Note: You might want to look into the HSK test if you still like thinking about Chinese. I think your system of measuring language ability makes some sense as a very general system for all languages. That said I think each language demands it's own system of measurement. The HSK has it's own flaws - for some absurd reason it demands I learn words for ancient clothing and weapons that I honestly don't give a fuck about and have never talked about in my life, as well as be able to use thousands of idiomatic phrases(i) - but it's as good a measurement of Chinese ability as I can find. Judging from what you've said I would guess you'd hit a level 2 or 3 on the HSK, though your writing would probably hold you back. Speaking wise I would guess a three. If I were writing the test next week I'd be aiming for a level five or six with my reading and speaking at six or seven and my writing closer to five.
Well I agree that is a bummer. Notwithstanding the obvious benefits of the spread of a standard language I have always insisted that in the long run the loss of a language is an incalculable loss to human culture. Each language shapes the way its speakers think and that variety is precious. During the British administration people in Hong Kong were well-educated in Cantonese, so those who also knew Mandarin knew both the Cantonese and Mandarin readings of the Fenn 5000 or some such standard list. To a lesser extent the same was true in Shanghai, another cosmopolitan city. Those folks had no trouble rendering their local colloquialisms into their Mandarin phonetic equivalents, so the northerners could partake of their "quaint provincial humor." Of course there were still a few inscrutable dialect words. In Shanghai the pronoun "I" is a-la. When Shanghai dialect is transcribed in a novel, they just pick two morphemes with those sounds. According to the Chinese people who looked it up for me, they don't seem to have any relation to the meaning. Apparently the etymology of the expression is lost. BTW this gave rise to a tragic wave of misunderstanding during the war years. The GI's in Shanghai used to hit on the Chinese girls and they would respond "I don't want to," a-la fu you in Shanghai = wo bu yao in Mandarin. To the ears of a sex-starved foreign soldier that sounded like "Ah luff you." Sichuan is a dialect of Mandarin but it still has its own unique expressions. They shout yao2 dei3 after an enjoyable performance. (My attempt to render a six-tone dialect into the four standard Mandarin tones.) The Sichuan people I knew were all well educated and they could write those words down. It turns out they were saying yao4 de4, "wanted," i.e. "I like that a lot and want more," or "I want to take that home." That's colorful and it's fun to know the origin of the expression. Well hey, this scale is my own invention because I've never seen anyone else devise one that was even vaguely useful. The problem with any geometric scale is that it exaggerates differences at one end and compresses them at the other. The difference between a person who can read road signs in English and one who can stop and ask for directions is 5 - 3 = 2, the same as the difference between a precocious foreign university student and Winston Churchill: 10 - 8 = 2. Admittedly my scale is more sensible in the low ranges, where most of our members are with most of their languages. The gap between my 6.6 and your 7.7 in Chinese is huge, and in fact it's a full half-power of ten. I generally urge members to use one decimal place in the higher numbers for that reason. In a language with a non-phonetic writing system you have to rate fluency separately in written and spoken language. With a near-rigorous phonetic system like Turkish or Czech it's not so important. Writing systems that only pretend to be phonetic like French and English fall somewhere in between. In alphabetic languages, my observation is that most people--natives or foreigners--have their greatest fluency in reading; understanding speech comes second, speaking third and writing fourth. "None" is never counted as a tone in an academic context. In colloquial speech people pronounce the tone in the first syllable of a compound, and that precision attenuates in the later syllables to the extent that it doesn't interfere with understanding, but nonetheless all of those morphemes do have their own tones. I assume you've been to Chinese movies. In most of them the actors exaggerate their pronunciation and as a result there are very few neutral tones in the dialog, even particles like de, ge, le. This may be for the benefit of Chinese for whom Mandarin is a second language (like the Chinese subtitles), but it's also nice for the foreigners.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! BTW, only in the classroom or a book on linguistics do I usually encounter third tone described as "falling and then rising (slightly)." It's generally just called "low," and that's the way it comes out in normal speech in most positions. There's no point in making the tone system look more complicated than necessary to people who just want an overview. High-rising-low-falling is pretty easy to remember and it's accurate enough without being unnecessarily precise.
you know I was looking into this because I thought that same thing as you. As I understand no one is really tone deaf, as in lack the ability to hear different tones. It's just some people are better at distinguishing subtle differences than others. With 4 tones it's probably not a problem. The History channel had a special on Chinese weapons and yeah, they used gun powder to attack people. It's just their other artillery and weapons were much better One other aside, Europe has a lot of natural barriers (mountain and rivers not to mention England is an island) to unification which means that it's difficult to consolidate and hold onto power over the continent - this then lends itself towards making better and better weapons as the ones you used last time to kick arse are now adopted by the people you conquored and being used to kick yours. CHina, is supposedly, much easier to hold power over. Supposedly this then meant that for long peaceful periods there was a loss or lack of weapon development. But make no mistake, the Chinese could kick some arse back in the day, during certain periods and under certain leaders.
I guess that all makes sense. I suppose it just feels strange because I'm not use to 1 - 10 scales being geometric. Exactly the same as my Chinese. I'm fully capable of reading a novel in Chinese - I'm reading my third one now! Usually when speaking with other people I miss a few words, but rarely enough that I don't understand their general meaning. The exception would be times, like today, when someone tries to explain how to make a medicinal soup and I just don't know most of the names of the ingredients. I'm fully capable of expressing any thought I want to, though often it comes out in poor Chinese or with strange choice of grammar. And my writing is obviously the worst area of all. I'm pretty sure "了" has no tone when it's pronounced as "le" in any context. Even in movies you'll clearly hear this. Possibly in relation to this, "啦" ("la") is used at the end of many sentences, specifically by adolescents, and can be given a tone. I strongly disagree. I can clearly hear a distinction between the foreigners who use "low" as their guide and those who use the standard guide. Those who do not include the fall and rise sound like foreign students. There's even a standard Chinese method of making fun of foreigners speaking Chinese that involves them pronouncing "我, 你， 马， 喜" all as if they were simply low tones. And every Chinese person I've ever met very clearly articulates the difference.
Not at all an expert on Chinese, but I have in mind a very efficient language missed out here so far - Sanskrit. Its very name means 'refined' or 'produced in purest form'. It's not only the fountain from which most of subcontinental languages emerged, but is also the liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Sanskrit has also been intricately interwoven with scientific and mathematical progress. Many of its early texts contain a number of scientific concepts which were then unknown in Western societies. Also, Vedic Mathematics, which is considered one of the most efficient mathematical forms in the world was developed because of the formal nature of the syntax and grammar of Sanskrit. In fact, Sanskrit impresses both linguists and computer scientists, who use its fundamental syntax as a model for the creation of new languages. IMO, all that should be enough to qualify it as one of the most, if not the single-most, efficient languages in the world.
You think that's bad? The French don't even have words for 70, 80 or 90, leaving them having to say things like "sixty and eleven" to express 71, "four twenties" to express 80, and "four twenties fifteen" to express 95. Of course they gave us the likes of Descartes and Fourrier, so I guess one can't complain too much, but it really boggles the mind.
People seem to want big numbers to have a lot of syllables. Look at all the anglophones who erroneously read 796 as seven hundred AND ninety-six. The Neolithic world abounded with vigesimal number systems. The Basques had one, which may have spread north to the Franks, becoming part of the Frankish substratum in French.
Vigesimal number system are cool. But it's hard to imagine why they bothered coming up with new words for thirty through sixty and hundred, thousand, etc. but never bothered inventing a seventy, eighty, or ninety.
The Franks and Gauls didn't invent those words. The Romans taught them Latin and the words already existed. They decided to assimilate the multiples of ten up to sixty but not the higher ones. The Modern French words are just the Latin words after a millennium and a half of phonetic shifts. This might have occurred if the Germanic or Celtic tribes in what is now France had a sexagesimal figure in their culture, and were therefore happy to have new words for those numbers, but had no special use for the higher ones. Patterns of sixty are common, for example our sixty seconds to the minute and sixty minutes to the hour, and the Chinese zodiac that repeats every sixty years.
