Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

I read the Amazon reviews, noticing that the negative and equivocal reviews were written by people who actually read Chinese with some degree of fluency, and realized that I don't need to read this book. So I skimmed. Assertions about the desirability of abolishing Chinese characters in favour of an alphabetical system, which is the burden of DeFrancis's argument, annoy me. Trying to read romanized Chinese text is as difficult as trying to read English text written in Chinese characters (you might call it a rebus format), and just as frustrating; not to mention the millennia of cultural heritage embodied in the characters which would be entirely lost to the world. Orwellian Newspeak is benign by comparison. DeFrancis begins his book show more with a shaggy-dog tale, a "joke" dozens of pages long and full of "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative", in which the Japanese during WWII anticipate complete victory over the US and spearhead a committee to plan writing the English language in Chinese characters ("kanji"). It is highly ironic that he fails to comprehend that he wants to inflict the same kind of violence upon the Chinese language. show less

This book will be of interest only to those who want to dig into the linguistics of Chinese. For people learning Chinese it might illuminate some of the problems you are having.

It's by one of the most prominent Chinese linguists of the last century, who in the first half of the book tackles (and for the most part demolishes) many of the myths about the Chinese language held both by outsiders and by Chinese scholars themselves. For example: that Chinese characters are ideographic, expressing ideas directly without appeal to spoken language; that the language itself is monosyllabic; that Chinese is a unified language across China with only minor differences in pronunciation.

I would have rated it higher if the second half hadn't been so show more out of date. It consists mostly of discussions of the political history of the attempt to spread literacy in China, and the issues of the writing system--should the characters be replaced or at least supplemented by a phonetic system? Written in 1984, the whole discussion I believe has been or soon will be rendered obsolete by the widespread use of the internet and cell phones, for the way characters are input into computing devices is by typing phonetically. Once communication is mediated by computers, game over. show less

Great introduction and a well-grounded presentation of the facts (and the fantasies) about the Chinese language make this a must-read for Chinese learners. Gets a bit strident towards the end, though.

The introduction is fantastic!