The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

Rating:
Summary: If you truly want to understand Chinese you MUST read this.
Review: Any serious scholar or student of the Chinese language absolutely needs to read this book. He goes about "myth busting" and it is indeed necessary. Most people, including many native speakers, have a rather stereo typical understanding of the Chinese language.
John Defrancis go through a well laid out series of arguments with elucidating examples to drive the points home. Even native speakers will learn from this book as he is one of the world's most renown scholars and authorities on the Chinese language. There are a lot of common misconceptions about the Chinese language and Defrancis provides a well written and illuminating uncovering of those misconceptions. If you want to sound like an authority about Chinese get this treasure.

Rating:
Summary: Academic and readable -- superb description of the issues.
Review: In struggling with some way to get a handle on how to learn Chinese characters in my first Mandarin course, I found Dr. Defrancis' wonderful text, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.

He had me hoodwinked and hornswoggled through the early part of the first chapter with only an inkling that something was not quite right. Great device for introducing a complex subject. I'm just now finishing the book and plan to re-read that first chapter now that I'm wearing a new set of evaluation tools.

Is the language at all phonetic? Somewhat phonetic...not at all phonetic? Was it sometime? Will some alphabetic system replace characters? What schemes have been tried in the recent past?

These are some of the questions that Dr. Defrancis tackles and worries over like a barnyard dog. Once he gets hold of an issue, he doesn't let go until he's examined every single aspect.

This is a really rewarding text if you're interested in the Chinese language. (Oh yes, what exactly is meant by 'language' anyway?...read the book for a great discussion.)

Rating:
Summary: Very enlightening reading
Review: John DeFrancis' book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is the best book I have read on the Chinese language. It explains in great detail what the Chinese language and its ancient writing system is all about. It is also great fun to read.

Based on his profound understanding of the language and its teaching methods, Mr. DeFrancis, in this book, contradicts all misconceptions, myths and fantasies that people may have about the subject. And there are lots of them.

He begins the book by telling a long-winded joke about a Language Committee that was founded by the Japanese during World War II. Its task was to prepare for changing the writing systems of all major world languages into using the Chinese language writing method in case the Japanese emerge victorious and become the rulers of the world. This way, by comparing the two writing systems Mr. DeFrancis makes it abundantly clear that most ideas people have about the Chinese language and its writing system lay on a very shaky foundation. I'll try to mention some points here although it has been a while since I read the book.

For a Western person, it is very difficult to say anything even remotely meaningful about the Chinese language before he has spent a good number of years studying it. We are told, for example, that there is such a thing as the Chinese language, and that it is universally spoken and understood, written and read by all Chinese-speaking people. This is one of the misconceptions Mr. DeFrancis attacks: most of the so-called dialects of the Chinese language are in fact completely different languages with mutual differences as great as those between English and German, or French and Spanish.

Mandarin Chinese has four tones, whereas Cantonese and Shanghaihua have six and nine, respectively. All of these languages use different words for the needs of the basic daily life and, when they do use the same word for a specific purpose, it is pronounced differently. In Pinyin, it is difficult to see whether we are talking about the same word or not, but still, in the Chinese character writing, the same character will be used. This makes it look, for a Western person, like Chinese was a single language that is used universally by all Chinese-speaking people.

Why is it, then, that Mandarin Chinese writing is understood by all Chinese-speaking people all over the world? It isn't, quite simply. Mr. DeFrancis goes on to show how much more difficult it is for a school child in China to learn to read and write as well as most school children using Indo-European languages. He illustrates his point by going through Chinese literacy statistics and expresses his doubts on whether these statistics are true or false.

Another explanation for the "easiness of universal understanding of the Chinese character writing" is the use of ideographs. Allegedly, each character describes its object so vividly that it is possible to understand what a Chinese character means - just by looking at it. Mr. DeFrancis takes it upon himself to do this point quite thoroughly.

The "one character - one word" -fallacy is also given a good going-over by Mr. DeFrancis. He shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that the Chinese language is in fact constituted of syllables, and that these syllables are written using characters. There are dozens of quite different characters that are pronounced identically. The characters representing each syllable of a word may be selected quite arbitrarily.

This is one of the works on the subject of the Chinese language that will really take you beyond myths and fantasies into the real world of facts. Read it and see for yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Essential, classic, indispensable
Review: This is without question the most important book on the Chinese writing system published in the last century, and it is one of the most important books on the Chinese language.

The main goal of the book is to explain how the Chinese writing system works, and to dispel commonly held beliefs such as that the Chinese writing system conveys thought directly without the intermediary of sound.

Anyone with a serious interest in the Chinese language or Chinese linguistics, or the general topic of writing systems, cannot consider themselves worth listening to unless they have grappled with the arguments in this book.

Anyone who is studying Chinese casually would do very well to read it; it's written in a very easy to read and accessible way without jargon.