Learning Chinese in the Washington Post

The Washington Post writer Jay Matthews recently had a semi-humorous article on his attempts to learn Chinese (thanks to my friend Joel Haas for the heads-up):

Learning the spoken language was not so bad. It had few annoyances like gender and tense and verb changes based on rank. My first Chinese professor was Rulan Chao Pian, who used a system invented by her father, the legendary UC Berkeley linguist Yuen R. Chao. She and her father shared a mischievous sense of humor, although I did not think it was so funny at first. One of her first exercises was a short story made of words that used only one Chinese sound, shi (sounds like 'sure'). It was totally incomprehensible -- just as the sentence "Sure sure sure sure, sure-sure, sure sure sure" would be in English -- unless you got all the tones right or could see the characters.

Anyveteran of Chinese will recognize the old tongue twister about 44 stone lions that a friend of mine once assured me was invented to torment the Taiwanese, who do not make the "shi" sound properly. Here's an interesting tidbit he notes:

The Asia Society report says it takes "an educated English speaker 1,300 hours to achieve the native-proficiency of an educated native speaker of Chinese, while it would only take about 480 hours to achieve the same level in French or Spanish." In Sunday's edition of The Washington Post Magazine , my Post colleague Elizabeth Chang quotes another source saying that it actually takes 2,200 class hours to achieve full proficiency.

That helps explain why, according to the Asia Society, a 1998 survey of college language instruction showed 656,590 students taking Spanish, but only 28,456 taking Chinese and 5,505 taking Arabic. In that survey, Spanish was in first place, followed by French (199,064), German (89,020), Italian (49,287) and Japanese (43,141). Chinese was in sixth place, followed by Russian, Arabic and Korean in that order.

[Taiwan]