Language Log

I am the proud possessor of the complete run of Mangajin (pun for "magazine") from #1-#70 (1988-1997).

Mangajin was the brainchild of Vaughan P. Simmons, whom I had conversations with at several meetings of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and corresponded with for a dozen years.  I have utmost respect for him as someone who had the vision and fortitude to make a truly effective pedagogical tool for learning Japanese a reality.

I dare say that I learned more Japanese language from Mangajin than from any other single source — just as I learned more Mandarin from Guóyǔ rìbào 國語日報 (Mandarin Daily), the Republic of China newspaper that had furigana-like bopomofo rubi phonetic annotations for all hanzi, than from any other single source.

The gap between spoken and written Sinitic is enormous.  In my estimation, it is greater than for any other language I know.  The following are some notes by Ľuboš Gajdoš about why this is so.

"The Discrepancy Between Spoken and Written Chinese — Methodological Notes on Linguistics", Comenius University in Bratislava, Department of East Asian Studies

The issue of choosing language data on which synchronous linguistic research is being done appears in many ways not only to be relevant to the goal of the research, but also to the validity of the research results. The problem which particularly concerns us here is the discrepancy between speech on the one hand and written language on the other. In this context, we have often encountered in the past a situation where the result of the research conducted on a variety of the Chinese language has been generalized to the entire synchronous state of the language, i.e. to all other varieties of the language, while ignoring the mentioned discrepancy between the spoken and written forms. The discrepancy between the spoken and written forms is likely to be present in any natural language with a written tradition, but the degree of difference between languages is uneven:  e.g. compared to the Slovak language, it may be stated that the situation in Chinese is in this respect extraordinary. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the quantitative (qualitative) research on discrepancies between different varieties of the language has not yet aroused the attention of Chinese linguistics to such an extent as would have been adequate for the unique situation of this natural language.

Anh Yeo is a Chinese from Vietnam.  Currently she is studying in a graduate program of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University.  To earn pocket money, she has taken up a job teaching Southeast Asia office workers Mandarin online.  In response to this post "Aborted character simplification in the mid-1930s" (10/5/24), which had much to do with character simplification (or not) in Singapore, she wrote to me as follows:

I had two lessons tonight teaching Pinyin. Southeast Asians learn Pinyin fast (similar alphabet + existence of tones in Thai and Vietnamese), but because of that students are reliant on Pinyin and cannot remember characters! I have students learning for 3-4 months and still have to read off Pinyin (recognizing fewer than 50 characters). I always thought the coexistence of characters and Latin alphabet in Mandarin interesting!

[This is a guest post by Don Keyser]

I was relieved/reassured to read this in Language Log yesterday:

VHM:  I myself remember very clearly being taught to say gongheguo 共和國 ("republic") and gongchandang 共產黨 (Communist Party) with the first syllable of each being in the first tone, then being surprised later when the PRC started pushing fourth tone for those first syllables.  This sort of thing happened with many other words as well, with, for example, xingqi 星期 ("week"), which I had been taught as first tone followed by second tone, becoming  two first tones.

My first Chinese language instructor, Beverly (Hong Yuebi) Fincher, used Chao Yuan-ren's Mandarin Primer.  Later I studied a couple years, full-time, at the "Stanford Center" (Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies) hosted by National Taiwan University.  Subsequent to that, a half decade later, I spent a year in Mandarin interpreter training at the government's Foreign Service Institute Branch School in Taiwan. In my "spare time" during that program, I studied daily an hour of Shanghainese and "Taiwanese" (i.e., Hoklo, or southern Min, or whatever). 

Upon first hearing, the very idea sounded preposterous, but when I searched the internet, I found it all over the place as "nonword reading / repetition", "nonsense words", "non word phonics / fluency", "non-word decoding", "pseudowords", etc.  In other words (!), it's a real thing, and lots of people take the concept seriously as a supposedly useful device in reading theory and practice, justifying it thus:

"as a tool to assess phonetic decoding ability" (here)

"contribute to children's ability to learn new words"  (here)

"a true indicator of the alphabetic principle and basic phonics" (here)

etc., etc., etc.

I would not have taken the topic of nonwords seriously and posted on it, had not AntC pointed out that it is actually being applied in the classroom in New Zealand.

One of our last posts was on a German Mongolist named Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) who was a specialist on Kalmyk.  This prompted a regular reader to send the following interesting account about another German Mongolist who was also an expert on the Kalmyks and their language, Nicholas Poppe (1897-1991):

Ying Reinhardt wisely advises us in this delightful article:

"I stopped apologising for my poor German, and something wonderful happened:

After a decade in Germany, I was still anxious talking to native speakers – then I realised my language skills weren’t the problem"

The Guardian (4/1/24

What Ying Reinhardt says about German as a second language is true, ceteris paribus, of other foreign languages that one may be learning.  Just plunge ahead.  Of course, one doesn't want to speak utter gibberish, but don't be afraid of making minor mistakes in grammar, vocabulary, and, yes, even tone or accent.  Just get your ideas across in the most efficient way possible within your capability.  It's all about communicative competence.

Hopefully.

Some exciting news.

A member of the PRC's National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (the yearly meeting of which is taking place in Beijing right now) is urging schools to increase the time spent teaching Pinyin (currently 4-6 weeks) to a semester or even longer to help ensure more students have a solid foundation in this skill. Intriguingly, there's also a mention of using more "texts."

Here's an account of what's happening:

"Schools should spend more time teaching Pinyin: PRC politician", Pinyin News (3/7/24)

This issue caused quite a hullabaloo more than a month ago and, during the runup to the national election that was going on at that time, it generated a lot of hot rhetoric.  It's important to note that First Girls High School is an elitist, influential institution that is very hard to get into.

The debate over how much and what sort of Classical Chinese to include in the curriculum grew quite heated, so naturally I quickly wrote a detailed post on the subject, but then my computer crashed because of one of the many dreaded, hated "updates" that I have to endure for the sake of "security" (the bane of my life), and I lost my carefully prepared post on the Classical Chinese debate — same thing happened to the draft of my post on the Tokyo restaurant sign that supposedly "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people".  It has taken me till now to find the time to reconstruct them.

Think what this article is telling us.  If you want to find a job teaching English in Hong Kong, you would do well to first learn some Cantonese — even if you are Pakistani.

"Hong Kong’s ethnic minority jobseekers tripped up by lack of Cantonese end up doing low-skilled work, survey shows", by Fiona Chow, SCMP (2/3/24)

From Emma Knightley:

Sent by my boomer parents – according to the caption how a Taiwanese village is teaching seniors how to sing "You Are My Sunshine" in English, which requires them to know a combination of Mandarin, Taiwanese ("阿粿"), English ("B"), and Japanese ("の")! (I think the calligraphy is wonderful, to boot.)

[This is the first of two consecutive posts on things Indian.  After reading them, if someone is prompted to send me material for a third, I'll be happy to make it a trifecta.]

Our entry point to the linguistically compelling topic of today's post is this Nikkei Asia (11/29/23) article by Barkha Shah in its "Tea Leaves" section:

Why it's worth learning ancient Sanskrit in the modern world:

India’s classical language is making a comeback via Telegram and YouTube

The author begins with a brief introduction to the language:

The language had its heyday in ancient India. The Vedas, a collection of poems and hymns, were written in Sanskrit between 1500 and 1200 B.C., along with other literary texts now known as the Upanishads, Granths and Vedangas. But while Sanskrit became the foundation for many (though not all) modern Indian languages, including Hindi, it faded away as a living tongue.

Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its tech-heavy schools

Charlene Pele, AP (9/10/23)

Accompanied by 10 photographs showing young children (3rd grade?) practicing handwriting.

As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills.

The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether the country's hyper-digitalized approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills.