Free Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows Page A

vague and unresolved to simply say, “Late” or “Hungry” or “Terribly lost.”
    But if I was guilty of using far too many pronouns in Chinese, I would argue back that the Chinese go way too soft on their pronoun use in English, particularly their lack of attention to he and she. Some English-speaking Chinese offered their own explanations of what was going on with he and she, explanations ranging from China’s educational system to children’s cognitive development to the Mandarin sound system.
    The Chinese education system excels in teaching to tests, particularly to the gāokǎo , China’s uniquely important college entrance exam. “The tests,” an American English teacher in China writes, “focus on recognizing esoteric vocabulary and grammar rather than being able to use the basics in flexible and expressive ways.” 16 By this prescription, colloquial use of he and she falls through the cracks; it’s not going to come up on the exam. So while my Chinese teachers could talk me under the table about the most arcane grammatical concepts in English or Chinese, even they faltered on he and she in conversation.
    The teachers just don’t drill pronouns, one Chinese friend told me, and getting no practice means you are always performing “an alien mental calculation” to come up with a choice of he or she. “Alien mental calculation,” I scoffed to myself, reflecting on my struggles with word order in Mandarin sentences, which (at least to my mind) requires a much more complicated formula to master than a simple choice between he and she. But to be perfectly fair, I would concede that the choice of he or she is made harder for the Chinese to master by all the variants of him/her, his/hers, and his/her in English. All these are reduced to tā in Chinese.
    One of my most reliable language resources, Miranda, a young Chinese woman, said she thought that the source of vagueness occurred well before going to school. It’s all about cognition and development, she ventured. English speakers have to run into the concept of pronoun gender in language from the get-go, because they have to distinguish he and she. But for the Chinese, it isn’t an important concept. Cognitively, everything is tā . Only later, once children begin to read and write the characters and , are they even introduced to the concept of gender in language.
    This explanation makes for a kind of reality check on what we consider the givens of language. We think the distinction between he and she is so important, but wait—the Chinese can do very well without it, thank you very much! This “given” is actually a reflection of the structure of English, just as the “givens” of gender assigned to every French noun ( la maison [f.], le travail [m.]) are a reflection of the structure of French.
    Jessie, a Chinese woman who spent a year in college in New York recently, said the Chinese sound system is to blame for the problems of keeping he and she straight. “He and she sound a lot the same to Chinese speakers. It’s easy to get mixed up,” she said. Much like our trouble with tones, I thought. Many Chinese just don’t hear the difference.
    In English, the “h” and “sh” sounds, as in he and she, are produced very differently. The tongue is in different positions, and the air passes around the tongue in different ways. So to English speakers, he and she are easily distinguishable words; no native speaker would confuse the two. It’s not the same for Chinese speakers. The sound system of their language does not include either he or she as we pronounce them in English. These are not sounds that Chinese speakers recognize easily or know how to say. Instead they know the syllable xi —which English speakers don’t recognize or find easy to say, and which sounds to us like a blend of “he” and “she,” or else like “see.” So, apart from other reasons for forgetting whether he or she is correct in a given sentence, Chinese speakers