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Jun. 27th, 2005 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikThis ("Why Chinese is So Damn Hard") was posted to the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
zhongwen community. I laughed my head off, and felt curiously absolved when I was done doing so... (This doesn't mean I'm abandoning Chinese. But... it's a great relief.)
A few favorite quotes.
"One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it."
I actually think sex is aerobic in a much more straightforward and important sort of way.
"Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile."
Though you develop a curious sort of symbiotic relationship with any dictionary you've used for a while. It's not quite as bad as all that. But it is bad enough to make you frequently want to slit your wrists. Um.
"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."
Though essentially working through major works of literature and philosophy is what I just spent the last year doing. I still like Classical Chinese, and sometimes I can even read it comfortably... and other times the characters will swim in front of my eyes and I will merely feel sadly inadequate and wonder how it is that after all the time I've invested I can still be such an illiterate lump of clay.
zhongwen community. I laughed my head off, and felt curiously absolved when I was done doing so... (This doesn't mean I'm abandoning Chinese. But... it's a great relief.)A few favorite quotes.
"One could say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is aerobic: technically so, but in practical use not the most salient thing about it."
I actually think sex is aerobic in a much more straightforward and important sort of way.
"Chinese is not exactly what you would call a user-friendly language, but a Chinese dictionary is positively user-hostile."
Though you develop a curious sort of symbiotic relationship with any dictionary you've used for a while. It's not quite as bad as all that. But it is bad enough to make you frequently want to slit your wrists. Um.
"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."
Though essentially working through major works of literature and philosophy is what I just spent the last year doing. I still like Classical Chinese, and sometimes I can even read it comfortably... and other times the characters will swim in front of my eyes and I will merely feel sadly inadequate and wonder how it is that after all the time I've invested I can still be such an illiterate lump of clay.
