C Est Du Chinois Analysis
“Les femmes c'est du chinois” is the name of a French song, and in English it is “Women, It's all Chinese to me.” Some people may not make heads of tails of it as obviously there are plentiful nationalities of women in this world. Indeed “c’est du chinois” is a French idiom that is often used to indicate something incomprehensible, and similar expressions that bring up about Chinese can also be found in many other Western languages, such as Dutch “Dat is Chinees voor mij!”(This is Chinese to me), Estonian “See on nagu hiina keel!” (It's like Chinese) and Czech “Mluvím s Číňanem?”(Am I speaking with a Chinese?).
Apparently, Chinese is considered a really hard language for a majority of westerners. Foreign Service Institute, developed by the United States government, has catergorized over 60 languages into 4 levels of difficulty. (Language Difficulty Ranking, 2013) Among all, Chinese is ranked as the most difficult languages to native English speakers along with Korean, Japanese and Arabic.
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Articles, essays, threads talking about its hardness, peculiarity, oddity…etc written by language learners abound in forums and Internet. In the presence of all, “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard” by David Moser is a well-known piece of article, as the title indicates, this article mainly talks about how daunting hard Chinese is to westerners comparing to other European languages. With a rather bantering and playful tone, this article points out the difficulty of Chinese in terms of its writing system, phonology, romanization and Chinese cultures …etc. After reading this article, people may be intimidated by Chinese and dismiss it right away.
Truly Chinese is so different from other European languages, but is it really that hard? In this writing I would respond to the above-mentioned article “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard” and focus on one of Moser’s points – Because tonal languages are
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