4 ms·

This article glides over the process of learning Chinese but the nature of the language makes it significantly harder to learn: http://pinyin.info/readings/text

This article glides over the process of learning Chinese but the nature of the language makes it significantly harder to learn: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

rahimnathwani 11y ago
That (nice!) article gives 9 reasons. Only 6 of them are applicable in 2015. #3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops. #5 is no longer true, as dictionaries are now on Pleco. Yes, I found it hard to look up words in a paper dictionary when I started learning. But, for today's learners, their first dictionary is Pleco on iOS/Android, and this pain is gone. #7 is a weird one. You only need one romanization method (Pinyin) to learn Chinese, or to look up the standard (Mandarin) pronunciation of a new character. When would I ever need to use or read Wade-Giles, or any other romanization method, unless I'm reading the romanized version of a Taiwan/HK person's surname?
- isolate 11y ago
  People write with pens often. Although characters per second is much faster on a computer, there's less total overhead to writing with pen and paper in many situations.
- adrianN 11y ago
  Regarding #3, there are efforts in China to prevent "character amnesia" http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473
- douche 11y ago
  Wade-Giles is used very, very widely in English-language historical writing. Particularly anything that is more than about twenty years old. So you have to know what the names of people and places are in both Pinyin and Wade-Giles, and often enough in whatever less-standard romanization the author happened to use.
- xiaoma 11y ago
  >#3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops. First of all, this isn't true. Every convenience store in China sells pens. Billions of pens are sold per year in China. Even at the tech company where I worked in China, everyone had a pen or pencil and some wrote notes with them. People often used markers and wrote things on whiteboards, too. It was pretty much the same in that sense as English speaking places. Secondly, the main point in #3 wasn't about writing. It was about learning. If you see a few taquerias in Mexico with "Taqueria" written in the sign, you'll learn a new word and how to pronounce it. You might later realize you've been hearing the word "taqueria" in a radio commercial and suddenly understand more of it. In China, you could enter a post office, see 郵局 written on it and hear the word 郵局 in conversation every day for a month and still not understand what it is people are saying. That is why the writing system slows learners down, even if comprehension is their goal.
  - rahimnathwani 11y ago
    You're right, especially about the reinforcement bit. There are some characters that I can recognise, because I've seen them often enough on Taobao, but don't come up in every day conversation. So, I don't know how to pronounce them, and wouldn't recognise them if someone said them out loud.
bubalus 11y ago
#1 through 3 are all saying the same general thing #5 no longer matters because there are online dictionaries that let you draw the character you want to look up #7: What's wrong with Hanyu Pinyin? But it is true that the gulf between English and Chinese is bigger than the gulf between English and a lot of other European languages.
Chathamization 11y ago
Eh, the complaints about the characters seem mostly overblown. I think I picked up about 2,000 in a year, and that was not studying particularly hard. Past a certain point most of the new characters are combinations of characters you've already studied. Of course, if you're not practicing your reading it's . Also, if you have at least a decent level in the language it's not going to be unfamiliar characters that give you trouble in newspaper articles (most of the unfamiliar characters you run into will be from names or chengyu), but Chinese words your unfamiliar with. And in these cases, the characters actually help; you're going to have a much easier time guessing what "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis" mean in Chinese than in English.

rahimnathwani 11y ago

That (nice!) article gives 9 reasons. Only 6 of them are applicable in 2015. #3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops. #5 is no longer true, as dictionaries are now on Pleco. Yes, I found it hard to look up words in a paper dictionary when I started learning. But, for today's learners, their first dictionary is Pleco on iOS/Android, and this pain is gone. #7 is a weird one. You only need one romanization method (Pinyin) to learn Chinese, or to look up the standard (Mandarin) pronunciation of a new character. When would I ever need to use or read Wade-Giles, or any other romanization method, unless I'm reading the romanized version of a Taiwan/HK person's surname?

isolate 11y ago
People write with pens often. Although characters per second is much faster on a computer, there's less total overhead to writing with pen and paper in many situations.
adrianN 11y ago
Regarding #3, there are efforts in China to prevent "character amnesia" http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473
douche 11y ago
Wade-Giles is used very, very widely in English-language historical writing. Particularly anything that is more than about twenty years old. So you have to know what the names of people and places are in both Pinyin and Wade-Giles, and often enough in whatever less-standard romanization the author happened to use.
xiaoma 11y ago
>#3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops. First of all, this isn't true. Every convenience store in China sells pens. Billions of pens are sold per year in China. Even at the tech company where I worked in China, everyone had a pen or pencil and some wrote notes with them. People often used markers and wrote things on whiteboards, too. It was pretty much the same in that sense as English speaking places. Secondly, the main point in #3 wasn't about writing. It was about learning. If you see a few taquerias in Mexico with "Taqueria" written in the sign, you'll learn a new word and how to pronounce it. You might later realize you've been hearing the word "taqueria" in a radio commercial and suddenly understand more of it. In China, you could enter a post office, see 郵局 written on it and hear the word 郵局 in conversation every day for a month and still not understand what it is people are saying. That is why the writing system slows learners down, even if comprehension is their goal.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  You're right, especially about the reinforcement bit. There are some characters that I can recognise, because I've seen them often enough on Taobao, but don't come up in every day conversation. So, I don't know how to pronounce them, and wouldn't recognise them if someone said them out loud.

bubalus 11y ago

#1 through 3 are all saying the same general thing #5 no longer matters because there are online dictionaries that let you draw the character you want to look up #7: What's wrong with Hanyu Pinyin? But it is true that the gulf between English and Chinese is bigger than the gulf between English and a lot of other European languages.

Chathamization 11y ago

Eh, the complaints about the characters seem mostly overblown. I think I picked up about 2,000 in a year, and that was not studying particularly hard. Past a certain point most of the new characters are combinations of characters you've already studied. Of course, if you're not practicing your reading it's . Also, if you have at least a decent level in the language it's not going to be unfamiliar characters that give you trouble in newspaper articles (most of the unfamiliar characters you run into will be from names or chengyu), but Chinese words your unfamiliar with. And in these cases, the characters actually help; you're going to have a much easier time guessing what "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis" mean in Chinese than in English.