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）

to me \takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can't skim to save my life.\would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers (at least in those unguarded moments when one has had a few too many Tsingtao beers and has begun to lament how slowly work on the thesis is coming).

对中文学习者来说，阅读障碍一般是一个敏感的问题。我们之中，有多少人有勇气站在一帮同事面前，大声读一篇随便选的中文文章呢？学生和老师们害怕丢脸，而且有些自卑情结，这就导致了他们在中文的学习上形成了某种“你懂的”的莫名默契----大家都假装承认，要是自己够勤奋的话，那么只要学四年中文，就能分分钟看得懂孔子和鲁迅的著作，除了极个别烦人的生僻字要查查字典之外根本不会卡壳（当然了，要查也是查中国人用的《新华字典》）。至于其他人嘛，对于学习中文所面对的困难就更坦诚一点。前几天我的一个学了十年汉语的研究生同学跟我讲：“我的研究真的遇到了很大的阻力，因为我真的真的读不懂中文啊！我看了一个小时书才看了两三页的样子，而且为了保命，我不能略读。”这话要是从一个学了十年法国文学的学生嘴里说出来，那可真叫人震惊，不过我倒总是从我们汉学中心的同事的嘴里听到类似的话（至少是在他们搞了一堆青岛啤酒，边喝边哀嚎论文的进展有多慢的时候）

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.

我的老师有次跟我说起了他和他的同事有时候会玩的一个游戏。这个游戏需要你去图书馆里的亚洲文学馆，找到放中文书籍的地方，然后从书架上随便抽一本中文书下来，接着比试谁能第一个搞清楚这

本书是讲什么的。只要是在图书馆里的东亚文学馆工作过的人都可以证明这个游戏真的超难--无需介意看书的时候有看不懂的地方。还有些没什么耐心，一上来就想享受博大精深的中华文化盛宴的初学者，最后也不得不在教科书的例题里痛苦挣扎，至少在学习汉语的头几年里会是这样。

The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels -- La nausée by Sartre, Voltaire's Candide, L'étranger by Camus -- plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage sale.

学习中文跟学习其他西方语言的比较结果是引人瞩目的。我在学习一年的法语之后，已经能看懂不少了。我可以看萨特写的《恶心》，伏尔泰写的《老实人》，加缪写的《局外人》--还能看懂无数的报纸，杂志，漫画书啥的。确实也是做了好多的功课，不过我不觉得过程很痛苦。我真正需要的东西，不过仅仅是一本还不错的词典，还有在跳蚤市场买的一本破破烂烂的法语语法教程。

This kind of \years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, I'm still not at a level where I can actually read it without an English translation to consult. (By \

if someone put a gun to my head and a dictionary in my hand, I could get through it.) Simply diving into the vast pool of Chinese in the beginning is not only foolhardy, it can even be counterproductive. As George Kennedy writes, \Chinese ideograph as compared with the difficulty of learning a new word in a European language, is such that a rigid economy of mental effort is imperative.\This is, if anything, an understatement. With the risk of drowning so great, the student is better advised to spend more time in the shallow end treading water before heading toward the deep end. 可这种“学的好不好全靠自己”的学习方法在汉语里根本行不通啊。我在学习汉语的第三年快结束的时候，还没完完整整的读过一本小说。我觉得实在是太难了，读起来特别的慢，而且我觉得这事做起来挺没意义的。看报纸也是这样，读起来真是让人生畏。读一篇文章，我每看十个字就得查一下字典，要不这篇文章根本读不下去。而且我经常在扫一眼《人民日报》的头版之后发现，就连好多新闻的主标题是什么意思我都搞不大懂。当时有人建议我读一读《红楼梦》，他还送给我一份精美的三卷版原著。哈哈哈我简直是笑了。那本书现在还躺在我的书架上，像个洋洋得意的胖菩萨。只有大概前20页被我标满了潦草的解释和备注，剩下的部分我动都没动。学了6年汉语之后，我还是没办法在不查字典的情况下阅读《红楼梦》（这里所指的阅读，我的意思自然是开开心心的阅读。我猜要是有人拿着一把枪顶在我脑袋上，然后给我一本汉译英字典逼着我读，我也是能读下去的）当初我一头扎进浩瀚的中华文化之海的行为已经不能用鲁莽来形容了，而应该用反生产力来形容。就像乔治·肯尼迪在他的书中写的一样，“记忆汉字的难度，跟学习其他欧洲语言相比，就像是对已经病入膏肓的经济作出看似必要的终极方法一样。”毕竟有被淹死的危险，因此建议学生们在浅水区踩踩水就好了，不要再想着走向深处了。

As if all this weren't bad enough, another ridiculous aspect of the Chinese writing system is that there are two (mercifully overlapping) sets of characters: the traditional characters still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the simplified characters adopted by the People's Republic of China in the late 1950's and early 60's. Any foreign student of Chinese is more or less forced to become familiar with both sets, since they are

routinely exposed to textbooks and materials from both Chinas. This linguistic

camel's-back-breaking straw puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese, who at this point would gladly trade places with Sisyphus. But since Chinese people themselves are never equally proficient in both simplified and complex characters, there is absolutely no shame whatsoever in eventually concentrating on one set to the partial exclusion the other. In fact, there is absolutely no shame in giving up Chinese altogether, when you come right down to it.

似乎所说的一切还不够糟糕呢。其实汉语书写体系还有另外一个荒谬的地方，就是汉字有两种形式（幸亏两种汉字有不少一样的地方）：仍然在香港和台湾使用的繁体中文，和在上世纪50年代末，60年代初被中华人民共和国正式采用的简体中文。学汉语的外国学生或多或少地被迫了解过这两种汉字形式，因为会经常接触到海峡两岸的教材和材料。这简直就像是压倒骆驼的最后一根稻草，让本就已经负担沉重的汉语学习者更加疲惫不堪。不过嘛，反正他们中国人自己也做不到同时精通这两种汉字形式，所以如果你最终把注意力完全放在其中一种汉字形式上，而完全抛弃学习另一种，也没什么好自责的。说句实话，等你真正开始学汉语的时候，你就算简繁两种汉字全都放弃，也没什么好自责的。

2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet. 2 因为汉语不是字母文字。

To further explain why the Chinese writing system is so hard in this respect, it might be a good idea to spell out (no pun intended) why that of English is so easy. Imagine the kind of task faced by the average Chinese adult who decides to study English. What skills are needed to master the writing system? That's easy: 26 letters. (In upper and lower case, of course, plus script and a few variant forms. And throw in some quote marks, apostrophes, dashes, parentheses, etc. -- all things the Chinese use in their own writing system.) And how are these letters written? From left to right, horizontally, across the page, with spaces to indicate word boundaries. Forgetting for a moment the problem of