There have been some misunderstandings about Chinese for a long time in our country, and some of them also involve misunderstandings about the whole culture of China. As a teacher of Chinese as a foreign language, we should have more knowledge and a deeper understanding of Chinese and China culture than ordinary people. However, in reality, the author finds that teachers who teach Chinese as a foreign language and even students majoring in linguistics are listening to and spreading rumors, which urges the author to explain common misunderstandings in linguistics.
1. Chinese is the most difficult to learn.
Usually, this assertion is dominated by spontaneous national pride, and so far no scientific arguments or evidence have been seen. Students living in cities where universities are concentrated, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Han, can carefully observe the Chinese level of American students and, if possible, the English level of some China students who have gone abroad-I don't know how others feel without strict sociological statistics. Anyway, according to my own experience, American Chinese is much better. In the United States, except Chinese, almost no one will learn Chinese from primary school, and no one will learn Chinese for many years. Usually it is only an elective course in 10- 12 grade. China people have been learning English for a long time since primary school. Maybe you should say that American education is good. To tell you the truth, I have never heard of anything special about foreign language teaching in the United States internationally. The foreign language teaching in China is basically the United States. Now you still think Chinese is the most difficult?
Ontology research holds that any language includes four parts: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and semantics. Take English as an example, is its apparent complexity necessarily worse than Chinese? English has complex consonants, such as string, but Chinese doesn't; English vocabulary can't be formed like Chinese, and carp carp and trout can't see any connection on the surface; Grammatically, English sometimes has tense, aspect and posture, and questions are inverted, but Chinese does not. There is no semantic evidence that English is simpler than Chinese. Even if we limit our comparison to the languages of relatives and brothers in China, interested readers can learn Amdo Tibetan, Jiarong and Dulong to ensure that you find Chinese and English extremely weak.
The above example is not simple to speak Chinese, and there must be complexity in simplicity. Without consonants, we have tones, simple morphemes can be complex and have no form, and we can have word order markers. In short, language itself must pay attention to balance. Take grammar as an example. If the form is difficult, the grammar must be simple, such as Latin. As the morphology becomes simpler, the syntactic complexity will increase accordingly, such as the descendants of Latin, Spanish and French. Scientifically speaking, language is no more difficult than "difficult" and "easy".
2. Chinese makes China people and foreigners have different ways of thinking.
A similar statement has a formal name in academic circles, which is called "Sapir-Wolff Hypothesis", which was put forward by the famous linguist Sapir and his disciple Wolff. This hypothesis is divided into the strong hypothesis that language determines thinking and the weak hypothesis that some aspects partially determine thinking.
Since it is a "hypothesis", it means that it cannot be proved at present. In recent years, with the development of molecular biology, anthropology, psychology and linguistics, more and more evidence shows that this is not the case. As far as linguistics is concerned, the international mainstream generative grammar school believes that language, like human hearing and touch, is the internal mechanism of biology, and human beings have not found that DNA differences will lead to language differences. The fact is that China people can learn authentic American English as they grew up in the United States, and there is no difference, which shows that there is a language mechanism in general, which is called "universal grammar" UG (universal grammar); The material basis of people's way of thinking is genetic material, and thinking cannot be reshaped about a year and a half after acquiring a language. Unless you think that thinking is determined by some immaterial "spirituality", there is no actual evidence.
So why do people see that people of different nationalities have the particularity of external performance? The author uses the parameter theory in generative grammar to explain this phenomenon. Suppose that people's thinking is a function f(x)=y=2x- 1, and the environmental factors such as language, culture and education acquired by people are independent variables X. The huge difference of X leads to the difference of the final dependent variable Y. X= 1000, then y= 1999 and X =/kloc. Can this explain the difference in thinking? Absolutely not. As a function f(function) owned by human beings, everyone is the same. Your output has characteristics, which only shows that the value of X you entered earlier is unique.
Because there are Chinese characters, Chinese is difficult and beautiful. Chinese characters determine Chinese, and Chinese determines the thinking of China people. Chinese characters are excellent and the most reasonable characters.
China people are particularly prone to make the mistake of not distinguishing between language and writing. As mentioned above, any language includes four parts: pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and semantics, but there is no text. Character is a kind of symbolic information system that records language, and it is definitely not the language itself. Chinese characters are difficult to write, but they don't mean advanced. Judging from the development law of human characters, it always changes from hieroglyphics to pinyin. Observing Mayan characters, you will find that they are very similar to early cave murals; Cuneiform was also pictographic in the early days, and Phoenician letters also had pictographic elements. The letter A was originally an inverted bull's head. Phoenician-ancient Greek-modern Latin alphabet has become a mature pinyin writing system.
There is no reason to think that Chinese characters are superior. On the contrary, pictographic characters are lower than pinyin, which is the normal law of the development of human characters. As far as Chinese characters are concerned, pictophonetic characters are the transition from pictophonetic characters to pinyin. From Oracle Bone Inscriptions to seal script, official script to later simplification, the proportion of pictophonetic characters is increasing, and Chinese characters themselves will be pinyin, but they are still changing. It took 3000-4000 years for pictographs to become pinyin in the west, but it has only been 3300 years since Oracle Bone Inscriptions in the first13rd century BC, so it is completely normal for Chinese characters to be in the stage of pinyin transformation.
Just because Chinese characters are not Pinyin in China doesn't mean they are not in other countries. Japanese pseudonyms and Korean proverbs are both pinyin characters, and their appearance cannot be said to have nothing to do with the basis of Chinese characters. From the perspective of human language needs, with the progress of scientific and technological civilization, a large number of immaterial abstract concepts will inevitably emerge. How should the words "philosophy" and "chauvinism of great powers" be expressed in hieroglyphics? In the end, it depends on abstract expression, and the carrier of human natural language is sound wave, so it is better to express it by voice.
Chinese characters determine language, thinking and culture, which is also not worth refuting. Assuming that the acquired visual stimulation can determine people's thinking, wouldn't it be like watching Chinese painting to form a unique oriental culture? Moreover, before Japan invented pseudonyms, North Korea and South Korea used 100% Chinese characters in their scripts before the middle of the 7th century. Did Japan and North Korea think like South Koreans at that time?
4. Ancient Chinese is simpler, more beautiful and more elegant than modern Chinese; Oracle Bone Inscriptions, bronze inscriptions and seal script are all tall.
To paraphrase the famous actor Li Chengru, this is a view of cultural relics, not Scientific Outlook on Development. Classical Chinese is the vernacular Chinese in the early Western Zhou Dynasty. Nothing special. It is difficult for modern people to learn, because you have no oral foundation, not because classical Chinese is so advanced. Many people think the Book of Songs is beautiful and philosophical. The Book of Songs is the folk songs and ballads sorted out at that time. If you don't believe me, you can go to Wuyuan Mountain in Jiangxi to listen to folk songs. Is it beautiful? Personally, I feel very rustic, far worse than traditional Chinese opera.
For example, some poems in ancient Greece did not rhyme, because people had not found that rhyming would be better at that time.
Ticket players like to drag Oracle Bone Inscriptions and classical Chinese in class; To put it bluntly, it is mechanical drawing and perceptual imitation. With the development of human science and technology, language research and second language acquisition research have all gone to the high-end research of mathematics, logic and psychology, and it is impossible to go back to the cave.
When you firmly believe in an opinion, you should ask yourself three questions carefully: 1 Is this view something I am inclined to believe? Second, haven't you experienced or seen scientific arguments? Third, do you like telling others? When the answer is three yes, you should be careful.