Sunday, May 29, 2011

Why Chinese is better than English

So I have already gotten through my gripe about English grammar, superfluous s's and changing forms of verb. Countless irregular verbs, then there are the irregular plurals. Like one man, two men, one person, two people. After that there is the problem that English has far to many synonmns (words that mean practically the same thing as other words) example: damp, moist, wet, clammy, soggy, soaked, drenched etc. Then there are a lot of variations on basic words depending on if they are used as a noun adjective or verb. Happy- Happyness- Happily Electric-Electrical-Electricity. Apart from the add -ly rule for adverbs there isn't a consistent way to change a word you already know into a verb-adjective or noun.

Chinese has none of these problems if you want to turn a verb into the past tense you add 了 le on the end. You want to talk about lived experience like have done just add 過 guo. Want to turn a statement into a question just add 嗎 ma on the end the spoken question mark. Everything is just a lot more simple.

Then there is my favourite part of Chinese. The way they make words is really simple. They never reach back to an ancient language to make something new. They just put together two characters they already have. For example days of the week 星期一  星期二 星期三 nothing more than week 1, week 2, week 3. Same as months of the year 一月 二月 三月 one month, two month, three month.

How drab and uncreative you say but wait how does one say earth? well you take the word for ground 地 di and the word for ball 球 qiu and you make ground ball or earth -diqiu. Same as computer you take electric 電 (dian) and the word for brain 腦 (nao)    to make electric brain  電腦 or computer. Telephone is 電話(dianhua) or electric talk. Mobile phone is 手機 (shouji) hand machine and a plane is 飛機 (feiji) flying machine. A train is a 火車 (huoche) fire vehicle and a bicycle is a 腳踏車 (jiaotache) foot powered vehicle.  Furniture is 家具 (jiaju) house tool, toys are 玩具 (wanju) play tools, work tools are工具 (gongju) work tools, cutlery is 餐具 (canju) meal tools, kitchenware is  廚具 (chuju) Kitchen tools. Sausages are 香腸 (xiangchang) fragrant intestines. Now to animals; dinosaurs are 恐龍 (konglong) terrible dragons. A giraffe is a 長頸鹿 (changjinglu) long neck deer and a panda is a 熊貓 (xiongmao) bear cat. The list goes on here but you get the idea.

The point is if you learn a long complex word you can break it down and you have just learned several new smaller words. Or if you learn a new long word and it is comprised of smaller words you already know,that word is from there in is incredibly easy to remember. You just think of the translation and the word acts as its own mneumonic (memory device).

So Chinese is hard but it isn't ridiculous. It's flaws are evened out by a heafty set of advantages. I honestly think from a teaching point of view Chinese is far simpler. So don't worry once you get over the hump Chinese has a lot going for it as a language. For anyone considering learning it as a language go for it or as they say around here 加油 jiayou! (add oil/ petrol).

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