Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard Summary

Chinese learning bristles with difficulties to many foreign learners. In David Moser’s article, “Why Chinese is so damn hard”, he gives nine reasons why it is difficult to learn Chinese. He thinks there are many confusing aspects in Chinese such as strange writing system and confusing tones that Chinese might be the most difficult language in the world. For other languages like French or Spanish, non-native learners can easily acquire without much but it takes twice or triple of the time for learners to understand simple words if they learn Chinese. Thus, the author believes that Chinese learning is a daunting process and one will choose to give up unless he is very interested in this language. He thinks that Chinese people should be thankful that they are born Chinese as they do not have to learn their native language. It is argued that Chinese is hard to learn because the writing system just ain’t very phonetic. It seems that

The relationship between written form and spoken form in Chinese is relatively complicated because Chinese characters are created by various principles. There are four major principles for Chinese characters construction, including pictographs, ideographs, logical aggregates and phonetic complexes (Lu, 2006). Among these principles, phonetic complexes comprise most of the Chinese characters which account for over 80 percent of the character construction by combining the meaning of one character and the pronunciation of another character (Tsao &Wang, 1983). Many meaning components in Chinese characters have tangible meanings and provide great aids to learners. For instance, the semantic part of the character 洋 reminds readers of its watery association for the meaning of ocean and its phonetic part (羊) indicates its pronunciation (joeng4). It shows that Hanzi can facilitate dual processing to sound and meaning to a certain extent (Olson & Torrance, 2009,