196 CultureShock! China
True fluency, especially in written Chinese, is rare among
people not raised to it. Many have observed that one measure
of a language’s difficulty is how many non-native speakers
have become great poets in that language. In Chinese, the
answer is: none. There have been great poets in Chinese who
grew up speaking Japanese or Korean, but (as we’ll see) those
languages in written form share many Chinese characters.
In all the 4,000 plus years that Chinese has, in some form
or another, been in more-or-less continuous use, no native
speaker of a non-character-based language has yet earned
wide recognition as a poet in Chinese.
But don’t despair: unlike alphabetic languages like English,
Chinese has a tremendous split between its written and
spoken forms, and there is no need whatsoever to learn
the written forms to be able to speak. Many expatriates in
China, including many who have lived in China for years
or even decades, who are successful in business, who have
many Chinese friends, who in short function extremely
well in Chinese society, are in fact functionally illiterate in
written Chinese. It gives a new appreciation for those who
are illiterate in our home societies.In major cities in China, there may be English translations for Chinese
characters on signboards, but not usually in smaller cities and in small
towns and villages.