中國網(wǎng)站品牌欄目（頻道）
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Married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking Surely Zuckerberg has an advantage because he can chat away with his wife, Priscilla Chan? Well, aside from the fact that linguistic ability does not seep across couples by osmosis, his wife is reportedly more comfortable in Cantonese (eight tones, compared to Mandarin’s four), which is as close to Mandarin as English is to Polish. Chan, the daughter of a Vietnamese-Chinese immigrant, was raised in Massachusetts and studied biology at Harvard. In other words, she is about as American as they come. Many expats in China claim that having a Chinese girlfriend brings the bonus of having a practice partner, but it is probably fair to assume the pillow talk in the Zuckerberg household is in English.
The revolution is not a dinner party Learning Chinese is hard. In short, the ratio of effort to reward is so dismal that all but the most mindlessly dogged foreigners give up. The Chinese, of course, have no choice, and their children have hours and hours of after-school homework, trying to drill the tens of thousands of characters into their long-term memory. Every person who tries to learn Chinese will at some point hit a wall and wonder why on earth they are bothering. Like me, many will find an excuse to settle on the low foothills, terrified at the daunting effort before them. Simple pronunciation, as Zuckerberg discovered, can take years to master. There is nothing more soul-sapping than enthusiastically going to lessons for months and still being faced with blank stares of incomprehension when you simply try to say hello and ask someone’s name. Grammar is more straightforward, but without rules it is difficult for learners to grasp which part of speech they might have heard. Which means if you do not know all the words in a sentence, you cannot guess its meaning.
A mountain of knives and a sea of fire And then there is the writing. There is no alphabet. You simply have to rote-learn Chinese characters, forcing thousands, or tens of thousands of them into your leaky brain. Anyone writing English can piece together the spelling of a word by saying it aloud to themselves in their head. But here you have to try to remember how many brush strokes it takes to write a character. Even professors of Chinese find it daunting to be handed a book and asked to read a passage. When my Chinese colleague looks at a text message on his phone, it takes him a good minute to decipher its meaning. |
彼此相愛的已婚夫婦無需通過語言就可以交流許多事情 扎克伯格真的是因為他可以與妻子普莉希拉·陳（Priscilla Chan）交談而讓自己漢語的學(xué)習(xí)更具優(yōu)勢嗎？ 事實上，除了英語能力不能進(jìn)行夫妻間的相互滲透外，扎克伯格的妻子更喜歡說粵語（相對于只有4個音調(diào)的普通話，粵語有8個音調(diào)），粵語接近于普通話的程度就如同英語接近于波蘭語。 普莉希拉是越南華僑的女兒，她成長于馬薩諸塞州，隨后在哈佛主修生物學(xué)。也就是說，在他們家搬去美國的時候，她就基本是個美國人了。許多外籍人士稱，有個中國女朋友的好處就是有了個練習(xí)中文的伙伴，但扎克伯格夫婦間的枕邊話是用英語交談這一假定可能是合理的。
改革不是請客吃飯 學(xué)習(xí)中文是艱難的，簡而言之，努力的回報率是非常低的，以至于許多最頑強(qiáng)的外國人最后都放棄了。 中國人當(dāng)然就沒有選擇余地了，孩子們在放學(xué)后要花費幾個小時來完成家庭作業(yè)，試圖把成千上萬個文字保存到他們的長期記憶中。 每個試圖學(xué)習(xí)中文的人都會在某一時候碰壁，接著就琢磨為什么它們到底為什么這么惹人困擾。在攀登漢語這座大山時，許多人像我一樣，會找個借口在低山麓處安定下來，害怕在它面前付出的艱巨努力。正如扎克伯格發(fā)現(xiàn)的那樣，掌握一個簡單的發(fā)音都會花費好幾年的時間。你充滿熱情上地去上課，幾個月后會，當(dāng)你只是試圖跟人打招呼或者問別人的名字，迎來的卻仍是不解的凝視，沒有什么比這更讓人心靈備受拷打了。 語法確實更加直觀，但是如果沒有規(guī)則的話，學(xué)習(xí)者就很難理解講話者所說是哪一部分，也就是說，如果你不認(rèn)識句子里的所有漢字，你也就無法猜到它的含義。
上刀山下火海 接下來是寫作，漢語中沒有字母表，你需要的是死記硬背漢字，然后將成千上萬的漢字灌輸?shù)阶约旱拇竽X中。 任何一個進(jìn)行英語寫作的人都可以通過在腦海中回想發(fā)音而將單詞拼寫出來，但寫漢字時，你必須努力記住要寫多少筆畫。 如果你給漢語教授一本書，讓他讀一篇文章，連他都會畏縮。當(dāng)我的一個中國同事看手機(jī)上的信息時，他總會花費好幾分鐘來理解它的含義。 |
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