Don't get rid of Chinese characters!

... but do get rid of learning to write all of them, especially by rote!

I came across this article by Victor Mair twice this week, once when checking the context for a Volokh Conspiracy post which my father sent to me, and then again when it was posted in a WeChat group for alumni of my college in Asia. In both cases, Mair's post was being used to postulate that Chinese characters may be outmoded, an argument spelled out by Geoffrey Pullum here.

I disagree with this conclusion. Speaking as a second language learner of Chinese, I never bothered to learn the writing of the characters. I agree that starting from Pinyin and learning to read first is optimal, and could almost certainly be employed to decrease the amount of drudgery for first-language learners of acquiring the written language. However, I personally would hate to see people not learning characters at all, since I find them beautiful and fascinating; they were and continue to be the largest source of my interest in learning Chinese in the first place.

The Chinese equivalent of "antidisestablishmentarianism"

Racism and the foreign experience in China

Last night¹ was another night of involuntarily being made to play the foreigner. At a "cross-cultural New Year's" party, I was the only non-Chinese person. The hostess went out of her way to talk to me in English, and if I was talking to my friend Eric in English, told other people that he was 'translating' for me. A few people at the party remembered my name, but generally I was referred to 外国人 wàiguórén - foreigner, or literally, "person from an outside country".

It's incredibly psychologically damaging to be made an outsider - regardless of the intent. I have no doubt that the hostess was not intending to be at all offensive. She probably assumed I was in on the joke. Perhaps if I were of a different temperament I might have been. But the effect for me was to make me feel like I was under a constant spotlight as the outsider.

Living abroad has proved the distinction between intelligence and wisdom, in that I've come to understand many things that my intelligence could not lead me to grasp a few years before. Racism is one of them. I'm pretty sure that the white Americans who complain about reverse racism - I used to be one of them - are wrong. Because it's impossible to understand what it feels like to be in the minority when you're in the majority.

Language

On Bitcoin [non-China]

I'm a bitcoin optimist, for several reasons. One of them is that I experience the inefficiencies of the current monetary system on a routine basis as someone who lives in a foreign country. Every time I want to transfer the money I make in Chinese RMB to my American bank account, I have to pay PayPal a 4% transaction fee. I hate having to use such an expensive way to transfer money, but it's better than the alternatives! (See how to use PayPal to do so here.) Compared with a wire transfer, at least PayPal is instant, and avoids the wire transfer fees from a bank which would come out to nearly as much.

PayPal's fees. 0.5%-2% sounds nice. The problem is, PayPal doesn't allow you to link a Chinese bank account!

Why should transferring money from one country to another cost so damn much? This is one of the questions that Bitcoin sets out to address. With Bitcoin, there's no banks holding your money and charging high fees to send it somewhere else. Once you own bitcoin, it's yours.

On knowledge and the meaning of "ex aequali" [non-China]

The advantages which Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia have brought to the curious mind are enormous. The amount of knowledge available to me at any instant is greater by a thousandfold than in the pre-internet era. I use Google and Wikipedia every day, and can't imagine going back to paper encyclopias and libraries.

Yet, as Socrates reminds us in the Meno, not all facts available to us are truely knowledge. Some, Socrates says, should rather be considered merely true opinions, since we believe them to be true without knowing why they are true.

But what the internet brings us is not even true opinions, but merely the capability to acquire such opinions. That is, it hasn't actually made us more knowledgeable, it's just given us the tools to more easily acquire opinions.

The Kunming incident & thoughts on terrorism

It was pretty scary to hear about this incident from a friend of mine. I've been to Kunming - my Facebook profile picture used to feature the train station where the shootings took place - and I'm sure for him, as someone from Kunming, it was far worse. However, my opinions on the matter may be different from those of my friend, or of most people.

Below is a translation of a short article by China's state-affiliated Xinhua News Network, followed by my thoughts on terrorism.

Do Chinese characters hold more meaning than Western phonetic alphabets?

Do Chinese characters hold more meaning than Western phonetic alphabets?

I just had an interesting argument about this with my friend (and roommate) Chris. Chris argued that, whereas Chinese characters indicate meaning, English words merely indicate pronunciation. Based mostly on having read The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, I said that this was a myth.

We ended up looking up two more-or-less random words to compare the two languages. For Chinese we used "福”, fú (pronounced "foo"), the second character of "幸福", happiness, which by itself means something like "fortunate". In English we used "assiduous", a word neither of us knew, taken from a list of SAT words.

A few Chinese characters

Here are my arguments for why the Chinese character is no more inherently meaningful than the English word:

*In both languages, the etymology of the word, and hence the meaning, is not obvious. "福" comes either from a pictographic compound of a jar 畐 of wine on the altar 礻, where each of the two pieces contributes to the meaning, or from a pictophonetic compound of 礻 (spirit) + 畐 fu, where one part contributes the meaning and the other part the sound. In either case, although one can see how the two parts 礻 and 畐 combine to make the full character, the meaning of the character is not something one could guess simply from looking at its parts - although there is some relation. Meanwhile, "assiduous", interestingly, comes ultimately from the Latin roots "ad" + "sedere". The former root means "to", while the latter means "sit" (as in "sedentary"); hence the word's root meaning is "to sit down", and thus to be continuously occupied at one's work. Just like in Chinese, the modern meaning is not something you would necessarily guess from the parts; but once you know the logic of its composition, the word's etymology makes a lot of sense!

*Chris, however, maintained that 福's meaning is more obvious, because it is based on a radical, 礻(shì, "sure"), which forms the left hand side of the character. However, I think the same can be said of "assiduous". It is a compound word composed of a prefix ad and a root sedere. It's true that this composition is not obvious to us in English, but neither is it so obvious in Chinese! It's only because Chris and I have been studying Chinese for so long¹, and because we both have do so by learning the etymologies of characters, that it seems obvious to us. If I were to teach someone English from scratch, I might do so by starting with Latin and Greek roots, and hopefully get them to the point where the "ad" in "assiduous" would be equally obvious to them!

The lucky 福 character is often seen on red squares like this one²

*Chis also argued that the basic components of a Chinese character, the 部首 or radicals (in this case, 礻, 一，口，and 田), have their own meaning, whereas in English the basic components are letters, which have no inherent meaning. But I think the better analogy is between letters and the strokes of a Chinese character. To look up or to write a character, you have to write each piece with a certain number of strokes, and then put the pieces together. Similarly, in English you have to write each part and then put the parts together. Just like one stroke of a Chinese character has no meaning, neither does one letter of an English word.

*But what about the switch from "ad" to "as"? Doesn't English obscure the nature of its roots? But in fact the same thing has happened with the Chinese character. The 礻radical is not written the same way as the full form, 示，and only after learning that the two are the same can one make the connection! Chinese, like English, requires study to understand word composition.

In sum, I think in both of these example cases the meaning of the word can be taken from the way it was written, but only with some research. I'm willing to grant Chris that deducing the meaning may be easier in Chinese, on the whole; but I would be interested to see how people who studied English with my etymologyical method would fare on English words. Regardless, my main point is that despite the strangeness of its appearance, the Chinese writing system may differ from that of other languages only in degree and not in kind. Which is not to say that those differences aren't mindblowingly fascinating or that they don't make Chinese the most intellectually exciting subject I've ever encountered!

---

1 Chris has actually only been studying for a year or so, which is really impressive.^↩
2 Image credit: 阿德 on Flickr^↩↩

The strange and wonderful Chinese language

The Most Interesting Language

Chinese is by far the most interesting language I've ever studied. I learned a bit of biblical Hebrew as a kid; got pretty good at Spanish in middle and high school; studied Ancient Greek and French in college; and picked up a bit of Arabic and Latin along the way. But nothing has captivated my attention to nearly the same degree as Chinese has.

Indeed, picking up the language is a large part of my reason for coming to China in the first place.¹ I speak and study Chinese every day, and I continue to find it fascinating. Here are a few examples of why.

"Do You Like It?"

The idea that language and culture are intertwined is one that I've always been skeptical of. I mean, do you really need to read up on French history or cuisine to get fluent in French? However, today I was surprised to find myself agreeing with the sentiment of that expression, after my mom asked me at lunch how to translate the expression "好吃吗？" into English. Literally, this is a simple statement: "[Is it] good to eat?"

Today's dinner: 好吃吗？非常好吃！(Hell yeah!) I ate three of those plates by myself.

But I realized that "is it good to eat?", or "is the food good?", or any such variation, aren't something we say very often in English – particularly when we're eating at home. The reason, it seems to me, is one of politeness. If you don't like something that your mom (or better yet, your friend's mom) made, it's much less awkward to say that "I don't like it", than it is to say that the food itself is bad, and perhaps, by extension, that your host is a bad cook.

So as I told my host mom, I think the best way to translate "好吃吗？" is, "do you like it?" The choice of translation is informed by knowledge of the culture. Maybe there's something to that saying after all.²

On the use (and abuse) of chopsticks

The bane of my existence during my first two weeks in China was the CHOPSTICKS. Anyone who thinks that because they managed to follow the directions on the red wrapper and eat some food with the wooden chopsticks at the Chinese restaurant, they are qualified to go to China and dine with the Chinese, is dead wrong. First because those cheap wooden chopsticks are much easier to use than the metal or porcelain ones that homes and good restaurants in China use, the equivalent of kiddie spoons in America: less risky but a pain in the ass if you were to use them all the time (who wants to get splinters from their eating utensils?).

But more importantly, there's a world of difference between using chopsticks to eat from your own plate and using them to eat from communal dishes. Everything in China, or at least in Beijing (with the exception of food at fast-food places), is served on communal plates. When I drop food here – as I still frequently do – it's generally not into my own bowl (communal plates, personal bowls for rice or noodles, is how my host family does it) but onto the table, where, often after splattering me with sauce, it lies as a testament to my inexpertise. Trying to pick it back up just makes things worse: it's almost impossible to pick up something that's lying flat on the table in one try, so I can only succeed in doing so after several seconds of pushing it around on the table, during which everyone else is watching me with dismay.

It's not that I haven't improved with using chopsticks. After two months here, I've pretty much gotten used to using them, and the muscles in my right hand have stopped aching after every meal. Indeed, after my host dad gave me several lessons to correct my improper grip (rather than using the index finger alone to move the top one, as I was taught by the chopstick wrapper, you should use both index and middle fingers for maximum traction), I've gotten a lot of compliments on my technique. Indeed, just as most Chinese people's English handwriting is better than that of American native speakers, so my own chopstick technique is better than that of many Chinese people. Interestingly, there are quite a few Chinese people, in my experience mostly women, who hold their chopsticks in what they themselves acknowledge is an entirely wrong way， with the chopsticks crossed in the palm of the hand rather than parallel. The two people I asked about this both said that their parents just put the chopsticks in their hands when they were little and left them to figure out how to use them, and that they've been doing it wrong ever since.

But despite the orthodoxy of my technique, the use of chopsticks remains an effort to me, something which I have to constantly concentrate on or else fail spectacularly at. (Eating in public sometimes feels like running the gauntlet.) With a fork and a knife in my hand I feel comfortable and stable; I trust their solidity and stability. I still don't feel that way about chopsticks, and perhaps never will.

That said, I must admit that Chinese food is fantastic, generally both pretty healthy and very tasty. In particular, Chinese dumplings and meat pies (of the vegetarian variety) are one of the most consistently delicious foods I've ever had. So if the cuisine came about in conjunction with the utensils, there's something to be thankful for.

The real thing

On my way to China (republished)

Thursday 2/16/12 6:30PM EST

I arrive at JFK's terminal 5 with 3 hours to spare before my flight leaves. Though I had planned to get some last-minute things done before leaving the US, I find myself caught up in the melting-pot atmosphere of the terminal and decide to wander around for a while.

The people at this international terminal are a fascinating mix of 1) American travelers about to depart, 2) foreigners returning home, and 3) airline personnel. In the first category are some young people standing around in a circle. I decide I'm gonna infiltrate them. I walk up to them and stand there as if I belong; nobody says anything. However, their purpose remains obscure until an older woman arrives and starts talking to them in French about their passports. As it turns out, they are New York high school students taking a trip to France for their French class. Despite taking French, they don't seem to understand the woman, but I think most of them are just pretending to be stupid to avoid the embarrassment of seeming intelligent. Par for the course for high-schoolers.

Continuing on in my wanderings, I encounter a group of Asian women in matching blue dresses, all wearing heavy lipstick. I later find out that these are the stewardesses on my flight. I also talk to a hostess for Air France, curious to determine the truth of the stereotype that French natives don't like speaking to people who aren't fluent in French (which I am not). The stewardess, unexpectedly, is not from France: she's an American, and as a foreigner herself, is able to confirm the stereotype from her own experience. However, I have yet to ask a French native to get their perspective on the matter. Perhaps the perceived slights that have led to the stereotype are merely impersonal Gallic arrogance.

I don't get a chance to talk to any of the people in the third category, foreigners returning home. Perhaps I avoid bothering them because they are neither culturally familiar nor paid to talk to me. Nevertheless, walking around among these three groups of world travelers makes me very happy. I feel blessed to enjoy not only new experiences, but also foreign languages, which I see as the key to understanding foreign cultures.

I would like to spend longer in the terminal but need to attend to my procrastinated pre-departure duties. Once through security I make a brief stop at the duty-free store and consider buying some Jamaican rum which they have samples of (it is very flavorful) but decide not to risk the alcoholic associations. I arrive at my gate and make some last-minute phone calls before suspending my phone service*. I then debate for a ridiculously long time about whether or not to spend $13.99 on a neck pillow. I finally decide against it but the decision is agonizingly marginal. I've noticed that I have a hard time deciding how highly to value my own short-term comfort against such goods as money and knowledge (the paradigm of the latter case being, should I watch TV or force myself to do Chinese flashcards?). It's hard to come up with a good weigh to way such disparate goods against each other.

I notice something strange while at the gate, but don't really think about until I'm aboard the plane. Almost everybody on my flight is Asian. Why is this? Do Chinese people travel to the United States much more than vice versa? Or was there something about this particular flight that made it better for those returning than for those starting a trip? I remain puzzled.

My neighbor on the plane is a Chinese man, late 30s, returning from a business trip in NYC. I watch him texting using a handwriting IME and am struck by the beauty of his writing. I wonder whether Chinese penmanship is as much a skill pertaining to the older generations as English penmanship is? The ability to write an elegant cursive hand is something I particularly envy people like the Founding Fathers. By contrast, the cursive I was taught in school is lame and wimpy-looking. I renew my resolve to someday learn a manly cursive script.

On the plane, the stewardesses and the captain speak in both Chinese and English, but the former is the default. One of the stewardesses even greets me with "Ni hao!", despite the fact that I'm not only white but have facial hair. (Beards, from what I've seen, are essentially nonexistent among Chinese men.) Moreover, all the talk from the passengers around me is in Mandarin. Though I understand very little, simply listening to the language is awesome and I look forward to spending time in an environment where the pressure is on me to speak and understand the language.

China awaits, and with it Chinese. I couldn't tell you which one I'm more excited about.