down the 'chinese reading rabbit hole'

When I set out to teach myself how to read Chinese, I really had no idea what I was doing. I picked a few random kids' books in a Hong Kong bookstore and ordered a copy of Reading and Writing Chinese by William McNaughton online, and off I went. This post is to share with you some of the very complicated lessons I learned over the course of about two years. I set out to learn one language, but it feels like I've sort had to learn much more than that...

1. There are two types of Chinese characters (Traditional and Simplified) and you'll need to decide which you want to learn. I didn't realize this for a long time, and mostly bought resources in Simplified Chinese as this is the standard for China, has the most learning resources and is being taught much more widely than Traditional. This doesn't have any direct connection to what language you speak. Someone could read Traditional characters and speak Mandarin, or read Simplified characters and speak Cantonese.

I decided to learn Traditional, as my family is Hong Kong-Chinese and I felt more aligned to it. There aren't as many resources in Traditional Chinese, but they are definitely out there! I source my books from Amazon or an awesome Canadian online bookstore Little Kozzi.

2. Ok this one is a doozy - Chinese is a diglossic language, meaning the written form and the spoken form of the language can be completely different! It's sort of like having the English we know, and the English used in Shakespearean plays: sometimes you can understand the general idea but sometimes you really can't! The words you use to express the same idea are different, as is the grammar. There is:

Standard Written Form | 書面語 | syu1 min6 jyu5

Colloquial (how you speak) | 口語 | hau2 jyu5

This took me a long time to wrap my head around, and I discovered the word "diglossia" only a few months ago. It was so confusing to spend all the time translating a sentence in a book word-for-word, then to read it as a whole and not understand a word of what I've read. I can spoke and understood a fair amount of Cantonese, but I wouldn't recognize any of the words I read aloud. This happened a lot. So if you want to learn to read Chinese as well as speak Cantonese, then you'll essentially need to learn two languages.

The neat thing is that Standard Written Form is, well, standardized. So literate Chinese people all across the world could pick up the newspaper and understand what is written, even though they all speak different languages that are mutually unintelligible (a.k.a. they wouldn't understand each other).

Historically, colloquial Cantonese would not ever be written down. It would be like seeing "lol" in a textbook... it would just be odd. But, there are designated characters for words that are only found in Cantonese, and in the age of texting, it is becoming more and more common for people to write out exactly what they would say out loud (colloquial Cantonese) instead of texting their message using the formal style of Standard Written Form. Now you can even find a handful of books actually written in colloquial Cantonese, though it is very rare still. In some ways this could be seen as counter-culture as it defies the expectation and standard of using Standard Written Form, but many people also see this as an act of language preservation, as Cantonese is projected to be a dying language (I'll write more on this in later posts, I'm sure). It is also just more practical for those that want to learn Cantonese as it is spoken, instead of having to devote time to learning both colloquial and written! ham6 baang6 laang6 is one such initiative that is doing amazing work in creating colloquial Cantonese resources.

3. There are many romanization systems of both Mandarin and Cantonese, which means the sounds/pronunciation of the words are written with Roman script (i.e. the English alphabet). Pinyin is the standard romanization of Mandarin, and jyutping and Yale are two of the more common romanizations of Cantonese. Figuring this out has really helped me in finding the best resources that fit my learning goals and needs.

All this to say, it was a long road before I could navigate my way around obtaining the resources I wanted and needed. I'm sure all these elements contribute to why Chinese is such a difficult language to learn. These days I am looking for either books in Traditional Chinese writing and/or include Jyutping. I'd love to be able to read fluently without the Jyutping one day, but for now it can be incredibly helpful so I don't have to stop-start constantly as I look up the words or as my brain sloooowly recalls less familiar words. But now the question on my mind is: when I read out loud to my kids, do I read what is written on the page in Standard Written Form or do I "translate" it into colloquial Cantonese?! Why is this language so complicated?!?!?!