资料文章：一位外国成年人学习中文感想Why Chinese Is So Hard(中英对照).doc

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard中文怎么这么难by David MoserUniversity of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies密歇根大学汉学研究中心The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, Hard for whom? A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the terrible twos, its Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by hard? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me - and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.有想法的人看这篇文章题目的第一眼，大概会问，中文对谁而言算难呢？唔，问的挺有道理的。毕竟中国人自己学起来好像还可以啊。当中国的小孩正在度过“狗都嫌弃的两岁”的时候，他们就是用鬼都听不懂的中文把他们的爹妈逼疯的。不过几年过去之后，这帮小孩却可以用复杂到不行的汉字来写情书、写购物清单了。所以我所说的“难”究竟是什么意思呢？开始动笔写这篇文章的时候，我就知道这篇文章肯定会充斥着牢骚和抱怨，那我不妨直截了当的告诉大家我什么意思好了。我所说的“难”，是对于我这种人，这种母语是英语，已经成年，通过课本、磁带、对话伙伴等方式学中文的人。啊！真是一整套即痛苦又没劲的东西。我所说的难，是指对于我很难-当然了，也包括很多其他西方人-那些花了不知道多少年学汉语，但是最后却学得一团糟，烦到想撞墙的西方人。If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty empty one. Of course Chinese is hard for me. After all, any foreign language is hard for a non-native, right? Well, sort of. Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language youre coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what Im contending is that Chinese is hard compared to . well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but its also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for half of East-Asians,even for Chinese people.要是我的文章就到此为止了，那我的陈述也未免太空洞了。中文对我而言当然是极难的，毕竟任何一门外语学起来都不是那么的容易，对不？好吧，可以这么说。对于外语学习者而言，不是所有的外语都一样难。这得看你的母语是什么了。一个法国人学意大利语一般都比美国人学得快，同样美国人掌握德语的平均时间也比日本人短许多，诸如此类。所以我在声明的其实是，中文比起.呃，好吧，几乎比你想到的所有语言都难。我意思是，中文不仅仅是只对我们这种（英语是母语的人）来说很难，对所有人都很难。也就是说，中文对于多半东亚人，甚至中国人来说也很难。If you dont believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New-Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) Maybe all Chinese people deserve a medal just for being born Chinese. At any rate, they generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes.你要是不信的话,那就随便找个中国人问问好了。大部分中国人都会欣然承认中文是很难的，没准儿是这个星球上最难的语言了。（很多人甚至会因此感到自豪，感觉就像一些纽约人为自己住在美国最不宜居住的城市很自豪一样）没准很多中国人巴不得为自己生下来就是中国人而专门弄个奖牌呢。不管怎么说，他们普遍意识到了他们的母语的地位就像珠峰一样。而他们就呆在峰顶上的VIP风景台，笑呵呵的看着笨手笨脚的老外们气喘吁吁的爬着这座汉语珠峰的陡坡。Everyones heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom Its Greek to me and search for equivalent idioms in all the worlds languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible language. (For example, the French have the expression Cest du chinois, Its Chinese, i.e., Its incomprehensible. Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding phrase in Chinese, and you find “Gen tianshu yyang”meaning Its like heavenly script.很多人都听说过这么一回事儿。有一句英语谚语是这么说的-“这对我简直是希腊语啊！” 你要是在世界上所有的语言中找出跟这句话意思相近的谚语，并且想借此来搞清楚各国人民对于全球最难语言的看法的话，那么让我告诉你，这个调查的结果就是汉语-汉语轻易的得到了由各国人民赐予的“典型的无法理解的语言”这一荣誉称号。（比如说，法语里有一个词组Cest du chinois-“这是汉语”，即“完全看不懂”。别的语言也有类似的说法。）那么问题来了：中国人认为难到不行的语言是什么呢？你可以找找在中文里对应的词组，然后你找到了这么一句话：“跟天书一样”。意为“天上的神仙才看得懂”。There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves Why the hell am I doing this? Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say Ive come this far - I cant stop now will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.有个语言学里的故事倒是实话：汉语这种难到让人想死的语言，压根就不配这么多人口使用它。对于那些学汉语的过程中痛苦到不行，完全体会不到汉语学习过程中纯粹的快乐的人来说，学习汉语极低的投入产出比总会让他们伤心不已。那些被汉语惊人的学习难度而吸引过来学汉语的人是绝对不会失望的。不管他们学习汉语的初衷为何，每一个学汉语的人，或早或晚都会这么问自己：“我他娘到底为啥要遭这份罪?” 那些还记得自己最初的目标的人，会明智的半路放弃学习汉语，因为没有什么值得让他们这么痛苦。那些说“哎呀我都已经学了这么久了，我可不能半途而废啊”的人，还是有一点儿机会成功的。他们像僵尸一样毫无意识的坚持了下去，而且总体上看，他们缺乏理智。Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I return to my original question: Why is Chinese so damn hard?好吧，说了这么多，算是解释清楚了一点点我想表达的意思，有点跑题，我得回到正题了。还是我一开始提的问题：中文怎么这么难?1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.1.因为汉语的文字体系简直荒谬。Beautiful, complex, mysterious - but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first attracted to Chinese because of the writing system, which is surely one of the most fascinating scripts in the world. The more you learn about Chinese characters the more intriguing and addicting they become. The study of Chinese characters can become a lifelong obsession, and you soon find yourself engaged in the daily task of accumulating them, drop by drop from the vast sea of characters, in a vain attempt to hoard them in the leaky bucket of long-term memory.美丽、复杂、神秘-但是荒谬。和其他学习汉语的学生一样，我一开始是被汉字吸引，才对汉语感兴趣的。汉字简直就是世上最吸引人的文字之一。你学的汉字越多，你就越觉得汉字真的是很吸引人、很有意思。对汉字的学习可以让人痴迷一生，而且过不了多久你就会发现，你每天一点一点积累下来的汉字，就像无尽汉字海洋中的一滴滴水，你试着把它们囤进一个叫作“长期记忆”的娄里，却发现这个娄是漏的。所有你付出的巨大努力最后都成了徒劳无功。The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the Chinese people began to realize the importance of universal literacy, it became clear that theseideogramswere sort of like bound feet - some fetishists may have liked the way they looked, but they werent too practical for daily use.汉字之美，无可争辩。但是，随着中国人意识到全民识字的重要性，表意文字的局限性也变得显而易见。有些汉字的死忠可能喜欢汉字的样式，但是汉字太繁杂，在日常生活中并不太实用。For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough characters to become functionally literate. Again, someone may ask Hard in comparison to what? And the answer is easy: Hard in comparison to Spanish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, or any other sane, normal language that requires at most a few dozen symbols to write anything in the language. John DeFrancis, in his bookThe Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, reports that his Chinese colleagues estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters, whereas his French and Spanish colleagues estimate that students in their respective countries achieve comparable levels in half that time. Naturally, this estimate is rather crude and impressionistic (its unclear what comparable levels means here), but the overall implications are obvious: the Chinese writing system is harder to learn, in absolute terms, than an alphabetic writing system. Even Chinese kids, whose minds are at their peak absorptive power, have more trouble with Chinese characters than their little counterparts in other countries have with their respective scripts. Just imagine the difficulties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent fo under my beltreign learners such as myself.首先，就算你只是想获得最基本的读写能力，需要你记忆的汉字也会非常多，难度很大。有的人又要问了：“你说的难，是跟什么比起来算难啊？”那么答案很简单：跟西班牙语、希腊语、俄语、印地语，或者其他的，至多只要几十个字母组合一下，就可以表达出所有意思的语言比起来，汉语的文字系统学起来都要更难。约翰德范克，在他的著作汉语：事实和幻想里面提到，他的中国同事估计，一个母语是汉语的人，需要花上七到八年，才能达到读写3000个汉字的水平。而他的法国和西班牙同事则估计，在他们的国家，如果想要达到同等的读写水平，只需要花上中国人所花费的时间的一半就可以了。自然，这样的估计是非常粗略以及主观的，不过这样的估计，整体上带给我们的启示还是显而易见的：比起那些表音文字，汉语的文字系统绝对更难学。甚至是那些处于接受事物最快的阶段的中国小孩子，比起别的国家的同龄小伙伴，他们对于自己母语的文字也有更多的疑问。连记东西最快的小孩子都如此，你就可以想象到，像我这样的已经到了后青春期的岁数还在学汉语的外国学生，学起来是有多么的慢了。Everyone has heard that Chinese is hard because of the huge number of characters one has to learn, and this is absolutely true. There are a lot of popular books and articles that downplay this difficulty, saying things like Despite the fact that Chinese has 10,000, 25,000, take your pick separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper. Poppycock. I couldnt comfortably read a newspaper when I had 2,000 characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, and even after that I had trouble pulling the meaning out of the article. (I take it as a given that what is meant by read in this context is read and basically comprehend the text without having to look up dozens of characters; otherwise the claim is rather empty.)每个人都听说过中文挺难的，因为要记忆的字实在太多了。这个传闻确实是真的。市面上很多书和文章都大大低估了记忆汉字的难度。这些文章宣称“尽管汉语里面有10000/25000个字，但是你只需要记住2000个字，就能够读懂中文报纸了。”屁话。我要是只认识2000个汉字，那我根本没办法通顺的把报纸读下来。每行新闻总有几个字我不认识，我还得去翻翻字典看看它们啥意思。甚至就算是我把每个字代表的意思都查出来了，我还是读不懂整篇文章。（这里我把“阅读”理解成“在不用总是翻字典的情况下，阅读并基本理解文章的内容”，否则的话，阅读所指的东西未免也太空泛了。）This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones.4But what such accounts dont tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words up and tight doesnt mean you know the word uptight.) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts. In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS is not going to get very far if they dont know the words jacuzzi or phlebitis.这个谎言被编出来的依据是，你要是仔细观察汉字的出现频率，你会发现报纸上面95%以上的汉字都是在2000个常用汉字范围内的。但是人家没告诉你，就算你认识这些字，他们拼在一块儿组成一个词语，你又不认识了。（为了说明这个问题，拿英语打个比方吧，你知道up和tight这两个词什么意思，不代表你知道它们的组合词uptight什么意思）另，只要是学过外语的人都懂，在一个句子里，你可能觉得每个词你都认识，但是如果连成一个句子，你就没法掌握整个句子是什么意思了。阅读理解这东西绝不是你词汇量大就牛了，没这么简单。你必须有那么一种语感，能在不同的上下文里搞清楚词和词是怎么组合搭配的。还有啊，就算你在给定的文本里明白95%的汉字的含义，但是你看不懂的那5%，一般都正好是这段文本里至关重要的重点。要是有个母语非英语的读者，读到一篇题目是浴缸对防治静脉炎有何作用的文章，如果他不知道浴缸 或者静脉炎是什么意思的话，这句话他是看不大懂的。The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius toLu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just cant read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I cant skim to save my life. This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).对中文学习者来说，阅读障碍一般是一个敏感的问题。我们之中，有多少人有勇气站在一帮同事面前，大声读一篇随便选的中文文章呢？学生和老师们害怕丢脸，而且有些自卑情结，这就导致了他们在中文的学习上形成了某种“你懂的”的莫名默契-大家都假装承认，要是自己够勤奋的话，那么只要学四年中文，就能分分钟看得懂孔子和鲁迅的著作，除了极个别烦人的生僻字要查查字典之外根本不会卡壳（当然了，要查也是查中国人用的新华字典）。至于其他人嘛，对于学习中文所面对的困难就更坦诚一点。前几天我的一个学了十年汉语的研究生同学跟我讲：“我的研究真的遇到了很大的阻力，因为我真的真的读不懂中文啊！我看了一个小时书才看了两三页的样子，而且为了保命，我不能略读。”这话要是从一个学了十年法国文学的学生嘴里说出来，那可真叫人震惊，不过我倒总是从我们汉学中心的同事的嘴里听到类似的话（至少是在他们搞了一堆青岛啤酒，边喝边哀嚎论文的进展有多慢的时候）A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task - never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.我的老师有次跟我说起了他和他的同事有时候会玩的一个游戏。这个游戏需要你去图书馆里的亚洲文学馆，找到放中文书籍的地方，然后从书架上随便抽一本中文书下来，接着比试谁能第一个搞清楚这本书是讲什么的。只要是在图书馆里的东亚文学馆工作过的人都可以证明这个游戏真的超难-无需介意看书的时候有看不懂的地方。还有些没什么耐心，一上来就想享受博大精深的中华文化盛宴的初学者，最后也不得不在教科书的例题里痛苦挣扎，至少在学习汉语的头几年里会是这样。The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels - La nause by Sartre, Voltaires Candide, Ltranger by Camus - plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage sale.学习中文跟学习其他西方语言的比较结果是引人瞩目的。我在学习一年的法语之后，已经能看懂不少了。我可以看萨特写的恶心，伏尔泰写的老实人，加缪写的局外人-还能看懂无数的报纸，杂志，漫画书啥的。确实也是做了好多的功课，不过我不觉得过程很痛苦。我真正需要的东西，不过仅仅是一本还不错的词典，还有在跳蚤市场买的一本破破烂烂的法语语法教程。This kind of sink or swim approach just doesnt work in Chinese. At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadnt yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldnt read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the Peoples Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, Im still not at a level where I can actually read it without an English translation to consult. (By read it, I mean, of course, read it for pleasure. I suppose if someone put a gun to my head and a dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, The difficulty of memorizing a Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is such that a rigid economy of mental effort is imperative. This is, if anything, an understatement. With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end.可这种“学的好不好全靠自己”的学习方法在汉语里根本行不通啊。我在学习汉语的第三年快结束的时候，还没完完整整的读过一本小说。我觉得实在是太难了，读起来特别的慢，而且我觉得这事做起来挺没意义的。看报纸也是这样，读起来真是让人生畏。读一篇文章，我每看十个字就得查一下字典，要不这篇文章根本读不下去。而且我经常在扫一眼人民日报的头版之后发现，就连好多新闻的主标题是什么意思我都搞不大懂。当时有人建议我读一读红楼梦，他还送给我一份精美的三卷版原著。哈哈哈我简直是笑了。那本书现在还躺在我的书架上，像个洋洋得意的胖菩萨。只有大概前20页被我标满了潦草的解释和备注，剩下的部分我动都没动。学了6年汉语之后，我还是没办法在不查字典的情况下阅读红楼梦（这里所指的阅读，我的意思自然是开开心心的阅读。我猜要是有人拿着一把枪顶在我脑袋上，然后给我一本汉译英字典逼着我读，我也是能读下去的）当初我一头扎进浩瀚的中华文化之海的行为已经不能用鲁莽来形容了，而应该用反生产力来形容。就像乔治肯尼迪在他的书中写的一样，“记忆汉字的难度，跟学习其他欧洲语言相比，就像是对已经病入膏肓的经济作出看似必要的终极方法一样。”毕竟有被淹死的危险，因此建议学生们在浅水区踩踩水就好了，不要再想着走向深处了。As if all this werent bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese writing system is that there are two (mercifully overlapping) sets of characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the simplified characters adopted by the Peoples Republic of China in the late 1950s and early 60s. Any foreign student of Chinese is more or less forced to become familiar with both sets, since they are routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas. This linguistic camels-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese, who at this point would gladly trade places with Sisyphus. But since Chinese people themselves are never equally proficient in both simplified and complex characters, there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set to the partial exclusion the other. In fact, there is absolutely no shame in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.似乎所说的一切还不够糟糕呢。其实汉语书写体系还有另外一个荒谬的地方，就是汉字有两种形式（幸亏两种汉字有不少一样的地方）：仍然在香港和台湾使用的繁体中文，和在上世纪50年代末，60年代初被中华人民共和国正式采用的简体中文。学汉语的外国学生或多或少地被迫了解过这两种汉字形式，因为会经常接触到海峡两岸的教材和材料。这简直就像是压倒骆驼的最后一根稻草，让本就已经负担沉重的汉语学习者更加疲惫不堪。不过嘛，反正他们中国人自己也做不到同时精通这两种汉字形式，所以如果你最终把注意力完全放