very fast -- rumored to be, in principle, about as fast as alphabetic look-up (though I haven't met anyone yet who can hit the winning number each time on the first try). Unfortunately, learning this method takes about as much time and practice as learning the Dewey decimal system. Plus you are then at the mercy of the few dictionaries that are arranged according to the numbering scheme of the four-corner system. Those who have mastered this system usually swear by it. The rest of us just swear.
Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. "THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE" HE PRO CLAIM ED. "FOR A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE."
Imagine how this difference would compound the dictionary look-up difficulties of a non-native speaker of English. The passage is pretty trivial for us to understand, but then we already know English. For them it would often be hard to tell where the word boundaries were supposed to be. So it is, too, with someone trying to learn Chinese.
5. 因为连在字典里查一个字都很复杂。
学中文中最不可理喻的困难之一，就是连学会查字典的难度都基本等于在文秘专业学一个学期。在台湾的时候我听说有时还有初中生查字典比赛。想象一下吧，有种语言里连查字典都成了跟辩论或是排球一样的技能！你多半不会称中文是个善待用户的语言，而中文字典则绝对是虐待用户的典型。
找出所有部首和它们的变体，再加上处理那些没有明显部首模棱两可的汉字，这是个愚蠢的，花时间的苦差事。和其他拥有合理的字母或类似系统的语言相比，这一点大大放慢了学习中文的过程。我得说，我花了一年时间才能比较顺利的在字典中找到任何汉字。而直到今天，我极偶尔还是会遇到即使查个十分钟还是查不到的汉字。这种时候我就会像（圣经中信仰屡受考验的）约伯一样，举手向天，同时考虑去电话营销业之类的工作……
中文肯定也是地球上最需要字典的语言之一。我现在手头有超过二十本各种中文字典在书桌上，每本都有单独用途：有大陆用的简体字字典，有香港台湾用的繁体字字典，还有简繁体都有的字典；有用威妥玛拼音的字典，有用大陆拼音方案的字典，还有用其他更超现实主义的拼音的字典；有经典的中文虚词字典，有北京方言字典，有成语字典，有歇后语词典，有谚语词典，有中国GCD用语词典，有佛教用语词典，还有反查用词典，不一而足。一次穷尽式的查询某个难解词汇可能会让书桌上“堆满词典，如同战场上的士兵尸体一样。”
查陌生汉字的时候还有一种四角系统的查法。有谣言说这方法很迅速，基本上和查字母语言的情况下一样快（虽然我没见过谁能第一次就找到正确的编码）。不幸的是，学习这个查法本身就跟学杜威十进图书分类法花的时间和精力差不多。此外你还得指望字典的确按照四角系统安排过（这类字典并不多）。那些掌握了这个四角查法的人对其推崇备至，我们其他人则是赌咒发誓。
查字典还有一个问题来自中文汉字本身的特性。绝大部分语言中词汇之间的分界很明显，有空格在那儿。如果你不懂一个词，那找到该查什么一般不难（当然什么算一个词是个微妙问题，不过在这个话题方面我的说法基本正确）。在中文里呢，汉字之间有空格，但是得需要好多中文知识和真正的侦探本领才能让你找出词汇之间的界限。所以找一个词儿往往是个试错过程。就好象英文写成如下的样子：
FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. "THE FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE" HE PRO CLAIM ED. "FOR A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE.
想象一下这样的情况会怎样加重英文学习者查字典的困难吧。这段话读起来不难，那是因为我们懂英文。对不懂的人来说搞清楚词汇之前的界限可不容易。在学中文的时候情况正是如此。
6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen).
Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure.
Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially in Chinese paintings and character scrolls, and most people will assume anyone literate in Chinese can read it. It's truly embarrassing to be out at a Chinese restaurant, and someone asks you to translate some characters on a wall hanging.
"Hey, you speak Chinese. What does this scroll say?" You look up and see that the characters are written in wenyan, and in incomprehensible "grass-style" calligraphy to boot. It might as well be an EKG readout of a dying heart patient.
"Uh, I can make out one or two of the characters, but I couldn't tell you what it says," you stammer. "I think it's about a phoenix or something."
"Oh, I thought you knew Chinese," says your friend, returning to their menu. Never mind that an honest-to-goodness Chinese person would also just scratch their head and shrug; the face that is lost is yours.
Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway. An uninitiated westerner can no more be expected to understand such writing than Confucius himself, if transported to the present, could understand the entries in the "personal" section of the classified ads that say things like: "Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please."
In fairness, it should be said that classical Chinese gets easier the more you attempt it. But then so does hitting a hole in one, or swimming the English channel in a straitjacket.
6. 然后还有个文言文……
放弃吧。太难了。如果你以为三四年学习之后你就能轻风般浏览过孔孟的文章，就好象差不多的三年级法文学习者能够阅读狄德罗和伏尔泰，哥你就杯具了。的确有一些西方人能够顺利地阅读古代中文，不过他们大都有灰白头发，或至少有教授地位……
不幸的是，中国古文到处出现，特别是在中国画和卷轴里。大部分人以为任何懂中文的人都能阅读它们。当你在中国餐馆，有人请你翻译一个屏风上的汉字时，那可真是让人无地自容。
“嗨哥们，你不是懂中文么？这个卷帘上写的什么？”你抬头一看，发现写的是文言，还用的是无法理解的草书体……这样的书法就看起来濒死的心脏病人的心电图差不多。
“呃……我想我能看懂一两个字，但我没法告诉你它什么意思。”你结结巴巴地说，“我猜是关于凤凰之类的东西……”
“噢，我以为你懂中文。”你朋友说道，然后继续看他们的菜单。即使那些字一个如假包换的中国人也会挠头不懂，丢的还是你的脸……
现代汉语仅仅是古怪的难，而古典中文则是刻意让人不可能学会。汉学家不会告诉你这样一个小秘密：要看懂文言文一小段话，你必须首先知道它在讲什么。因为古典中文根本是由几个世纪的典故用一种简要的编码组成，流传于一个书虫们组成的精英小团体中，他们自己都彻底了解任何一点相关的文学背景。一个没有专业知识的西方人没法理解这些，就好象如果孔子本人来到现在，也看不懂分类广告中“个人”一栏里这类的东西：“Hndsm. SWGM, 24, 160, sks BGM or WGM for gentle S&M, mod. bndg., some lthr., twosm or threesm ok, have own equip., wheels, 988-8752 lv. mssg. on ans. mach., no weirdos please.”（译者注：这个意思就不翻译了，好孩子不需要知道……）
公平的讲，文言文你越尝试就会变得越容易。 不过高尔夫一杆进洞或者穿着束身衣横跨英吉利海峡也是如此。
7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck.
Well, perhaps that's too harsh. But it is true that there are too many of them, and most of them were designed either by committee or by linguists, or -- even worse -- by a committee of linguists. It is, of course, a very tricky task to devise a romanization method; some are better than others, but all involve plenty of counterintuitive spellings. And if you're serious about a career in Chinese, you'll have to grapple with at least four or five of them, not including the bopomofu phonetic symbols used in Taiwan. There are probably a dozen or more romanization schemes out there somewhere, most of them mercifully obscure and rightfully ignored. There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method.
7. 因为字母化方案太多了，而且全都不给力。
嘛，这么说可能有点过分。不过真的，把中文用字母表达的方案很多，而绝大多数都是由某个委员会或是某些语言学家弄出来的。有时候还更糟，是个语言学家组成的委员会…… 当然啦，设计一种字母化方案非常不易，有些方案比较好，但所有的方案都需要很多与直觉抵触的拼写。而如果你真想发展中文方面的职业道路，那你至少得会其中四五种，还不包括台湾用的那些鬼画符。总共恐怕有超过一打的字母化方案，大部分都是晦涩难懂而理所应当地被大家忽略了。长久以来在汉学家之间有个笑话：一个汉学学者老年痴呆的标志，就是他感到发明一种新的字母化方案的迫切性。
8. Because tonal languages are weird.
Okay, that's very Anglo-centric, I know it. But I have to mention this problem because it's one of the most common complaints about learning Chinese, and it's one of the aspects of the language that westerners are notoriously bad at. Every person who tackles Chinese at first has a little trouble believing this aspect of the language. How is it possible that shùxué means "mathematics" while shūxuě means "blood transfusion", or that guòjiǎng means "you flatter me" while guǒjiàng means "fruit paste"?
By itself, this property of Chinese would be hard enough; it means that, for us non-native speakers, there is this extra, seemingly irrelevant aspect of the sound of a word that you must memorize along with the vowels and consonants. But where the real difficulty comes in is when you start to really use Chinese to express yourself. You suddenly find yourself straitjacketed -- when you say the sentence with the intonation that feels natural, the tones come out all wrong. For example, if you wish say something like "Hey, that's my water glass you're drinking out of!", and you follow your intonational instincts -- that is, to put a distinct falling tone on the first character of the word for "my" -- you will have said a kind of gibberish that may or may not be understood.
Intonation and stress habits are incredibly ingrained and second-nature. With non-tonal languages you can basically import, mutatis mutandis, your habitual ways of emphasizing, negating, stressing, and questioning. The results may be somewhat non-native but usually understandable. Not so with Chinese, where your intonational contours must always obey the tonal constraints of the specific words you've chosen. Chinese speakers, of course, can express all of the intonational subtleties available in non-tonal languages -- it's just that they do it in a way that is somewhat alien to us speakers of non-tonal languages. When you first begin using your Chinese to talk about subjects that actually matter to you, you find that it feels somewhat like trying to have a passionate argument with your hands tied behind your back -- you are suddenly robbed of some vital expressive tools you hadn't even been aware of having.
8. 因为音调系统很古怪。
Ok，这种说法很白人中心主义，我知道。但我得提一下这一点，因为它是最常见的抱怨之一，也是西方人最恶名昭著的弱项之一。每个学中文的人一开始都无法相信中文有音调系统的一面存在。怎么可能Shuxue既可以是“数学”同时还能是“输血”呢？或者guojiang可以是“过奖”或者是“果酱”？它本身就是中文一个大难点了，因为这意味着我们非母语人士在记忆元音辅音之外，还得记住这些看起来不重要的发音部分。更大的真正的困难出现在你实际使用中文表达自己的时候：你发现自己束手束脚的，你可能语调都挺自然，结果音调都搞错了。比如，你可能想说“嗨你在喝我的杯子里的水！”，然后你想当然地把重音放在“我的”身上（结果声调变成了四声）(相当于中文四声的声调)，那你说的多半是些胡言乱语，可能被理解也可能不被。
语调和重音习惯具有非常大的追加和自由性质。在无音调的语言中，你基本上可以随心所欲地（加上必要的修改）按你的习惯来强调，否定，重视，和质疑。说出来的可能不太自然，但绝对能被理解。中文则不然，你的语调习惯必须遵守每个你用的词汇音调的限制。中国人当然能自由地表达所有微妙的语调，和使用那些无音调的语言的人一样。只是他们的方式对我们说无音调语言的人来说有点陌生。当你真正开始用中文说些你在意的话题时，你就发现好像你不得不双手被捆着，同时试图表达一个激情四射的观点。你突然被剥夺了一些重要的表达手段，以前你可能还没意识到自己拥有它们。
9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met.
Language and culture cannot be separated, of course, and one of the main reasons Chinese is so difficult for Americans is that our two cultures have been isolated for so long. The reason reading French sentences like "Le président Bush assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement américain va continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace irakienne," is about as hard as deciphering pig Latin is not just because of the deep Indo-European family resemblance, but also because the core concepts and cultural assumptions in such utterances stem from the same source. We share the same art history, the same music history, the same history history -- which means that in the head of a French person there is basically the same set of archetypes and the same cultural cast of characters that's in an American's head. We are as familiar with Rimbaud as they are with Rambo. In fact, compared to the difference between China and the U.S., American culture and and French culture seem about as different as Peter Pan and Skippy peanut butter.
9. 因为东西方泾渭分明，而两者才刚刚相遇。
语言和文化当然无法分割，这也是中文对美国人如此难的主要原因之一。中美文化隔绝太久了。读法语句子“Le président Bush assure le peuple koweitien que le gouvernement américain va continuer à défendre le Koweit contre la menace irakienne”的难度仅仅如同于看懂一些行话而已。其原因不但在于印欧语系之间的相似性，还因为这些表达方式中的核心概念和文化背景是同源的。我们有一样的绘画史，音乐史，乃至历史的历史，后者的意思是一个法国人脑中的各种典型例子以及文化角色的集合和一个美国人一样的。我们熟悉阿蒂尔·兰波，就好象法国人熟悉兰博。事实上，与中美文化的差异比起来，美国和法国文化的区别就类似于Peter Pan花生酱和Skippy花生酱。（译者：好吧，换个例子，就好象可口可乐和百事可乐，两者内容几乎一样……）
Speaking with a Chinese person is usually a different matter. You just can't drop Dickens, Tarzan, Jack the Ripper, Goethe, or the Beatles into a conversation and always expect to be understood. I once had a Chinese friend who had read the first translations of Kafka into Chinese, yet didn't know who Santa Claus was. China has had extensive contact with the West in the last few decades, but there is still a vast sea of knowledge and ideas that is not shared by both cultures.
Similarly, how many Americans other than sinophiles have even a rough idea of the chronology of China's dynasties? Has the average history major here ever heard of Qin Shi Huangdi and his contribution to Chinese culture? How many American music majors have ever heard a note of Peking Opera, or would recognize a pipa if they tripped over one? How many otherwise literate Americans have heard of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, or even Mozi?
What this means is that when Americans and Chinese get together, there is often not just a language barrier, but an immense cultural barrier as well. Of course, this is one of the reasons the study of Chinese is so interesting. It is also one of the reasons it is so damn hard.
和中国人说话往往不一样。你没法谈话中随口提到狄更斯，人猿泰山，开膛手杰克，歌德，或者披头士，同时期望对方总是能明白。我有个中国朋友，他都读过卡夫卡著作最早的中文译文，却仍然不知道Santa Claus是什么。最近几十年来中国和西方接触甚多，然而两者之间仍然有大量的知识和思想差异。
同样地，除了一些哈中的，有多少美国人对中国朝代有个大致概念呢？一个普通的历史系学生听说过秦始皇和他对中国的贡献么？有多少美国音乐系学生听过一丁点京剧，或是能认出来琵琶？多少其他方面博学的美国人听说过鲁迅，巴金？更别提墨子了。
这些意味着当两国人在一起时，不但有语言障碍，还有一个巨大的文化障碍。当然这是学习中文如此有趣的原因之一。这也是中文为啥这么TM难的原因之一。
Conclusion
I could go on and on, but I figure if the reader has bothered to read this far, I'm preaching to the converted, anyway. Those who have tackled other difficult languages have their own litany of horror stories, I'm sure. But I still feel reasonably confident in asserting that, for an average American, Chinese is significantly harder to learn than any of the other thirty or so major world languages that are usually studied formally at the university level (though Japanese in many ways comes close). Not too interesting for linguists, maybe, but something to consider if you've decided to better yourself by learning a foreign language, and you're thinking "Gee, Chinese looks kinda neat."
It's pretty hard to quantify a process as complex and multi-faceted as language-learning, but one simple metric is to simply estimate the time it takes to master the requisite language-learning skills. When you consider all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire -- ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.
How much harder is Chinese? Again, I'll use French as my canonical "easy language". This is a very rough and intuitive estimate, but I would say that it takes about three times as long to reach a level of comfortable fluency in speaking, reading, and writing Chinese as it takes to reach a comparable level in French. An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese.
One could perhaps view learning languages as being similar to learning musical instruments. Despite the esoteric glories of the harmonica literature, it's probably safe to say that the piano is a lot harder and more time-consuming to learn. To extend the analogy, there is also the fact that we are all virtuosos on at least one "instrument" (namely, our native language), and learning instruments from the same family is easier than embarking on a completely different instrument. A Spanish person learning Portuguese is comparable to a violinist taking up the viola, whereas an American learning Chinese is more like a rock guitarist trying to learn to play an elaborate 30-stop three-manual pipe organ.
Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.
There is still the awe-inspiring fact that Chinese people manage to learn their own language very well. Perhaps they are like the gradeschool kids that Baroque performance groups recruit to sing Bach cantatas. The story goes that someone in the audience, amazed at hearing such youthful cherubs flawlessly singing Bach's uncompromisingly difficult vocal music, asks the choir director, "But how are they able to perform such difficult music?"
"Shh -- not so loud!" says the director, "If you don't tell them it's difficult, they never know."
结论
我还能再继续，不过我想如果亲爱的读者们能看到此处，多半他们早就已经同意我的看法。那些学习其他困难语言的人们有他们自己的恐怖故事，我敢肯定。但我仍然能相当自信地断言，对于一个普通美国人，中文比世界上三十多种主要语言（亦即在大学阶段常常学习的语言）中其他任何一种都难得多。这件事也许不会引起语言学家们的兴趣），但它值得你好好考虑一下，如果你决定最好学个外语，想着说“嗯～中文看起来好像不错。”
要量化学习语言这样一个复杂而多层面的过程很难，不过一个量度是掌握必要的语言学习技能的时间。考虑到上述所有的中文学习者必须具备的东西，使用字典，熟悉两三种字母化方案，大致了解汉字系统（包括简繁），这加起来可是很多时间，而你仅仅是在学习如何学习中文。
中文本身要更难多少呢？再次我使用法语作为简单语言的例子。非常粗略和直觉的估计，不过我想说要达到法语中类似的读写流利程度，中文需要你三倍的时间。同样的时间，一个普通美国人多半可以学会流利使用两种拉丁语系的语言。
学习语言也许类似于学习乐器。比如说，虽然口琴有某些精彩的作品，一般而言钢琴学起来要比其他乐器困难而花更多时间。作为类比，可以说我们都是某种乐器的高超演奏家（即我们的母语），而学习同类的乐器则比学习完全不同的乐器容易得多。西班牙人学葡萄牙语类似于小提琴手学习中提琴，而美国人学习中文则更像摇滚吉他手试图学习演奏拥有三个手键盘，三十个音栓的管风琴。
有人说过学习中文是“五年关于谦虚和低调的课程”。我曾经以为这是说五年之后你就能掌握中文，同时学会了谦虚。然而，我现在学习了中文六年，我的结论是，这句话告诉你五年之后中文对你来说仍然是神秘的深渊，不过至少你已经彻头彻尾地学会了低调这个好品质。
仍然有一个令人敬畏的事实，那就是中国人掌握他们的语言相当不错。可能他们就像是那些巴洛克艺术表演团体招收的小孩子们，然后去表演巴赫的康塔塔清唱剧。那个故事里，有个听众十分惊讶于听到这些胖嘟嘟的小孩子们能够如此完美无瑕地演唱，而这些乐曲都是巴赫那些困难的要求严格一丝不苟的作品。他问合唱团指挥，“但这些孩子们怎么能够演唱如此高难度的音乐呢？”
“嘘！小声点！”乐团指挥说道，“如果你不告诉他们这有多难，那他们就永远不知道。”
来自：龙的天空
原文：http://www.lkong.net/thread-379650-1-1.html | 
楼主