212 CultureShock! China
existing characters in creative ways. For instance, the most
common modern translation for ‘computer’ is ା (diannao):
literally ‘electric or lightning brain’.
If these sorts of character combinations are considered,
the total standard Chinese lexicon runs to well over 200,000
words—an awful lot for a non-native speaker (or even a
native speaker) to memorise. And that’s not even beginning
to touch on slang, or jargon specific to different academic or
business fields, or the new phrases constantly being created
to translate new words from other languages.The Beauty of Chengyu
There are the wonderfully poetic idioms called chengyu,
combinations of characters which can often be understood only
in context of the myth or legend they refer to. Many educated
Chinese seed their writing with chengyu, just as many educated
Westerners seed their writing with literary and other allusions.
But the chengyu provide allusions in highly compressed form.
The classic chengyu is just four characters long, but many pack
meanings that take paragraphs of English to explain.Add in all that, and it starts to become clear why Chinese
101 students always, sooner or later, run into that seemingly
unreadable wall. All the richness of Chinese etymology and
slang and chengyu makes for a language that can be a great
deal of fun to learn, but which is also a constant challenge
—even for native speakers. The average age of independent
reading in native speakers of English is between five and six;
among native speakers of Chinese, it is between seven and
eight, with the additional time required to learn so many
symbols the commonly cited reason for this difference. And
before the age of computers, typing or printing anything in
Chinese required racks and racks of fonts, which traditionally
had to be switched by hand. While skilled typists in English
can often type 120 words per minute (wpm), skilled Chinese
typists on traditional typewriters rarely hit 30 wpm.
Even looking up words is a challenge without an alphabet.
A set of 214 stylised versions of early pictographs, commonly