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）

这样一种语言，光是学会查字典，就可以算得上掌握一门技能了，就像学会辩论或者打排球这样的技能一样。中文本就算不上是什么用户友好的语言，汉语字典更是反用户习惯式的存在。

Figuring out all the radicals and their variants, plus dealing with the ambiguous characters with no obvious radical at all is a stupid, time-consuming chore that slows the learning process down by a factor of ten as compared to other languages with a sensible alphabet or the equivalent. I'd say it took me a good year before I could reliably find in the dictionary any character I might encounter. And to this day, I will very occasionally stumble onto a character that I simply can't find at all, even after ten minutes of searching. At such times I raise my hands to the sky, Job-like, and consider going into telemarketing.

要搞清楚所有汉字的字根、变形，还要处理那些还没有确定字根的、尚存争议的汉字，是愚蠢又费时的一件事。比起其他那些有着合理的字母表的语言来说，这种行为放在汉语上，会大大延缓学习的进度。不得不说，我翻字典查生词的本事可真是花了好几年才学会的。然而，就算是现在，我有时候也会翻十分钟字典都找不到我想要的东西，真是让人服气的不行。

Chinese must also be one of the most dictionary-intensive languages on earth. I currently have more than twenty Chinese dictionaries of various kinds on my desk, and they all have a specific and distinct use. There are dictionaries with simplified characters used on the mainland, dictionaries with the traditional characters used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and dictionaries with both. There are dictionaries that use the Wade-Giles romanization, dictionaries that use pinyin, and dictionaries that use other more surrealisticmethods. There are dictionaries of classical Chinese particles, dictionaries of Beijing dialect, dictionaries of chéngyu (four-character idioms), dictionaries of xiehouyu (special allegorical two-part sayings), dictionaries of yanyu (proverbs),, dictionaries of Buddhist terms, reverse dictionaries... on and on. An exhaustive hunt for some elusive or

problematic lexical item can leave one's desk \dead soldiers on a battlefield.\

汉语也一定是世上最精于使用字典的语言了。我的桌子上正摆着20多种不一样的中文字典，每种字典都有不同的细化分工。有在大陆使用的简体字字典，也有在港台使用的繁体字字典，还有简繁汉字都有的字典。有用汉语拼音索引的字典，有用威妥码（流行于民国时期，现在在台湾仍有使用的老式拼音）索引的字典，还有用其他稀奇古怪的部首检字法法索引的字典。有古汉语字典、北京话字典、新华成语字典、歇后语字典、谚语字典、佛教用语字典、反义词字典....好多好多。如果有人真的想查找一个不太好懂的词汇，那你可以在他查到累趴的时候看一下他的桌子，桌上的书一定会像战场上横尸遍野的士兵尸体一样，用来查阅的字典摆的到处都是，一片狼藉。

Another problem with looking up words in the dictionary has to do with the nature of written Chinese. In most languages it's pretty obvious where the word boundaries lie -- there are spaces between the words. If you don't know the word in question, it's usually fairly clear what you should look up. (What actually constitutes a word is a very subtle issue, of course, but for my purposes here, what I'm saying is basically correct.) In Chinese there are spaces between characters, but it takes quite a lot of knowledge of the language and often some genuine sleuth work to tell where word boundaries lie; thus it's often trial and error to look up a word. It would be as if English were written thus:

查字典的时候碰到的另一个问题，就是要对付汉语的书写规则。在大部分语言中，词与词之间是有非常明显的分界线的--词和词之间有一个空格。如果你不知道一个问题中的某个单词是什么意思，最起码你很清楚自己该在字典里查什么东西。（当然了，构成一个词语的因素有很多，不过我只是想说明，我的以上言论基本上是正确的）在汉语里，字和字之间倒的确是有空格，但是要是你想搞清楚词和词之间的间隔在哪里，那你不但要有一定的语言功底，还需要你稍加推测才能找到。因此，如果你想查一下某个词是什么意思，你通常都要尝试并且猜错数次，才能找到你想要的答案。就好像如果英语这么写：

FEAR LESS LY OUT SPOKE N BUT SOME WHAT HUMOR LESS NEW ENG LAND BORN LEAD ACT OR GEORGE MICHAEL SON EX PRESS ED OUT RAGE TO DAY AT THE

STALE MATE BE TWEEN MAN AGE MENT AND THE ACT OR 'S UNION BE CAUSE THE STAND OFF HAD SET BACK THE TIME TABLE FOR PRO DUC TION OF HIS PLAY, A ONE MAN SHOW CASE THAT WAS HIS FIRST RUN A WAY BROAD WAY BOX OFFICE SMASH HIT. \FIRST A MEND MENT IS AT IS SUE\HE PRO CLAIM ED. \A CENS OR OR AN EDIT OR TO EDIT OR OTHER WISE BLUE PENCIL QUESTION ABLE DIA LOG JUST TO KOW TOW TO RIGHT WING BORN AGAIN BIBLE THUMP ING FRUIT CAKE S IS A DOWN RIGHT DIS GRACE.\

Imagine how this difference would compound the dictionary look-up difficulties of a non-native speaker of English. The passage is pretty trivial for us to understand, but then we already know English. For them it would often be hard to tell where the word boundaries were supposed to be. So it is, too, with someone trying to learn Chinese. 想想吧，如果英语是这样写的，那么那些学英语的外国人查字典的时候会是多么的头疼。虽然我们说的就是英语，但是上面这篇文章还是太过琐碎，不易理解，很难找出词与词之间的间隔。所以呢，那些想学汉语的人啊，你们自己感受下吧。

6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen). 6.还有古汉语（文言文）呢

Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure.

算了吧，这个太难了。虽说人家学法语的同学学了三四年之后就可以看懂狄德罗和伏尔泰的古法语著作了，但是你要是以为，学了三四年汉语之后，你也能轻松理解“孔孟之道”的话，那你就大错特错了，错的离谱。确实有些西方人能轻松读懂文言文，不过这些人大部分学得头发都白了...

Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially in Chinese paintings and character scrolls, and most people will assume anyone literate in Chinese can read it. It's truly embarrassing to be out at a Chinese restaurant, and someone asks you to translate some characters on a wall hanging.

实在不幸，文言文会在各种各样的地方出现，尤其是在国画和书法里。而且大部分人还以为，既然你认识汉字，那你就一定能读懂它。有一次，因为某些事，我不得不呆在一家餐厅里，然后就碰到一件超尴尬的事：有人过来问我墙上挂的书法是什么意思。

\characters are written in wenyan, and in incomprehensible \boot. It might as well be an EKG readout of a dying heart patient.

“喂，你懂汉语的吧？墙上挂着的这个卷轴是什么意思啊？”我抬头看了看，发现上面写的是文言文，还是用根本看不懂的草书写的。那东西写得跟临终的人的心电图似的。

\you stammer. \

“呃，我大概能看得懂一两个字，不过我也不知道上面写的是什么”我有点结巴。“我感觉说的应该是凤凰什么的吧。”

\I thought you knew Chinese,\says your friend, returning to their menu. Never mind that an honest-to-goodness Chinese person would also just scratch their head and shrug; the face that is lost is yours.