The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

by John DeFrancis

Book Overview

"DeFrancis's book is first rate. It entertains. It teaches. It demystifies. It counteracts popular ignorance as well as sophisticated (cocktail party) ignorance. Who could ask for anything more? There is no other book like it. ... It is one of a kind, a first, and I would not only buy it but I would recommend it to friends and colleagues, many of whom are visiting China now and are adding 'two-week-expert' ignorance to the two kinds that existed before...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824810686
• ISBN13: 9780824810689
• Release Date: March 1986
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Length: 342 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A scholarly, yet sometimes humourous look at the Chinese language

John DeFrancis is one of the most eminent linguists in the United States working in the field of Chinese language. He is also possessed of a very wicked sense of humour as his first chapter, "The Singlish Affair" proves. I do not speak Chinese. I am a student of a language that was profoundly influenced by the Chinese system of writing, namely Korean. Though the Hangeul alphabet has replaced a lot of the Chinese characters, they are still used, though on a limited scale in newspapers and on a greater scale in academic works. I've found learning the characters to be helpful personally, as the bulk of the vocabulary is taken from Chinese. Korean lacks the tones to differentiate between homonyms, of which there are many in the Sino-Korean vocabulary. The characters can add a certain level of clarity that could be lacking in Hangeul-only texts, especially if the meaning isn't entirely clear from the context. I found his work to be entertaining, informative, and insightful. However, I am not in a position to judge certain of his propositions as I do not speak Chinese.

Essential, classic, indispensable

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.

If you truly want to understand Chinese you MUST read this.

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.

Very enlightening reading

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 i

Everything You Thought You Knew About Chinese -- and Don't

This is not only the best book I know about Chinese, it is one of the best books I know about language. DeFrancis, a University of Hawaii professor who is a distinguished author of texts for English speaking learners of Chinese, attacks a whole web of misconceptions about the Chinese writing system, in particular, the notion that it works by representing concepts or ideas, rather than sounds and words.The point of attack is a wonderfully whimsical chapter framaed as the notes of a [fictitious] international committee established by the Japanese government during WWII to create a way to write English in kanji -- adapted Chinese characters -- for occupation and reculturation of America. The committee consists of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese scholars. In the course of presenting the problems facing the group (against the historical background of the problems in adapting Chinese characters to Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese) it becomes obvious how misleading and wrongheaded is the idea that Chinese writing somehow embodies thoughts rather sounds in spoken languages. In the subsequent chapter, DeFrancis examines in detail the components of the concept-writing idea -- what he calls "myths" about Chinese characters. In the course of these expositions, a reader not only learns a great deal about Chinese languages (there are many) and their written representation, but also about the basic process by which _any_ language is written. (DeFrancis later developed these ideas into another book, "Visible Speech," also recommended."The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" remains controversial: some of the myths DeFrancis attacks are held by Chinese about their own language, and DeFrancis is emphatically a non-fan of the Chinese writing system. But DeFrancis argues his case with elegance, deep knowledge, skill at presenting examples which make his points with intuitive directness, and passion. The best part is a reader needs no prior knowledge of Chinese or linguistics at all to appreciate it, only an interest in how people communicate. I recommend it highly to anyone who has this interest in any form.