为什么中文TMD这么难双语阅读.docx

1、为什么中文TMD这么难双语阅读为什么中文TMD这么难? 原作者：David MoserWhy Chinese Is So Damn Hard ? by David Moser University of Michigan Center for Chinese StudiesThe 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

2、 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? Sin

3、ce 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 text

4、books, 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.看到这篇文章的标题，任何有头脑的人第一个问题都会是“难，是对谁而言？”问的有理。说到底，中国人看起来学的还挺顺当的。当中国

5、小孩儿经历那“狗 都嫌的两岁”时，他们用的是中文来把父母们逼疯。几年之后，同样这些孩子就已经在用复杂得不可思议的汉字来歪歪斜斜地写情书和购物清单了。所以我说的 “难”到底是什么意思？既然我早就知道本文的语调将充满牢骚和抱怨，那我最好还是说清楚自己到底是什么意思。我的意思是，对我来说很难，一个以英语为母 语，试图学习中文的成年人。他会经历教科书、磁带、语伴等等这一整套折磨人的繁琐过程。我的“难”是说的对我自己，呃当然还对很多其他西方人，那些花 费了经年累月，在中文的长城上撞到头大的人们（译者：原文“Chinese”同时表示“中文”和“中国的”）。If this were as far as I

6、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 usual

7、ly 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 th

8、at 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 Chinese people. 如果我要说的只有这些，那这些话相当空洞。中文对我来说当然难喽。毕竟，任何外语对非母语人士都很难，对不对？这个嘛，差不多是这样。不过不是所有的外语 对任何学生的难度都是一样的。它取决于你自己的母语。一个法国人学意大利语往往比美国人快，而一个普通美国人掌握德语则多半比一个普通日本人快

9、得多，如此 而已。所以我所谈论的部分观点是指中文很难，相对于反正相对于你有可能想学的几乎其他任何语言。我的意思是中文不但对我们（英语人士）来说难，它在绝 对意义上也是难的。这意味着对于中国人来说，中文也很难。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 s

10、ame 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 privileg

11、ed vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes. 如果你不信，随便问个中国人。绝大多数中国人都会高兴地承认他们的语言很难，可能是地球上最难的。（实际上很多人以此为傲，就好象实际上有些纽约人以居住 在美国最不宜居的城市为傲一样。）可能所有中国人都该因为生为中国人而获得一枚奖牌才是。不管怎样，基本上他们早晚都会意识到他们母语那种珠穆朗玛峰一样 的地位的，当他们站在那至高无上的山峰上，优越地俯视着那些有勇无谋的外国人们在陡峭的山崖上气喘吁吁的时候。

12、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 incompr

13、ehensible 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 correspondin

14、g phrase in Chinese, and you find Gn tinsh yyng 跟天书一样 meaning Its like heavenly script.大家都听过这个公认的说法，那就是如果你考虑英语中的“Its Greek to me”（译者注：原意是“这对我就像希腊文”，引申为“难以理解”。），然后在全世界的语言中寻找一个与之相对应的习语，从而得到一个关于哪个语言最难的 共识。那这样一个语言调查的结果将是中文轻松获得最难解语言的称号。（比如，法语就有这种表达“Cest du chinois”，意为“这是中文”，亦即“这是神马我不懂”。其他语言有类似说法。）那么问题来了，

15、中国人自己认为什么才是最不可能学会的困难语言呢？ 你在中文中寻找类似的习语，然后你找到了“跟天书一样”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 effor

16、t 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 in the world am I doing

17、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 doggednes

18、s and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.Okay, having explained a bit of what I mean by the word, I return to my original question: Why is Chinese so damn hard?这些可不完全是在说笑话，中文那令人心痛的难度是名副其实的。所有那些试图学习这门语言的人们，除了纯粹以此为乐的，都会对学习中极低的投入产出比感到沮 丧。那些实际上正是被这门语言吓人的复杂和难度吸引的家伙，则绝不会失望。不管原因为何，所有中文学习者早晚

19、都会问自己这个问题“我到底为啥在干这个？” 还能记着自己初衷的人会明智的选择立刻放弃，因为没有什么值得付出如此多的痛苦挣扎。而对自己回答说“事已至此，无路可退”的人呢，则有机会成功，因为他 们拥有学习中文必需的素质不见黄河不死心的死钻牛角尖精神。 Ok，解释了一下我的措辞含义之后，让我回到最初的问题：为什么中文这么TM难？ 1. Because the writing system is ridiculous.Beautiful, complex, mysterious - but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first

20、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

21、 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.1. 因为书写系统很不合理优美，复杂，神秘但是莫名其妙。像很多中文学习者一样，我一开始就是被这些汉字所吸引的，它们肯定是世界上最迷人的字符之一。你学中文越多就就 越发现汉字的让人上瘾的魅力。中文汉字的学习可以令人痴迷一生，很快你就每天一滴滴地从汉字的海洋中积累成癖，

22、徒劳地试图建立一点储备，靠着那漏水桶一般 的长期记忆能力。The beauty of the characters is indisputable, but as the Chinese people began to realize the importance of universal literacy, it became clear that these ideograms were sort of like bound feet - some fetishists may have liked the way they looked, but they werent too prac

23、tical for daily use.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 requi

24、res at most a few dozen symbols to write anything in the language. John DeFrancis, in his book The 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 F

25、rench 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 s

26、ystem 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 difficul

27、ties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent foreign learners such as myself.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 t

28、hings like Despite the fact that Chinese has 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, 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 lin

29、e, 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.)汉字的优美是不容置疑的，不过当中国人意识到普及识字的重要性时，

30、有一点就很明显了，这些表意文字有些像裹足小脚可能有些恋物癖喜欢这些小脚，可是它们在日常中并不实用。首先，要学会基本识字要求的汉字就已经是不可理喻的难了。“相对什么而难？”有人可能会再次发问。答案很简单：相对西班牙语，希腊语，俄语，印地语，或者任何只需要最多几十个符号就能完成书写的“正常而理智”的语言。 John DeFrancis在他的书The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy中提到，他的中国同事估计让一个说普通话的人学会读写三千个汉字需要七到八年，而他的法国和西班牙同事估计他们的母语要达到类似水平则是只需一半时间。自然的，这些估计很粗糙，凭印象而已（比如什

31、么算“类似水平”就没说清楚），不过其中寓意是显然的：中文书写系统在绝对程度上比字母书写系统更难学习。在中国，就算是吸收能力处于顶峰的小孩子，他们学起汉字来也比其他国家小孩学习其他文字更费劲。所以想象一下已过青春期的，学习相对缓慢的外国人学习者（比如我）经历的困难吧！大家都听说过中文很难是因为需要掌握巨量的汉字，这一点千真万确。好多畅销书和文章中淡化了这一困难，说什么“尽管中文拥有（10000，25000，或者50000。来，您选个数字）个不同的汉字，你其实只需要学习大约2000个就能读报了”。这是瞎掰。我学习了2000个汉字的时候并不能顺利地读报。我常常每看一行就得查几个字，之后还得冥思苦想文

32、章的意思。（我假定读报中“读”的意思是“阅读并且能基本理解文章意思，而不需要查几十个字先”，不然的话这个说法就没什么好讨论的了。）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. But 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 b