Customer Reviews

Speaking of Chinese: A Cultural History of the Chinese Language

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

OK, first and foremost, this is not a language learning book. What it is is a "learning aid" book that motivates your interest and curiosity of the structure and origins of the Chinese written language. What do I mean? If you are learning Chinese, it describes many relationships between characters that enhance your ability to remember them, as well as recognize insights to meanings of characters you do not even know. In some ways it is a narrative version of another excellent book, the more dictionary-like "Reading and Writing Chinese: A Guide to the Chinese Writing System" by William McNaughton and Li Ying. Both excellently address the origins and relationships between characters, but with very different styles.

Chang and Chang colorfully, interestingly, and amusingly describes contrasts, contradictions, and anomalies in character formation. It is a charming book that I would highly recommend to the language student.

Even if you are not learning the language, the book still offers interesting discussions about characters. Western languages, and many others, are truly different from the "phonetic" languages so many of us know. Chinese construction is old, yet novel, so meaning-rich, that it presents an interesting discussion and perspective. And the writing itself remains unchanged over a much longer period than western languages.

Read a few of its pages and see if you don't agree.

The subtitle sounds daunting, doesn't it? But this clever little book is so well written, in a friendly, colloquial voice, that you'll turn the pages as quickly as you might while reading a frothy novel. At the same time, the book is jammed with information--about the basics of the Chinese language and how it has managed to survive without an alphabet; about various dynasties; about Chinese folklore and everyday life. If you're thinking of visiting China, if you're interested in languages, or if you've adopted a child from China, this book is a wonderful introduction to a land and culture that we Westerners tend to dismiss.

This book is great for learning about Chinese language construction and writing. And its relationship to Chinese culture and history. But not for learning specifiaclly how to speak or write Chinese.

With that said, this is a very entertaing book and hard to put down.

Among the subjects it covers are:

* Langage construction. For exaample how questions are asked

in Chinese. And general sentence structure.

* How pictographs came about and how archologists traced their

orgins.

* How Chinese pictographs are taught to children in China.

(They have to memorize them--each one.)

* Chinese tongue twisters.

* How Chinese writing styles differ from the spoken word,

classical and contemporary. How this related to testing

for government officials, and how the Communist revolution

changed this.

* How Chinese language construction differs from English

language.

And much more.

I have been working at teaching myself Chinese, and it is so different that there is a lot of the concepts that I was not able to grasp until reading this book.

If you are going to study Chinese, I would highly recommend reading this book first.

If you are interested in Chinese culture, I highly recommend reading this book. Culture and language are intimately tied togeather.

For people who just started learning Chinese and would like to have a wider background on the language. Chinese as a language is looked at from all possible directions : written, spoken, origin, calligraphy ...
Very easy to read, well explained, interesting examples, fascinating stories ...

Excellent! This little book is packed with information and is easy to read and follow. Topics covered: The written and spoken language, its historical roots, household communication, the future of the language and the impact of technology. I have perused other Chinese language books, but this one is by far the best I've seen.

Excellent summary of the culture and history of language in China. Very readable. Helpful appendices of dynasties, historical feats, common radicals, and others.

This might be a harsh comment to say about this book. In fact, considering this is written in the 70s, when the Cold War was in full swing, I think this book had it place to make this seemingly inaccessible language available to the masses. Generally a fascinating read, on the origins and the logic behind the written Chinese language, there are a few things that the reader should be aware. Again, I think these points come from the Changs's desire to make the language accessible to the American reader.

First, from time to time, the authors mixed up the Authentic script ("Complex script" as the Chinese would call it) and the Simplified scripts. While they are colloquially interchangeable, where the simplified script is used in the same sense as informal abbreviations, it is generally more appropriate in a published setting to stick with one script (complex or simplified) throughout the book.

Second, the authors seem to be stuck with the idea that each Chinese character must have a corresponding one-word English meaning. I think people should get over this notion. There are Latin or Arabic terms that cannot be fully translated into English, so why should we expect otherwise for the Chinese language?

Finally, some of the materials have been misrepresented. One such example is the "pastry" story that is presented early on in the book. The story, which had its historical roots, was altered significantly to suit the writers' vision. Sometimes, going back to the need to map every Chinese word to an English word, the translation is either incomplete, or done out of context.

The Chinese writing on the book is probably done by the author, and introduced into the book as images. While the writing is generally correct and legible, the handwriting suggests that he does not write Chinese on a regular basis. So I think while the authors have a reasonably deep theoretical knowledge in the Chinese language, they are also out of practice.

In evaluating this book, I had to put it in context. It was written in a time when the Chinese language was still a very foreign and exotic entity, and that the American understanding of it still left much room to be desired. This book served the purpose of bridging the gap then. In this day, we need something more substantial. It makes a good introductory text nevertheless, only if the reader is aware of the quirks and is willing to avoiding falling for them.

I write as a newbie to China and its ancient language, who used this book as orientation and as a break from the rote work that learning Chinese demands.

The book is a well-written overview of the written and spoken languages which provides a "top-down" overview of the terrain that language learning neglects for drill in basic conversation. In particular, "business" Chinese can be easily a form of Klingon, an oversimplified language informed only by current concerns, which may create the very misunderstandings it pretends to avoid.

But as a Western educator I disagree with an implication in the chapter "Old Wisdom, New Technology", and this is that because "technology" is "Western", Chinese students are better off learning Pinyin and computers than writing the characters...or, perhaps, that we must accept this naturalized development.

The continued survival of the abacus and the fact that it's faster than electronic calculators in the hands of a skilled operator should teach us not to reify Western Technology, that is, to treat it as a natural force like global warming to which we must necessarily, perhaps with a sigh of ai-ya, demur.

Understood as an extension of culture, the Chinese up to about 1750 had MORE technology in the sense of practical solutions to problems of daily life than did Europeans.

The "complexity" of Chinese characters is not an absolute. It is relative to the origins of the Western encoding of "all" characters in 256 bits, the "ASCII" code, which in the early 1960s simply ignored the fact that most people use a richer "character set".

Complementary to the complexity of Chinese characters is the fact that their mastery imparts information handling skills at an early age and results in the self-discipline which has made Chinese software developers, for years, highly successful at creating "Western" solutions.

In general any claim that a system of writing is "too complex" needs to be classified with Plato's original charge against writing, that it was marginal and unnecessary to the conduct of affairs, and, as Derrida has shown, this charge is bad faith since it can only be made in writing, in traditional Chinese terms, by a vermilion decree swaying all under heaven.