资料文章：一位外国成年人学习中文感想Why Chinese Is So Hard（中英对照）

1.因为汉语的文字体系简直荒谬。

Beautiful, complex, mysterious -- but ridiculous. I, like many students of Chinese, was first 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 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.

美丽、复杂、神秘--但是荒谬。和其他学习汉语的学生一样，我一开始是被汉字吸引，才对汉语感兴趣的。汉字简直就是世上最吸引人的文字之一。你学的汉字越多，你就越觉得汉字真的是很吸引人、很有意思。对汉字的学习可以让人痴迷一生，而且过不了多久你就会发现，你每天一点一点积累下来的汉字，就像无尽汉字海洋中的一滴滴水，你试着把它们囤进一个叫作“长期记忆”的娄里，却发现这个娄是漏的。所有你付出的巨大努力最后都成了徒劳无功。

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 weren't too practical for daily use.

汉字之美，无可争辩。但是，随着中国人意识到全民识字的重要性，表意文字的局限性也变得显而易见。有些汉字的死忠可能喜欢汉字的样式，但是汉字太繁杂，在日常生活中并不太实用。

For one thing, it is simply unreasonably hard to learn enough characters to become functionally literate. Again, someone may ask \answer is easy: Hard in comparison to Spanish, Greek, Russian, Hindi, or any other sane, \

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 French 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 (it's unclear what \Chinese writing system 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 difficulties experienced by relatively sluggish post-pubescent fo under my beltreign learners such as myself.

首先，就算你只是想获得最基本的读写能力，需要你记忆的汉字也会非常多，难度很大。有的人又要问了：“你说的难，是跟什么比起来算难啊？”那么答案很简单：跟西班牙语、希腊语、俄语、印地语，或者其他的，至多只要几十个字母组合一下，就可以表达出所有意思的语言比起来，汉语的文字系统学起来都要更难。约翰·德范克，在他的著作《汉语：事实和幻想》里面提到，他的中国同事估计，一个母语是汉语的人，需要花上七到八年，才能达到读写3000个汉字的水平。而他的法国和西班牙同事则估计，在他们的国家，如果想要达到同等的读写水平，只需要花上中国人所花费的时间的一半就可以了。自然，这样的估计是非常粗略以及主观的，不过这样的估计，整体上带给我们的启示还是显而易见的：比起那些表音文字，汉语的文字系统绝对更难学。甚至是那些处于接受事物最快的阶段的中国小孩子，比起别的国家的同龄小伙伴，他们对于自己母语的文字也有更多的疑问。连记东西最快的小孩子都如此，你就可以想象到，像我这样的已经到了后青春期的岁数还在学汉语的外国学生，学起来是有多么的慢了。

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 things like \

25,000, take your pick] separate characters you really only need 2,000 or so to read a newspaper\characters under my belt. I often had to look up several characters per line, 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 \without having to look up dozens of characters\每个人都听说过中文挺难的，因为要记忆的字实在太多了。这个传闻确实是真的。市面上很多书和文章都大大低估了记忆汉字的难度。这些文章宣称“尽管汉语里面有10000/25000个字，但是你只需要记住2000个字，就能够读懂中文报纸了。”屁话。我要是只认识2000个汉字，那我根本没办法通顺的把报纸读下来。每行新闻总有几个字我不认识，我还得去翻翻字典看看它们啥意思。甚至就算是我把每个字代表的意思都查出来了，我还是读不懂整篇文章。（这里我把“阅读”理解成“在不用总是翻字典的情况下，阅读并基本理解文章的内容”，否则的话，阅读所指的东西未免也太空泛了。）

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.4But what such accounts don't 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 \know the word \often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts. In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters

that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline \TREATING PHLEBITIS\not going to get very far if they don't know the words \or \

这个谎言被编出来的依据是，你要是仔细观察汉字的出现频率，你会发现报纸上面95%以上的汉字都是在2000个常用汉字范围内的。但是人家没告诉你，就算你认识这些字，他们拼在一块儿组成一个词语，你又不认识了。（为了说明这个问题，拿英语打个比方吧，你知道?up?和?tight?这两个词什么意思，不代表你知道它们的组合词?uptight?什么意思）另，只要是学过外语的人都懂，在一个句子里，你可能觉得每个词你都认识，但是如果连成一个句子，你就没法掌握整个句子是什么意思了。阅读理解这东西绝不是你词汇量大就牛了，没这么简单。你必须有那么一种语感，能在不同的上下文里搞清楚词和词是怎么组合搭配的。还有啊，就算你在给定的文本里明白95%的汉字的含义，但是你看不懂的那5%，一般都正好是这段文本里至关重要的重点。要是有个母语非英语的读者，读到一篇题目是《浴缸对防治静脉炎有何作用》的文章，如果他不知道\浴缸\或者\静脉炎\是什么意思的话，这句话他是看不大懂的。

The problem of reading is often a touchy one for those in the China field. How many of us would dare stand up in front of a group of colleagues and read a randomly-selected passage out loud? Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said