思考与写作pinyin.info编辑精选
中文为什么这么难（1992）
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (1992)
2010 — 2018，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
David Moser 1992 年的经典长文，以幽默而犀利的笔调列举了汉语难学的九大原因：荒谬的书写系统、缺乏拼音化、字典难查、声调、没有同源词可借力等。文章在中文学习圈流传多年，作者本人后来也成为精通中文的汉学家。
为什么经久不衰：它把'汉语为什么难'这个话题讲得既专业又好笑，三十年后仍是中文学习者讨论难点的起点，且能引发对书写系统与语言难度的普遍思考。
HN 评论精选
文章写于 80 年代，如今资源和工具已大不相同，汉语其实没那么绝望。
这篇文章在中文学习圈流传已久，Moser 的中文好得让人恼火。作为达到高水平的学习者，我同意他很多观点，但画面画得太灰暗了。如今有大量免费优质资源：语法 wiki、带 OCR 的 Pleco 词典、播客等。间隔重复软件大幅降低了识字门槛，我约 10 个月就读了第一本小说。汉语语法其实比法语简单，汉字的合成性也让很多词好记，比如海军=海+军。
msvan查看英文原文
This essay has circulated in the Chinese learning community for a long time, and David Moser is both highly respected as well as obnoxiously skilled at Mandarin. As someone who has learnt Chinese to a high degree of proficiency, I agree with many of his points, but it paints a picture that is a bit too grim in my opinion. The first thing one should note is that Moser started studying Chinese in the late 80s. Things have changed. There is a wealth of accessible, well-written and free learning resources available online. People like Olle Linge have written much about how to study Chinese efficiently. There is a grammar wiki. There is the amazing Pleco dictionary (among others) with built-in OCR, flashcarding, recorded pronunciations. There are podcasts (check out Popup Chinese). Spaced repitition software has significantly reduced the barrier to literacy; I read my first novel after ~10 months. It was painful, but not impossible thanks to an intensive flashcarding regimen, immersion, and other studying. Chinese grammar, while not trivial, is much simpler than I found French grammar to be. Also, the "compositive" nature of Chinese characters makes many words easy to remember despite not being cognates. When you have built up an internal library of individual characters, the meaning of a word like 海军 (navy) will be obvious since 海=sea and 军=army. Also, learning Chinese is incredibly rewarding. It opens up a country with 1.4bn+ inhabitants that is quickly gaining prominence in the world, and with one of the most fascinating scripts ever to be designed. Even though I no longer live in China, I still hear Mandarin all time. This makes learning the language exciting! The hardest part is sticking with it. If you want to learn, it will come so much easier to you.
汉语难在维持成本极高，缺乏文化浸润渠道时只能靠纯粹的意志力。
汉语是'高维护成本'语言，且与西方文化重叠很小。学好只是成功一半，保持不退步才是另一半。英语因文化主导地位，学会后靠看好莱坞电影、读科幻就能自然维持；而德语高中毕业后不维护就全忘了。学中文时，我每天要花越来越多的时间只为了不忘记已学的字，最后我决定放弃中文。
peferron查看英文原文
Chinese is high maintenance, and has very small cultural overlap with westerners. Becoming good at a language is only half the battle; the second half is to stay good, and for that you need to maintain it. English has the massively unfair advantage of being culturally dominant in the western world. As a Frenchman, once I became good at English, it was dead easy to maintain it. All I had to do was to keep doing what I had been doing since I was five: watching Hollywood movies (but not dubbed anymore), reading sci-fi books (but not translated anymore), and so on. The maintenance gets taken care of naturally. Now, take German: at the end of high school, I was completely fluent in German. But now, I couldn't say two words to save my life. That's because after high school, I didn't maintain it, and it rot away. With Chinese, in addition to learning new characters, I had to spend an ever increasing amount of time every day just to avoid forgetting the ones I had already learnt. Unlike American culture, I have no particular interest in Chinese culture, so the upkeep had to be paid entirely through sheer, conscious effort. Living in China alleviates part of this effort, but after watching all the issues China is plagued with get worse rather than better over the past 5 years, I don't want to live there long-term anymore. So I decided to just drop Chinese. Thinking back on this decision makes me extremely sad, but the truth is there are many things I'd rather do with my time rather than keep paying the Chinese upkeep. I could just drop the characters and focus on speaking and listening instead, but ugh, just the idea of being illiterate grosses me out, even in a foreign language. It's irrational, but I can't help it. After traveling to Taiwan - which is awesome btw - I even started learning the traditional writing of every character I knew. To be fair, traditional isn't that difficult, but that wasn't making things easier either. Oh well...
文章有术语和论证瑕疵，且忽略了汉语语法简单的另一面。
文章很有趣也很有信息量，但有些瑕疵：'表意文字'一词已不再使用，正确术语是'语标文字'；汉字的部首让人能在不知词义时对词归类。另外'书写系统不表音'的论点用英语举例很糟糕，英语的拼写到音素映射本就出了名地混乱。Moser 没提的是汉语语法极其简单，对比希腊语或立陶宛语的复杂语法。
Jun8查看英文原文
This article is great fun to read and overall very informative. Yet I had a few gripes about it. * Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols directly refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term. The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor". * Writing system not phonetic: Any other European language than English would have formed a much better argument, since English is notorious for its haphazard mapping of mapping phonemes to the alphabet, partly caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch with bare knowledge of English. One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent. Compare with, say, Greek grammar which has baffling complexity or Lithuanian that still has noun 9 cases! Some exotic native Indian languages have 10-15 noun classes (German has three, which we call gender). In pure writing complexity, some people rate Japanese to be even more complicated (with its three sub systems). Or for an older example, consider Mayan hieroglyphs.
概括了文章的九大论点，并用'猜书名游戏'佐证中文阅读门槛之高。
九大原因简列：书写系统荒谬、不用字母、不表音、没有同源词、查字典复杂、文言文、罗马化方案太多且都烂、声调怪异、东西方文化隔阂。一个美国人学会两门罗曼语的时间，可能才刚把中文学到同等水平。我的老师曾玩一个游戏：从图书馆中文书架随机抽一本书，看谁先猜出书讲什么——这确实很难。
barry-cotter查看英文原文
1. Because the writing system is ridiculous. 2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet. 3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic. 4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates. 5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated. 6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen). 7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck. 8. Because tonal languages are weird. 9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met. An average American could probably become reasonably fluent in two Romance languages in the time it would take them to reach the same level in Chinese. 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.
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