David Moser on the Struggle to Create a Modern Chinese Language

Author Moser astutely points out that the use of Chinese characters is a serious impediment to soft power . Chinese will never replace English as the international lingua franca .

The Chinese child's intensive interaction with Chinese character formation and learning significantly impacts their cognitive and social development. The discipline required to 'imprint' character recognition and the inflexible nature of the teaching process to support this written language education imbues an acceptance of rote learning and the belief in a need for consensus in social communication.

I spent two years studying Chinese at a major university -- in middle age, and it was a most remarkable experience of language -- I speak three European languages, it showed me what a language could be. While I do not know the history of Mandarin Chinese, I do know that memorizing Chinese was especially hard, and not just for associating sound with pictogram: Chinese seemed especially hard because of the rather limited numbers of sounds and syllables, so that I often felt as if I was swimming in a huge caldron of syllable minestrone with no easy handles on whatever might differentiate one nugget from the next and make for such a huge vocabulary.
Still, a remarkable and deeply rewarding experience for anyone interested in languages. I wish I had gone farther. It will seem sad, even if useful, for that huge nation to reach a simpler way to be literate.

It’s disappointing to read this overly exaggerated characterization of the differences among the Chinese dialects, especially from a psycholinguist with 30 years of experience in China. Even the phonetic differences between some of the dialects are indeed vast, their lexical, semantic and grammatical differences are minor and have been mutually intelligible for about 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty. The language does evidently require more effort to learn, but it is no longer a severe impediment to literacy, which is over 99% among 15-25 year olds today according to UNESCO. The overall literacy rate is 96.4%, which means that only under 50 million cannot read. So, the claim that 300-400 million still cannot speak OR READ Mandarin (Putonghua) is simply incorrect, even though it is probably true that this many people cannot speak Mandarin. Mr. Moser’s book may be more nuanced, but a number of the claims in this interview are rather misleading.

" There are still 300 to 400 million people who cannot speak or read Putonghua easily." per Mr. David Moser.

I may not be able to speak Putonghua, but I can certainly read and write Chinese words. Please understand the Chinese writing is the same, only the speaking dialects are different.

The character Mr. Moser used as an example is from classical Chinese which is not relevant in modern mainland China. The simplified character is much easier to recognize and remember. This is not to say that writing in Chinese is far more time consuming than learning to speak or listen, but one of the acheivements of the Revolution was to simplify the written language which had a vast effect on literacy levels.

The Author seems to imply that a phonetic writing system is beneficial, as if this is a goal the Chinese people should strive for. The Chinese character system is indeed difficult to learn but is a very powerful form of written communication, far more expressive in many ways than a phonetic system. Unlike in English, where we combine nouns, adjectives, and verbs to create a sentence, each Chinese character is a living entity embodying all these parts of speech. And when several characters are combined, it is more powerful yet. It is as integral to Chinese culture as their food and art, and inseparable from what it means to be Chinese. Therein the controversy surrounding the simplified characters introduced by the Communists as compared to traditional, or complex, characters used in Taiwan and reflecting the long history of the language.

This article is nothing but the most blatant orientalism. Chinese ideographs constitute one of the most culturally rich systems of communication combining the aesthetics of the culture of the brush with a multidimensional system of cultural allusion. It is not entirely arbitrary as some of these commentators imply. Combining characters to form compounds or even constructing complex single characters has a certain allusive logic that makes it easier as one learns more and more. An intellectual tradition easily comparable to others such as our western one was successfully conducted using this marvelous system of communication for much of recorded history and it has not functioned as a barrier literacy in any real sense. In any case achieving literacy equivalent to that of non college educated people in other societies including our own was never that much of a problem. One might as well wonder how one could convey complex thought with our silly little alphabet. The questions raised in this article do not have content when stripped of naïve provincial assumptions on the one hand or post colonial cultural defensiveness on the other.

Written Chinese does in fact have a prominent phonetic element which, along with the so-called classifier element, makes learning to read and write the language - at least for native and student speakers of the Mandarin language - somewhat easier than this article suggests. For example, the syllable liao includes, but is not limited to, characters that share the phonetic element 尞 such as 療，寮，瞭，撩 (there are many more for this sound alone), each with its own meaning indicated by its respective classifier element. The somewhat phonetic aspect of the language may not look easy, but it should not be ignored.

It’s disappointing to read this overly exaggerated characterization of the differences among the Chinese dialects, especially from a psycholinguist with 30 years of experience in China. Even the phonetic differences between some of the dialects are indeed vast, their lexical, semantic and grammatical differences are minor and have been mutually intelligible for about 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty. The language does evidently require more effort to learn, but it is no longer a severe impediment to literacy, which is over 99% among 15-25 year olds today according to UNESCO. The overall literacy rate is 96.4%, which means that only under 50 million cannot read. So, the claim that 300-400 million still cannot speak OR READ Mandarin (Putonghua) is simply incorrect, even though it is probably true that this many people cannot speak Mandarin. Mr. Moser’s book may be more nuanced, but a number of the claims in this interview are rather misleading.

China is complex and is very small and very large. The small is springing ‘existence’ from the family outward to the community and eventually to the nation and China as the large. Along the way are biases as one village or providence is ranked well above the next entity, but face China against the Other and there is overwhelming unity. The Chinese can not right off understand each other as dialect and local pronunciation flavor Putonghua or so-called Mandarin. My Hunan wife, a Chinese teacher, must repeat herself often to get Beijing understanding.
Language scholars had Marx well convinced to adapt Pinyin at one point as national scripted language but his model, Stalin, said No stay with traditional Chinese, perhaps seeing the opening of that door to a broader world for his fellow Communist partners as a threat.
The children are all studying English, an unwise use of class room time in most cases.

There is no doubt that putonghua is difficult to learn, but school children in China do not have a choice (they don't have the luxury of choosing English). With regard to the 300-400 million people mentioned in this article being unable to speak or read putonghua, I would assume they are the older generation. I would estimate that 90% of school children in China would be able to speak putonghua. The government has done the right thing in promoting putonghua to unify the country. China has never been more united as it is now. If digitization is saving Chinese now, what it means is Chinese is now a modern language and that the fears of Chinese linguists of 1913 were unfounded. In other words, the Chinese language has stood up.

I have no idea what the author is talking about. I was in China until age 9 and had no problems learning how to read and write, no need for his pity party. we were taught both the characters and pinyin, which is now standardized. the simplified chinese significantly reduced the number of strokes needed for each character, it's actually Taiwan that still use the older more complex version. Also, the characters aren't randomly formed, it's visually than phonetically based, like hieroglyphics. for example, every word related to water contains the base character representing water. Every word related to wood contains the symbol for wood (which actually looks like a simplified tree). While the characters require more memorization, the grammar rules are simpler. There's no past, present, and future tenses for verbs and no male or female assigned to objects (french). What China needs is free k-12 rather than language changes. Also chinese kids are learning English because their parents want them to, not because chinese is too hard for them. Chinese people atm are obsessed with western culture, they teach English so their kids can tour, learn at, or work in western countries. Europe, USA, and Australia are the popular ones. Multilingual, no need to choose.

Why do Westerners always feel compelled to change what the Chinese do? Shouldn't that best be left to the Chinese?

Terrific article. Why Mandarin will never become the world language -- because few non-native speakers will ever be able to read and write it quickly.

Misguided efforts to reform Chinese written language are a move in exactly the wrong direction. China has a rich linguistic heritage both spoken (in the form of the hundreds of local dialects of its language) and written (in the form of the beautifully complex written characters). These exist because of one another, not despite the other. A diverse spoken language requires a unified NON-PHONEMIC writing system. Efforts to replace the writing system with an alphabet will inevitably hasten the extinction of diverse dialects. China will lose both these historical treasures and be left with a written form that while easier to master, is far less useful and versatile. One might as well simply impose English on the entire continent and be done with it, if the goal is uniformity and ease. That is not a laudable goal, however.

My own pet theory of why Chinese people tend to do very well academically is that they have to memorize thousands of characters since they are very young. This is a very good mental training, especially to a young person, and the techniques you use to learn the Chinese script you might find useful later on for further studies. So the famously difficult Chinese script might be after all blessing in disguise

The origin of the Chinese writing problem came thousands of years ago.

The original idea was that people could write to each other even though they could not speak to each other. They wrote characters for the ideas, not the sounds. The writer could have one set of sounds, the readers others, yet they could all read it.

Now the complexity of that is defeating the purpose. People can't learn it on the scale now expected. It worked then because widespread literacy was not expected, in china or anywhere else.

The Chinese had a thousand year old ability to write to each other when in the remains of the fallen Roman Empire illiterate rules required their priests to write to the priests of the other rulers. The Chinese wre far ahead.

The story now is the West developed a new concept, and raced far ahead with it. The well established Chinese system was not designed with this in mind, and does not suit it. Hence they need a new idea.

This is not a unique situation. Western scholars, mostly priests, provided written forms for many spoken languages in the 18th and 19th Centuries, such as Thai, which was also a very old culture that needed to make this transition. Hence, we've seen it done.

This is a rather naive and exotic view of the history of Chinese language. Being a native Chinese speaker myself, I can say that many of his assertions are incorrect. China has been unified since the Qin Dynasty 2000 years ago. The so-called Han language, namely what we call Chinese today, has the same written characters throughout the Han regions of China. Any educated Chinese from any region of China can read the same language on paper. To compare the Chinese dialect system to the fragmented linguistic systems of Europe is too much of a stretch. The Pinyin system that was developed under Mao was also what saved the Chinese language. Most Chinese people today use pinyin to input Chinese characters into computers. I know western people have such disgust for the Cultural Revolution and the ruthless manner Communists dispatch old traditions. But the miraculous modernization of the Chinese economy in recent decades has its roots in the Mao period. Distaste for tradition and anything old, and a voracious hunger for change and new things, are what driving Chinese people to constantly look for new opportunities.

Reading and writing follow power. If language were divorced from power, then Portuguese or maybe Spanish would be the world's lingua franca: what you see is what you say. English is burdened by pronunciation. 'Fish' may be spelled phonetically as 'ghoti'. GH may be pronounced F as in enouGH. The I becomes an O in wOmen. TI is sounded as -sh in -TIon -- 'naTIon'.

The problem of language/dialect is one of the core issues that China must overcome for the nation to ever become a culturally whole country.