Language Log

From a long-time learner of Japanese language:

I must say that the Japanese instructors at the Foreign Service Institute were NOT inclined to teach — or even acknowledge — pitch … and, for that matter, in all but rare cases, "bother" to correct students save on the most egregious botching of vocabulary or grammar.

Their core view, perhaps not atypical for the era, or, who knows, even for today, was "No foreigner is EVER going to learn to speak Japanese, so it is senseless to devote effort to minor things."

All that was part and parcel of the famous (=infamous) "study" by the Japanese who devised a means of determining WHY foreigners could never speak Japanese properly, and why Japanese could never speak foreign languages properly.  After wiring up his brain to gerry-rigged electrodes and electrical impulse measuring devices, he concluded (he was a dentist, I believe, and not a scientist let alone a linguist) that Japanese is a vowel-rich language, foreign tongues are consonant-rich, vowels and consonants are processed on opposite cerebral hemispheres, so "of course" it would be "impossible" for Japanese to speak foreign languages (he excluded vowel-rich Polynesian languages as inferior and unworthy of serious attention) and vice versa.  When asked how it could be, then, that Japanese diplomats so often spoke foreign languages fluently, without accents, he replied "Because they are no longer TRUE JAPANESE.  Their brains have altered."

A gentler version of that is found in this posting to a language forum, with extensive comments providing a variety of viewpoints on the subject:

"Pitch Accent? Should Learners of Japanese master it?", Ling!Q (April 2011)

The number of students enrolled in a given foreign language is a good index of public perceptions of the importance of that language for global politics, economics, and cultural influence.  When I came to Penn in 1979, interest in all things Russian was soaring.  The Slavicists occupied quite a bit of real estate in Williams Hall, which houses language studies at Penn.  They had a number of institutes, research centers, libraries, and so forth, and they were extremely well funded.  A decade later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian juggernaut at Penn began to fall apart, to the extent that it lost nearly all of its space and researchers, and they were tossing whole libraries into dumpsters.  As an ardent bibliophile, it pained me greatly to see precious books being thrown into the trash.  I rescued as many of them as I could stuff into my Volkswagen Beetle and cart away, including an enormous, old, and undoubtedly historically important encyclopedia that still sits in the enclosed porch of my home.

So exclaimed a graduate student from the PRC.  She was decrying the new teaching methods for Mandarin courses in the West that do not emphasize copying characters countless times by hand and taking dictation (tīngxiě 聽寫 / 听写) tests, but rather relying on Pinyin (alphabetical) inputting to write the characters via computers.

These are topics we have discussed numerous times on Language Log (see "Selected readings" below for a sample of some of the posts that touch on this subject.  I told the student that this is indeed a fact of life, and that current teaching methods for Mandarin emphasize pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, etc., and that handwriting the characters is no longer a priority.  Whereas in the past handwriting of the characters used to take up over half of a student's learning time, now copying characters is reduced to only a small fraction of that.

There may well be a dogma out there stating that all languages are equally complex, but I don't believe it, especially not if it has to be "drummed" into our minds.  I have learned many languages.  Some of them are exceedingly hard (because of their complexity) and some of them are relatively easy (because they are comparatively simple).  I have often said that Mandarin is the easiest language I ever learned to speak, but the hardest to read and write in characters (though very easy in Romanization).  And remember these posts:

"Difficult languages and easy languages" (3/4/17)

"Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2" (5/28/19)

From a fluent speaker of Mandarin:

This past weekend, I watched the latest film from Marvel Studios: "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" (an Asian superhero movie). I was rather surprised to hear about 30% of all lines spoken in Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 (Mandarin), especially when given that some scenes were set in Macau and characters from ancient Chinese villages. Although I could not find an article or commentary on this specific topic I was interested in, I did find this Reddit post—the author discusses how strange and peculiar the creators' decision to use Mandarin in particular is in the context of the movie. 

Recent article on gender and language teaching:

How Language Classes Are Moving Past the Gender Binary

Languages that contain only “he” and “she” pronouns pose problems for communicating about gender identity. Here’s how some language teachers are helping.

By Molly Lipson, NYT     Sept. 1, 2021

Selections from the article:

…

So they say, but I wouldn't count on it.  We've heard this patriotic, isolationist tune sung countless times during the last thirty years or so (in fact, it happens every time preceding a national political meeting, but nothing ever comes of it).  The wealthy, privileged, elite, right up to and including Chairman Xi, keep spending a fortune to send their children to the comfort, safety, and English environment of the USA.  I know, because I've taught hundreds of them during the last twenty years and more.

"‘Reversing Gears’: China Increasingly Rejects English, and the World:

A movement against Western influence threatens to close off a nation that succeeded in part by welcoming new ideas."  By Li Yuan, NYT (9/9/21)

Valerie Hansen is Director of Undergraduate Studies for East Asian Studies at Yale.  Yesterday she was talking to a sophomore who had taken 1st and 2nd year Mandarin online and is about to start 3rd year.  Valerie writes:

After a while, she told me that she did have one worry about taking 3rd year: she had never written a single character and she wondered if her teacher would expect her to know how to write characters.

Article by Colm Keena in The Irish Times (8/2/21):

"Decision on Mandarin Leaving Cert exam ‘outrages’ Chinese communities:
Exam subject that students can sit from 2022 will only allow for simplified Chinese script"

Here are the first four paragraphs of the article:

Tweet from Bryan Van Norden:

My sense is that most doctoral programs in philosophy in the US have abandoned language requirements. This reflects the mistaken beliefs that the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy outside the Anglophone world are worthless. https://t.co/hX8uIyQHXj

— Bryan W. Van Norden (@BryanVanNorden) July 11, 2021

Tom Mazanec saw an announcement of a course in Hong Kong, in which the teacher, Dr. Lai Chi Fung 黎智豐, proposes to teach Classical Chinese by focusing on vocabulary for everyday use, just as if one were learning a foreign language. So you learn greetings, introductions, and the like. The idea intrigued Tom, especially since the language of instruction is Cantonese (which would make spoken Classical a little more intelligible than if it were in Mandarin).

If the course were taught in Mandarin, I think it would be a big flop, but since it is being taught in Cantonese, there is a somewhat higher possibility of limited, meaningful spoken communication.  Cantonese preserves more features (phonological, lexical, grammatical, syntactical) of earlier stages of Sinitic than does Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM).  Just in terms of phonology, Cantonese has more than 2,200 possible different syllables, almost twice as many as MSM (source).

After reading "Bad poetry, bad translation" (6/18/21), Zihan Guo wrote:

Thank you for sharing this post.

While reading it, its comments, and all the selected readings related to it, I could not help but feel that translating classical Chinese poetry is the way to make sure one really understands it. Back in middle school and high school in China, my teachers would teach poetry and prose through paraphrasing, making them coherent narratives. However, adding things is as detrimental as its opposite. It was not until college that I started to truly appreciate classical Chinese poetry, through producing English translations myself, struggling with its syntactic concision and lack of precision, squeezing meanings from diction and speculating moods from imagery.