Facebook CEO扎克伯格的普通话究竟有多好？

2014-10-28 09:45:22来源：网络

　　Married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking

　　Surely Zuckerberg has an advantage because he can chat away with his wife, Priscilla Chan?

　　Well, aside from the fact that linguistic ability does not seep across couples by osmosis, his wife is reportedly more comfortable in Cantonese (eight tones, compared to Mandarin’s four), which is as close to Mandarin as English is to Polish.

　　Chan, the daughter of a Vietnamese-Chinese immigrant, was raised in Massachusetts and studied biology at Harvard. In other words, she is about as American as they come. Many expats in China claim that having a Chinese girlfriend brings the bonus of having a practice partner, but it is probably fair to assume the pillow talk in the Zuckerberg household is in English.

　　The revolution is not a dinner party

　　Learning Chinese is hard. In short, the ratio of effort to reward is so dismal that all but the most mindlessly dogged foreigners give up.

　　The Chinese, of course, have no choice, and their children have hours and hours of after-school homework, trying to drill the tens of thousands of characters into their long-term memory.

　　Every person who tries to learn Chinese will at some point hit a wall and wonder why on earth they are bothering. Like me, many will find an excuse to settle on the low foothills, terrified at the daunting effort before them. Simple pronunciation, as Zuckerberg discovered, can take years to master. There is nothing more soul-sapping than enthusiastically going to lessons for months and still being faced with blank stares of incomprehension when you simply try to say hello and ask someone’s name.

　　Grammar is more straightforward, but without rules it is difficult for learners to grasp which part of speech they might have heard. Which means if you do not know all the words in a sentence, you cannot guess its meaning.

　　A mountain of knives and a sea of fire

　　And then there is the writing. There is no alphabet. You simply have to rote-learn Chinese characters, forcing thousands, or tens of thousands of them into your leaky brain.

　　Anyone writing English can piece together the spelling of a word by saying it aloud to themselves in their head. But here you have to try to remember how many brush strokes it takes to write a character.

　　Even professors of Chinese find it daunting to be handed a book and asked to read a passage. When my Chinese colleague looks at a text message on his phone, it takes him a good minute to decipher its meaning.

　　彼此相爱的已婚夫妇无需通过语言就可以交流许多事情

　　扎克伯格真的是因为他可以与妻子普莉希拉·陈(Priscilla Chan)交谈而让自己汉语的学习更具优势吗?

　　事实上，除了英语能力不能进行夫妻间的相互渗透外，扎克伯格的妻子更喜欢说粤语(相对于只有4个音调的普通话，粤语有8个音调)，粤语接近于普通话的程度就如同英语接近于波兰语。

　　普莉希拉是越南华侨的女儿，她成长于马萨诸塞州，随后在哈佛主修生物学。也就是说，在他们家搬去美国的时候，她就基本是个美国人了。许多外籍人士称，有个中国女朋友的好处就是有了个练习中文的伙伴，但扎克伯格夫妇间的枕边话是用英语交谈这一假定可能是合理的。

　　改革不是请客吃饭

　　学习中文是艰难的，简而言之，努力的回报率是非常低的，以至于许多最顽强的外国人最后都放弃了。

　　中国人当然就没有选择余地了，孩子们在放学后要花费几个小时来完成家庭作业，试图把成千上万个文字保存到他们的长期记忆中。

　　每个试图学习中文的人都会在某一时候碰壁，接着就琢磨为什么它们到底为什么这么惹人困扰。在攀登汉语这座大山时，许多人像我一样，会找个借口在低山麓处安定下来，害怕在它面前付出的艰巨努力。正如扎克伯格发现的那样，掌握一个简单的发音都会花费好几年的时间。你充满热情上地去上课，几个月后会，当你只是试图跟人打招呼或者问别人的名字，迎来的却仍是不解的凝视，没有什么比这更让人心灵备受拷打了。

　　语法确实更加直观，但是如果没有规则的话，学习者就很难理解讲话者所说是哪一部分，也就是说，如果你不认识句子里的所有汉字，你也就无法猜到它的含义。

　　上刀山下火海

　　接下来是写作，汉语中没有字母表，你需要的是死记硬背汉字，然后将成千上万的汉字灌输到自己的大脑中。

　　任何一个进行英语写作的人都可以通过在脑海中回想发音而将单词拼写出来，但写汉字时，你必须努力记住要写多少笔画。

　　如果你给汉语教授一本书，让他读一篇文章，连他都会畏缩。当我的一个中国同事看手机上的信息时，他总会花费好几分钟来理解它的含义。

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