Homophones - More Confusing Than Ideographs Or Tones

As I start each new lesson in Duolingo, I realise what is most confusing and difficult about learning Mandarin.

It's not the number of ideographs. There may be two thousand of them, and they may be hard to write, but they're an order of magnitude easier to remember. Writing with pīnyīn (romanised spellings) and choosing from the limited set of characters that the computer or smartphone presents to you is eminently doable, even for a beginner.

Tones are admittedly harder for me. The first (high) tone is the easiest for me to recognise and pronounce. I find it hard to tell apart the second (rising) tone from the third (falling-rising). And pronouncing the no-tone version of a syllable is really, really hard. I often end up pronouncing it like the high-tone version. (I'll get there one day though. It's just a matter of time and practice.)

But now, I'm starting to see a far more serious issue than either the number of ideographs or the confusing tones, and this is a problem that is going to get bigger with time.

It's the number of homophones.

More and more of them as time goes on and the lessons progress.

I guess it's a natural corollary of having so few unique syllables (phonemes) in the language. Pretty soon, you'll have to start reusing existing phonemes for new words, and the soil is ripe for sowing confusion.

With each new lesson, I'm now prepared to be confronted with yet another character that is pronounced "shi", "zhi", "li", "wan", "xi", "xiang", "jian" or "qi". Sometimes, the tone is different, but often, the tone is also the same as that of an earlier character with the same pronunciation.

There are in fact three types of homophones that I'm struggling with:

1. Those that have different characters and different tones, but are otherwise pronounced the same way, e.g., 是 shì, 时 shí, and 师 shī.

2. Those that have different characters, but are pronounced in exactly the same way, including tone, e.g., 时 and 识, both pronounced shí.

3. Those that are exactly the same in character and pronunciation, but meaning different things in different contexts, e.g., 只 zhǐ

我 只 有 一只 狗 wǒ zhǐ yǒu yīzhǐ gǒu ("I only have one dog"). Here, the first 只 zhǐ means "only", and the second one in 一只 yīzhǐ is a "measure word" that is used to count animals. Two completely different contexts.

When a sentence with homophones is spoken fast, it can be really hard to parse.

Just for fun, I made up these sentences with homophones.

1. 我 吃完 一碗 晚饭 wǒ chīwán yīwǎn wǎnfàn ("I finished eating a bowl of dinner"). Here, the first 完 wán is an "aspect particle" that means "finished", the second one in 一碗 yīwǎn is a "measure word" that means "a bowl of", and the third one is part of 晚饭 wǎnfàn ("dinner", literally "late rice").

2. 这只 狗 只 喝 果汁 zhèzhǐ gǒu zhǐ hē guǒzhī ("This dog only drinks fruit juice"). Here, the first 只 zhǐ in 这只 zhèzhǐ ("this") is a "measure word" for animals, the second 只 zhǐ is exactly the same character but means "only" when used in this context, and the third 汁 zhī means "juice".

3. 意大利 的 李子 里 没有 力 yìdàlì de lǐzǐ lǐ méiyǒu lì ("There is no strength in Italian plums"). Here, the first 利 lì means nothing by itself, and is just meant to help spell out the word "yidali" or "Italy", the second 李 lǐ is part of the word 李子 lǐzǐ ("plum"), the third 里 lǐ means "in", and the fourth 力 lì means "strength" or "power".

[I must say the Japanese have a much better system to deal with foreign words like "Italy". Instead of roping in ideographic characters to do some meaningless (and confusing) double-duty, they have an entire parallel script called Katakana that instantly tells the reader that they are reading a foreign word.]

So as you can see, homophones are my biggest bugbear at the moment, and I wonder how I'm going to deal with the ever-growing list of homophones I will encounter as I progress through my lessons.

Still, I tell myself that 1.4 billion people are able to hold meaningful conversations without effort, so there has to be light at the end of this tunnel too.