7 ms·

The Chinese character system is a brake on development

45 points by temp 11y ago

arien 11y ago
Complex doesn't mean awful. Impractical and slow for our fast-paced life, sure. But the characters are beautiful and the etymology, shape and composition is fascinating. I'm currently learning Chinese (using Remembering Simplified Hanzi from Heisig [0] for characters and Iknow [1] for words/pronunciation) and I find it a lot easier than I initially thought it would be. It helps a great deal to know that all these characters that look so complicated are mostly made of the same 200-some radicals [2], suddenly it's a lot less daunting and the characters even make sense most of the time. And sure, one might forget characters with lack of use, but the same can be said about other languages. Grammar is a hot topic on the internet, isn't it? [0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning... [1] http://iknow.jp/ http://iknow.jp/ (originally for Japanese, but Chinese course is excellent, too) [2] https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Radical_chart_highjpeg-e1435044530864.jpg https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Radic...
dang 11y ago
It's an interesting article by a competent and well-known author, but that baity title is guaranteed to produce a flamewar, so (in accordance with the HN guidelines) we replaced it with more neutral language from the article. If someone suggests a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
swang 11y ago
This guy is a linguist? And his best argument is that characters take long to write using the example of a word whose only real use is the answer to the trivia question, "what is the Chinese character containing the most strokes?" Also I would say a lot of Americans couldn't spell English words correctly to save their lives, does that mean English is a problem? (I would say in general, yes. It's a very hard language to learn) So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /s Edit: Also the author fails to recognize that even if a Chinese person doesn't recognize the word exactly, the radical and underlying pictograms in the word describe what that word means and sometimes the tone/pronunciation of the word. It is not just a bunch of random strokes on a paper.
- temp 11y ago
  >So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /s Did you even read the article? The author wrote a critique of English and listed problems non-natives have with it and its potential unsuitability as a lingua franca. Then they received a question regarding Chinese and this is their follow-up and answer to what it is that makes Chinese potentially unsuitable as a lingua franca. If what you got from the article is "they're too lazy to learn Chinese and think English has no faults" then you didn't really even try to comprehend the article.
  - swang 11y ago
    I actually totally missed that one-liner at the top, which unless you follow this guy, would make it seem like he was promoting a pro-English view. So any of my comments regarding English I withdraw. I still think his view about Chinese characters is _wrong_, especially when he uses the extremes of Chinese problems as arguments against Chinese completely.
- marvy 11y ago
  He has a pretty low opinion of English too: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/11/23/the-unsuitability-of-english/ http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/11/23/the-unsui...
  - swang 11y ago
    Yeap in reading the article I missed it at the beginning.
- smcl 11y ago
  > says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) Hold up - you've made a slightly false equivalence there: that the Latin alphabet == English. English is frustrating for a few reasons - some of the issues I see first hand every day are * many irregular verb conjugations * inconsistent\confusing\unintuitive grammar * irregular spelling\pronunciation. However Pinyin is just a different representation of the sounds involved in Chinese using the latin alphabet - _not_ a translation into some English-like form. Furthermore it appears to be very regular. I'm not sure where you're from or what your language experience is, but one article I personally found pretty enlightening on this subject was at http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html . It's written by an American PHd student of Chinese language, it's a thoroughly entertaining read but the standout quote from me is around halfway down when he starts talking about Chinese people he'd met struggling to write a simple character. I'm going to copy-paste a big-ish chunk because it perfectly represents what the author of the linked post is trying to say: "I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??"
pouetpouet 11y ago
Recently on HN on vietnamese writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755 and how the population of Vietman grew rapidly literate with the romanisation of the written language. Another thing comes to mind: movable type printing could not take off without the small set of characters of an alphabet. The efforts to simplify chinese characters come from the realization that it held back the country's literacy.
- llull 11y ago
  No, Chinese characters do not stop "moveable type taking off". Moveable type printing was in fact invented in China, nearly 1000 years ago, and widely used.
  - pouetpouet 11y ago
    > Moveable type printing was in fact invented in China I know that's my point exactly. It was definitely not as widespread and explosive as Gutenbergs printing press though. The number of characters is two orders of magnitude smaller and cuts down the manual labor far more effectively. You can't argue against that. Woodblock printing was in use long after the invention of movable type because of that.
  - yen223 11y ago
    Movable type actually proves the author's point. It was an amazing idea which didn't take off in China as fast as it did in the West, precisely because it was a huge hurdle to manufacture the ~1000s of blocks required to represent each Mandarin word.
    - sorpaas 11y ago
      See Wikipedia [1]. Movable type was first invented in China around A.D 1040, about four hundred years earlier than in the western world. In Qing Dynasty, the government used it to print 64 sets of the encyclopedic Gujin Tushu Jicheng. Each set consisted of 5040 volumes, making a total of 322,560 volumes printed using movable type. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type
infinity0 11y ago
I sympathise with his assessment but pinyin is really not suitable as a replacement. There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word". You can make the same argument for speech but there are other cues such as temporal spacing to help a listener parse that; none exist for pinyin.
- temp 11y ago
  >There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word". Yep, example https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yīn#Mandarin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yīn#Mandarin
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    And each of those characters might, itself, have multiple meanings.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  Pinyin is phonetic right? So if I say this word in a sentence in Chinese, people have to figure out which one it is out of the 30 possible meanings?
  - wodenokoto 11y ago
    As parent mentions, there are things that pinyin doesn't encode, such as temporal spacing. Even in English we tend to opt for spelling homophones different. Witch and which, for example.
  - rahimnathwani 11y ago
    Imagine if I asked you to read English words in this way. I segment the words into individual syllables, and show you one at a time. You read each one aloud, and then (very quickly) I show you the next one. So you're constantly reading the phonemes. At the same time, you try to listen to yourself and turn the sounds into meaning. That's kind of what it's like for me to read pinyin. Pinyin is great for learning pronunciation, but not great for getting meaning: it's just too slow.
laurent123456 11y ago
That "biang" character is not a good example since it's not commonly used and was possibly made up by a noodle shop (it doesn't appear in dictionaries). The most common Chinese characters are made of less than 9 or 10 strokes.
dangrover 11y ago
This seems kind of specious. Have been living/working in China for nearly 2 years and studied the language in that time. While individual characters can have many strokes (usually, like, 10 at the most), they're more like words or half-words. While it can be tricky for foreigners to gain confidence with characters and radicals, due to the way they work, you'll realize it is surprisingly easy to remember new words (or even guess the meaning of words when you see them). Much easier than English in that regard. Once you have a certain baseline level of competence (and ability to "chunk" things appropriately), the learning curve quickly softens out.
- w0utert 11y ago
  Exactly. I've started learning Japanese less than two years ago, and with some determination and a tool that supports efficient memorization (thank you http://www.wanikani.com http://www.wanikani.com) the writing system starts to 'click' once you've reached about 500 Kanji, which took me less than 2 years on a casual schedule. From there, recognizing and learning new words that are a combination of these 500 Kanji starts to come almost automatically (meaning, and reading). Latin languages have the same thing to some extent, but much less so, some words are composed by combining other words, but most things have their own proper noun which can only be remembered by rote memorization. For example the word 'swan' would be 「白鳥」 in Japanese, which would literally translate to (and is pronounced as) 'white bird'. Japanese, and I guess also Chinese, is full of these words. I found the article narrow-minded and short-sighted, and can only assume the author never spent any effort learning a logographic language. I recognize the sentiment from back when I just started learning Kanji, but it doesn't take too long before your brain seems to 'rewire' for the different way to write, recognize and compose words, and you start to see the benefits.
  - looki 11y ago
    I certainly never would have expected to meet somebody from WaniKani here. I agree with everything you said.
  - Grue3 11y ago
    Ah, but can you tell the difference between 白鳥 (swan) and 白烏 (white crow)? Consider that 500 kanji is equivalent to about 3rd grade of elementary school, you need to know much more to read most texts. And as you learn more, they become more and more similar-looking.
b6 11y ago
Wow. I am an intermediate speaker of Mandarin, and I think this article is pretty unfair. It's true that there are many tens of thousands of characters, but relatively few are actually used. To me it's very similar to there being a million someodd words in English. And nobody writes that biang character. It's notorious for being huge and weird. I could easily find some comparable ridiculous English word that we don't actually use. I spend a few hours a day practicing writing characters, and yes, it is difficult and time-consuming. But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters. No, they can't just write pinyin instead of characters. Well, they could, but it would be profoundly annoying. It'd be like looking at a TV much too close, or looking at assembler instead of Ruby. Yes, it was a terrible mistake to "simplify" the characters. It did not simplify the process of learning the characters in any meaningful sense, and split the user base. But I find it very hard to understand why anyone would say it is necessary to know both simplified and traditional characters. In my experience, it's just not true. At the end of the day, we more or less choose to keep these anchors around our necks because they're fun and interesting playgrounds. I don't really need Mandarin for anything, but I still learn it, just because it's interesting, and because when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.
- rogeryu 11y ago
  I guess pinyin is more like the German tv synchronizing English series. I live in the Netherlands, where we have subtitles on English shows and films, because that is much cheaper. So we're used to English, we all speak English. We have German tv channels here as well, and especially back in the 70s and 80s, when there were only six channels on tv, that was annoying and kind of funny. Maybe Germans growing up with these German voices makes you ignorant about the fact that what you see and what you hear does not match, but for everybody else it's absolutely clear. I see this on Spanish tv as well. But I disagree with you "comparable ridiculous English word". The thing is that any foreigner can read it, look it up, type it on a keyboard, and pronounce it, probably remember it with a little effort and then use it at parties or to impress people. But well, I guess I'm biased from my "roman" point of view, and maybe Asian people have the same "fun" with that strange Chinese character?
legulere 11y ago
> Training yourself to recognize 3,000 discrete graphic symbols They're not discrete but composed of radicals that might hint at the meaning or pronunciation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)
- wibr 11y ago
  Radicals are just a system which was invented to look up characters in dictionaries, so a character is often composed of components with different functions (e.g. sound component or meaning component) and one of those components can be the radical.
  - GordonS 11y ago
    > Radicals are just a system which was invented to look up characters in dictionaries First I've heard of it; source please?
    - wibr 11y ago
      http://blog.outlier-linguistics.com/learning/getting-radical-radicals/ http://blog.outlier-linguistics.com/learning/getting-radical...
      - GordonS 11y ago
        Actually, most of the radicals existed long before the Shuōwén Jiězì, as recurring graphic elements[1]. They might not have been called 'radicals', or been used to look up dictionaries, but they certainly existed. [1] Wilkinson, Endymion (2013), Chinese History: A New Manual, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, ISBN 978-0-674-06715-8
        GordonS 11y ago
        Downvoter care to comment?
Nutmog 11y ago
It's funny that most of the arguments people make for retaining old languages and writing systems are "so we can read old literature or perpetuate old cultures". Surely if everyone used the same language, that would have the opposite effect and open up far more writing to more people - Chinese people could read Shakespeare. Translators would only have to convert from each old language to the lingua franca, so Hebrew speakers could read Confucius too. That's an O(n) task instead of the O(n^2) that we currently have.
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- rogeryu 11y ago
  "The Web standards are a brake on development, let's write every web page in Assembly." This is how I see it: "Assembly is a brake on development, let's write every web page in Web standards." (And to be clear: web standards are not the holy grail! They have their pitfalls. Sometimes assembly is better, etc...)
wodenokoto 11y ago
While the article might be too harsh, I think the general sentiment in the comments are way too lenient. hanzi is a particular difficult writing system.
- adrianN 11y ago
  Yes, it is difficult even for Chinese native speakers. Character amnesia is a thing. Read for example this classic essay http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html written by an actual linguist.
- Arnt 11y ago
  So it is. Rather like how the English word order rules are particularly difficult, e.g. look at the weird table in http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/adjectives.htm http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/adjectives.htm, or German plurals. Most children learn their native language(s) properly at about the same age, which suggests that the languages are comparably difficult to learn, and perhaps that if a language takes too long, it'll be simplified. But there's nothing that pushes languages to have the same difficulties.
  - ggreer 11y ago
    An important difference is that English lets you get your point across even if you mess up word order, conjugation, and/or spelling. With logographic systems, there is practically no connection between written symbols and their sounds. Even competent writers can know what a symbol means, but not know how to pronounce it. Or they'll be able to use a word in speech, but not be able to write it down. The first time I saw this happen with native Mandarin speakers, I thought they were playing a joke on me. The main advantage of logographic languages is written information density. If you've ever seen a Chinese or Japanese copy of a Harry Potter book, you'll understand. (They're quite thin.) Also, Twitter is a totally different experience when using hanzi or kanji. The character limit is enough for a paragraph instead of a sentence.
  - pja 11y ago
    Using adjectives in the “wrong” order doesn’t really change the meaning significantly though, it just sounds a little weird to a native speaker. I don’t think anyone claims that spoken Chinese is particularly hard compared to other languages, but that the written form is measurably harder than languages that use an alphabetic orthography. (I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?)
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
If you're going to spoit nonsense about how writing systems hold people back, you might as well attack Japanese, since its use of the same characters is much more complicated. Chinese is pretty simple: one character, one syllable, one pronunciation. Japanese kanji? One character, many pronunciations, context-sensitive.
- mystikal 11y ago
  Some Chinese characters are pronounced differently depending on the surrounding characters. Example: sometimes in Mandarin a 4th-tone character is changed to 2nd-tone because saying two 4's in a row is hard.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Mandarin does do that, but it's not quite the same thing.
- yen223 11y ago
  Lots of Mandarin words have multiple context-sensitive pronunciations too. And yeah, all the problems with Mandarin are very much present in Japanese as well.
- Grue3 11y ago
  At least Japanese has a phonetic syllabary to supplement the kanji. If Chinese had adopted Bopomofo [1] it would've solved a lot of problems (and no, pinyin is not a substitute since it sticks out like a sore thumb in writing). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
reuven 11y ago
I have been learning Chinese for about 18 months. Before I started my studies, I had similar opinions to the author of this article -- that Chinese characters are antiquated, hard or impossible to learn, and a hindrance to anyone who wants to learn or use Chinese. Since starting my Chinese studies, I've changed my mind entirely. First and foremost, the characters are far from random; the system is very different than an alphabetic one, but it works -- providing the reader (or even the learner) with hints as to the meaning and pronunciation. It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. But yes, it means that if I see a character I haven't learned before, I can be a bit stuck. And yes, Chinese children spend lots of time learning characters in school. Secondly, Chinese has a ridiculous number of homophones. Even if you take the tones into account, there are lots and lots and lots of characters that sound precisely the same when spoken. However, they look completely different. For example, the character 店 (for a shop) and 电 (electricity) look totally different, but sound precisely the same, diàn. This makes understanding the language difficult (as I'm learning), but a switch to Pinyin (the Latin-character transliteration) would make the written language as ambiguous and hard to read as the spoken language is to hear. Thirdly, there's a huge amount of national pride associated with characters. I can't imagine telling the Chinese people, or even a subset of them, that they'll be abandoning characters in favor of Pinyin. Now, does this mean that Chinese is unlikely to overtake English as the international language of business and academia? Yes; I think that English has firmly cemented itself in that position for a long time to come. (I say this one day after returning from teaching a course in Brussels, where my students were from Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Serbia... and spoke English among themselves.) But there's a difference between saying that English will continue to dominate in business, and saying that Chinese characters have to be tossed out. The latter just isn't going to happen.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Another point I would add: the Chinese language - to my knowledge - has the most functional and discrete method of forming complex concepts by smashing characters together. Many times in classes I have made up words or phrases simply by stringing characters together, and lo and behold, my teachers never blinked. It is astounding how easy it is to build your understanding of the language exponentially the more you learn. Add in the total lack of grammatical tidbits like articles and verb tenses, and you come to a language - tens of thousands of characters no withstanding - that is quite intuitive and fun to learn. Just sucks to speak.
DominikR 11y ago
Interestingly, Kemal Atatürk made similar reforms in Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire. He abolished the use of the Arabic script and introduced a new Turkish script based on the Latin alphabet. His reasoning was the same one used in this article. But there were other goals too, like promoting Turkish nationalism against a wider Muslim identity.
ignord 11y ago
Lived in Taiwan 3 years - picked up Advanced spoken proficiency and intermediate reading / writing in Traditional Mandarin. Studied Simplified Mandarin @ Brigham Young University. While studying we became conversant in modern Mandarin and also Ancient text including The Dao De Jing, Mencius, Confucius etc. There is a beauty and depth to the language not available in the romance languages or German: may I recommend www.zhongwen.com as an introduction. With modern keyboard input methods producing Chinese text is not a difficult task although learning the writing system is not for the faint of heart. Not just due to the characters but also the syntax of the language. English generally is a head-first language where as Chinese is a head-last language. Combine this with careful character placement within the syntax and you have a minefield awaiting the non-native writer. What English lacks in concentrated depth and beauty it makes up for in flexibility and diversity.
gbog 11y ago
That's not really sensible to call a Horror-show the very writing system upon which one of the longest and most fertile culture on Earth has been built... But it is also right to say that the difficulties of learning Chinese makes it an unlikely candidate for a universal language.
Xophmeister 11y ago
I generally find this article lacking in anything beyond personal opinion. However, I think the kernel of the problem is hinted at when he writes about chemical elements (and the article it links to is more suggestive of this): That is, synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese -- due to the large number of homophones -- which is compounded by the inflexibility of the writing system. If this is true -- I'm not a Chinese speaker, but I'm married to one and have had this discussion before! -- then that is a burden on development as it clearly makes communication of new ideas clumsy.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  "synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese" It's not. You just slam two existing characters together. So many possibilities. Computer? Electric brain. If you want a new individual character, just put them on top of each other and invent your own single character (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duang) as long as you don't expect it to be added to unicode.
Xophmeister 11y ago
I generally find this article lacking in anything beyond personal opinion. However, I think the kernel of the problem is hinted at when he writes about chemical elements (and the article it links to is more suggestive of this): That is, synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese -- due to the large number of homophones -- which is compounded by the inflexibility of the writing system. If this is true -- I'm not a Chinese speaker, but I'm married to one and have had this discussion before! -- then that is a burden on development as it clearly makes communication of new ideas clumsy.
happyindeed 11y ago
The past/perfect tenses, the infinitives and gerunds, the active/passive/possessive/nonpossessive, the he/she/his/her, of the English language is... a pain. Chinese is much simpler! :D
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- yen223 11y ago
  They barely even share that. The word for "not" in Mandarin is 不是, but in Cantonese it's 唔係. "Book" is 书 in Mandarin, but 冊 in Hokkien. There are enough differences between the various "dialects" in both the spoken and written form, that there's a debate as to whether they should be considered "dialects" at all, or a separate language altogether.
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Houshalter 11y ago
I read an interview with Andrew Ng, a well known Chinese AI research that works for Baidu. He talked about his work on speech recognition. And how it's such a big deal in China. I guess they use it a lot more than in the US. That makes more sense in the context of this article.
ksec 11y ago
I am afraid I am not qualify to say whether the Chinese Character is, or not a brake on development of its language. But I do have a story to share, just one story, nothing more. When I was a kid studying in UK, during an Art Session we had to cut a black card and overlay on top of white paper to create some form of Art. I have absolutely no idea what to do! Compared to some of my classmate who start creating and cutting some beautiful images, I was starring in the air and didn't know what to do. I try cut a few things but they all look so dull, ugly and meaningless in my mind. After 30 mins of not going anywhere, my teacher came around and pat on my back, he said, "Beauty is in the eye of beholder. It doesn't really have to mean anything, it could just be some random cutting, some shape or even some words like your name. It doesn't matter. Try your best" At that moment i really needed some encouragement, So i thought, since everyone were doing something good and fancy, why dont I cut out a Chinese word? He did said some words. Since i am the only Chinese in the class, surely no one would be doing it and no one would understand it anyway. So in the remaining 15 min or so I drafted out the Chinese letter "愛", ( meaning love ), it is complex enough and easy to explain. In the end when everyone were presenting their work to our teacher, I still remember the look on his face when he saw mine, he was, awkwardly staring at it for 30 seconds, without making a single noise. The silence was quite intense I was thinking I make some crap... "What is this?" He asked. "A Chinese Letter" "What does it mean?" "Love" "This is beautiful! This is actually a letter?" "Yes" I thought all these were just some encouragement so i dont look too bad. When we left the classroom, I turn around and my teacher was still standing there staring at my form "art". Later on that Week my teacher asked me privately to make him a few more of these Chinese Characters, I wrote out a few so he could choose, he was truly fascinated at the act form of these Characters. I couldn't grasp the idea then. Because I never saw them as act, merely as what the article suggest as a painful tool to write. It was only as i grow older and older, did i start to appreciate this beautiful form of Chinese glyph. I hope you all too, would some day appreciate the beauty of these characters.
jensen123 11y ago
Guess I'm somewhat ignorant about history, so maybe this is a stupid question. But I've been wondering about this: Until about 500 years ago, I guess China was ahead of Europe culturally, economically, scientifically etc, but then Europe raced ahead. How much does this have to do with the printing press? How easy is it to use a traditional printing press with Chinese characters compared to the Latin alphabet? Obviously, access and spread of information must have a lot to do with a society's development. Did the traditional printing press cause information (i.e. books and newspapers) to become cheap and widespread in Europe, but not in China? Writing Chinese characters on a computer is relatively quick and easy. I wonder if this has something to do with the rapid development that we're seeing in China now? Some might say that embracing capitalism is why China is developing so fast now, and I guess that is partially true. However, wasn't China kinda capitalist before the Communist revolution? It didn't develop that much back then. Edit: I found a bit of info on this on the Wikipedia page for the printing press. According to that "a single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing prevalent in East Asia". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
eccstartup 11y ago
In fact, Chinese can express more meanings than English, not by using more characters, but by multiple meanings of the same character. So, if you want to express the world better, try this language.
tokenadult 11y ago
沒錯。After reading the fine article kindly submitted here and all the previous comments, I think I should draw on my education and life experience to comment too. I have been studying the Chinese language since 1975, my undergraduate major subject in university was Chinese language, and have I lived after university graduation in the Chinese-speaking world for two three-year stints (mid-1980s and spanning the turn of the last century). I have worked for many years as a Chinese-English translator of written texts and as a Chinese-English interpreter for official visitors to the United States. Besides learning Mandarin well enough to work as an interpreter, I have also studied other Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka. My university studies acquainted me not only with Modern Standard Chinese but also with Literary Chinese. The blog post kindly submitted here is by a linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, who specializes in the English language and who co-edited the most definitive grammar of the English language.[1] Pullum is not a specialist in Chinese language but he cites the numerous writings of Victor Mair,[2] who does have deep professional knowledge of the Chinese language. Simply put, the author's comments are linguistically and sociologically correct. My nieces and nephews who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world were faced with a considerably more difficult task in learning to read and write than was strictly necessary, solely because of clinging to the tradition of writing Chinese in the traditional characters rather than the alphabetical writing systems that are used EVERYWHERE in the Chinese-speaking world for initial reading instruction. The late Y.R. Chao, an eminent Chinese linguist, made the simple point about alphabetical writing of Chinese: if one claims that alphabetical writing cannot be understood, that is equivalent to claiming that Chinese people cannot speak to one another over the telephone. But in fact Chinese people can speak to one another over the telephone just fine--I have seen it done, and I have been party of many international voice-only conversations in Chinese. See a whole book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by the late John DeFrancis,[3] a linguist who specialized in the study of the Chinese writing system, for more details. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468 http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language... [2] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13 [3] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686 http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...

45 points by temp 11y ago

arien 11y ago

Complex doesn't mean awful. Impractical and slow for our fast-paced life, sure. But the characters are beautiful and the etymology, shape and composition is fascinating. I'm currently learning Chinese (using Remembering Simplified Hanzi from Heisig [0] for characters and Iknow [1] for words/pronunciation) and I find it a lot easier than I initially thought it would be. It helps a great deal to know that all these characters that look so complicated are mostly made of the same 200-some radicals [2], suddenly it's a lot less daunting and the characters even make sense most of the time. And sure, one might forget characters with lack of use, but the same can be said about other languages. Grammar is a hot topic on the internet, isn't it? [0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning... [1] http://iknow.jp/ http://iknow.jp/ (originally for Japanese, but Chinese course is excellent, too) [2] https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Radical_chart_highjpeg-e1435044530864.jpg https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Radic...

dang 11y ago

It's an interesting article by a competent and well-known author, but that baity title is guaranteed to produce a flamewar, so (in accordance with the HN guidelines) we replaced it with more neutral language from the article. If someone suggests a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

swang 11y ago

This guy is a linguist? And his best argument is that characters take long to write using the example of a word whose only real use is the answer to the trivia question, "what is the Chinese character containing the most strokes?" Also I would say a lot of Americans couldn't spell English words correctly to save their lives, does that mean English is a problem? (I would say in general, yes. It's a very hard language to learn) So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /s Edit: Also the author fails to recognize that even if a Chinese person doesn't recognize the word exactly, the radical and underlying pictograms in the word describe what that word means and sometimes the tone/pronunciation of the word. It is not just a bunch of random strokes on a paper.

temp 11y ago
>So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /s Did you even read the article? The author wrote a critique of English and listed problems non-natives have with it and its potential unsuitability as a lingua franca. Then they received a question regarding Chinese and this is their follow-up and answer to what it is that makes Chinese potentially unsuitable as a lingua franca. If what you got from the article is "they're too lazy to learn Chinese and think English has no faults" then you didn't really even try to comprehend the article.
- swang 11y ago
  I actually totally missed that one-liner at the top, which unless you follow this guy, would make it seem like he was promoting a pro-English view. So any of my comments regarding English I withdraw. I still think his view about Chinese characters is _wrong_, especially when he uses the extremes of Chinese problems as arguments against Chinese completely.
marvy 11y ago
He has a pretty low opinion of English too: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/11/23/the-unsuitability-of-english/ http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/11/23/the-unsui...
- swang 11y ago
  Yeap in reading the article I missed it at the beginning.
smcl 11y ago
> says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) Hold up - you've made a slightly false equivalence there: that the Latin alphabet == English. English is frustrating for a few reasons - some of the issues I see first hand every day are * many irregular verb conjugations * inconsistent\confusing\unintuitive grammar * irregular spelling\pronunciation. However Pinyin is just a different representation of the sounds involved in Chinese using the latin alphabet - _not_ a translation into some English-like form. Furthermore it appears to be very regular. I'm not sure where you're from or what your language experience is, but one article I personally found pretty enlightening on this subject was at http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html . It's written by an American PHd student of Chinese language, it's a thoroughly entertaining read but the standout quote from me is around halfway down when he starts talking about Chinese people he'd met struggling to write a simple character. I'm going to copy-paste a big-ish chunk because it perfectly represents what the author of the linked post is trying to say: "I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??"

pouetpouet 11y ago

Recently on HN on vietnamese writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755 and how the population of Vietman grew rapidly literate with the romanisation of the written language. Another thing comes to mind: movable type printing could not take off without the small set of characters of an alphabet. The efforts to simplify chinese characters come from the realization that it held back the country's literacy.

llull 11y ago
No, Chinese characters do not stop "moveable type taking off". Moveable type printing was in fact invented in China, nearly 1000 years ago, and widely used.
- pouetpouet 11y ago
  > Moveable type printing was in fact invented in China I know that's my point exactly. It was definitely not as widespread and explosive as Gutenbergs printing press though. The number of characters is two orders of magnitude smaller and cuts down the manual labor far more effectively. You can't argue against that. Woodblock printing was in use long after the invention of movable type because of that.
- yen223 11y ago
  Movable type actually proves the author's point. It was an amazing idea which didn't take off in China as fast as it did in the West, precisely because it was a huge hurdle to manufacture the ~1000s of blocks required to represent each Mandarin word.
  - sorpaas 11y ago
    See Wikipedia [1]. Movable type was first invented in China around A.D 1040, about four hundred years earlier than in the western world. In Qing Dynasty, the government used it to print 64 sets of the encyclopedic Gujin Tushu Jicheng. Each set consisted of 5040 volumes, making a total of 322,560 volumes printed using movable type. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type

infinity0 11y ago

I sympathise with his assessment but pinyin is really not suitable as a replacement. There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word". You can make the same argument for speech but there are other cues such as temporal spacing to help a listener parse that; none exist for pinyin.

temp 11y ago
>There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word". Yep, example https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yīn#Mandarin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yīn#Mandarin
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  And each of those characters might, itself, have multiple meanings.
mahyarm 11y ago
Pinyin is phonetic right? So if I say this word in a sentence in Chinese, people have to figure out which one it is out of the 30 possible meanings?
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  As parent mentions, there are things that pinyin doesn't encode, such as temporal spacing. Even in English we tend to opt for spelling homophones different. Witch and which, for example.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  Imagine if I asked you to read English words in this way. I segment the words into individual syllables, and show you one at a time. You read each one aloud, and then (very quickly) I show you the next one. So you're constantly reading the phonemes. At the same time, you try to listen to yourself and turn the sounds into meaning. That's kind of what it's like for me to read pinyin. Pinyin is great for learning pronunciation, but not great for getting meaning: it's just too slow.

laurent123456 11y ago

That "biang" character is not a good example since it's not commonly used and was possibly made up by a noodle shop (it doesn't appear in dictionaries). The most common Chinese characters are made of less than 9 or 10 strokes.

dangrover 11y ago

This seems kind of specious. Have been living/working in China for nearly 2 years and studied the language in that time. While individual characters can have many strokes (usually, like, 10 at the most), they're more like words or half-words. While it can be tricky for foreigners to gain confidence with characters and radicals, due to the way they work, you'll realize it is surprisingly easy to remember new words (or even guess the meaning of words when you see them). Much easier than English in that regard. Once you have a certain baseline level of competence (and ability to "chunk" things appropriately), the learning curve quickly softens out.

w0utert 11y ago
Exactly. I've started learning Japanese less than two years ago, and with some determination and a tool that supports efficient memorization (thank you http://www.wanikani.com http://www.wanikani.com) the writing system starts to 'click' once you've reached about 500 Kanji, which took me less than 2 years on a casual schedule. From there, recognizing and learning new words that are a combination of these 500 Kanji starts to come almost automatically (meaning, and reading). Latin languages have the same thing to some extent, but much less so, some words are composed by combining other words, but most things have their own proper noun which can only be remembered by rote memorization. For example the word 'swan' would be 「白鳥」 in Japanese, which would literally translate to (and is pronounced as) 'white bird'. Japanese, and I guess also Chinese, is full of these words. I found the article narrow-minded and short-sighted, and can only assume the author never spent any effort learning a logographic language. I recognize the sentiment from back when I just started learning Kanji, but it doesn't take too long before your brain seems to 'rewire' for the different way to write, recognize and compose words, and you start to see the benefits.
- looki 11y ago
  I certainly never would have expected to meet somebody from WaniKani here. I agree with everything you said.
- Grue3 11y ago
  Ah, but can you tell the difference between 白鳥 (swan) and 白烏 (white crow)? Consider that 500 kanji is equivalent to about 3rd grade of elementary school, you need to know much more to read most texts. And as you learn more, they become more and more similar-looking.

b6 11y ago

Wow. I am an intermediate speaker of Mandarin, and I think this article is pretty unfair. It's true that there are many tens of thousands of characters, but relatively few are actually used. To me it's very similar to there being a million someodd words in English. And nobody writes that biang character. It's notorious for being huge and weird. I could easily find some comparable ridiculous English word that we don't actually use. I spend a few hours a day practicing writing characters, and yes, it is difficult and time-consuming. But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters. No, they can't just write pinyin instead of characters. Well, they could, but it would be profoundly annoying. It'd be like looking at a TV much too close, or looking at assembler instead of Ruby. Yes, it was a terrible mistake to "simplify" the characters. It did not simplify the process of learning the characters in any meaningful sense, and split the user base. But I find it very hard to understand why anyone would say it is necessary to know both simplified and traditional characters. In my experience, it's just not true. At the end of the day, we more or less choose to keep these anchors around our necks because they're fun and interesting playgrounds. I don't really need Mandarin for anything, but I still learn it, just because it's interesting, and because when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.

rogeryu 11y ago
I guess pinyin is more like the German tv synchronizing English series. I live in the Netherlands, where we have subtitles on English shows and films, because that is much cheaper. So we're used to English, we all speak English. We have German tv channels here as well, and especially back in the 70s and 80s, when there were only six channels on tv, that was annoying and kind of funny. Maybe Germans growing up with these German voices makes you ignorant about the fact that what you see and what you hear does not match, but for everybody else it's absolutely clear. I see this on Spanish tv as well. But I disagree with you "comparable ridiculous English word". The thing is that any foreigner can read it, look it up, type it on a keyboard, and pronounce it, probably remember it with a little effort and then use it at parties or to impress people. But well, I guess I'm biased from my "roman" point of view, and maybe Asian people have the same "fun" with that strange Chinese character?

legulere 11y ago

> Training yourself to recognize 3,000 discrete graphic symbols They're not discrete but composed of radicals that might hint at the meaning or pronunciation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)

wibr 11y ago
Radicals are just a system which was invented to look up characters in dictionaries, so a character is often composed of components with different functions (e.g. sound component or meaning component) and one of those components can be the radical.
- GordonS 11y ago
  > Radicals are just a system which was invented to look up characters in dictionaries First I've heard of it; source please?
  - wibr 11y ago
    http://blog.outlier-linguistics.com/learning/getting-radical-radicals/ http://blog.outlier-linguistics.com/learning/getting-radical...
    - GordonS 11y ago
      Actually, most of the radicals existed long before the Shuōwén Jiězì, as recurring graphic elements[1]. They might not have been called 'radicals', or been used to look up dictionaries, but they certainly existed. [1] Wilkinson, Endymion (2013), Chinese History: A New Manual, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, ISBN 978-0-674-06715-8
      - GordonS 11y ago
        Downvoter care to comment?

Nutmog 11y ago

It's funny that most of the arguments people make for retaining old languages and writing systems are "so we can read old literature or perpetuate old cultures". Surely if everyone used the same language, that would have the opposite effect and open up far more writing to more people - Chinese people could read Shakespeare. Translators would only have to convert from each old language to the lingua franca, so Hebrew speakers could read Confucius too. That's an O(n) task instead of the O(n^2) that we currently have.

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rogeryu 11y ago
"The Web standards are a brake on development, let's write every web page in Assembly." This is how I see it: "Assembly is a brake on development, let's write every web page in Web standards." (And to be clear: web standards are not the holy grail! They have their pitfalls. Sometimes assembly is better, etc...)

wodenokoto 11y ago

While the article might be too harsh, I think the general sentiment in the comments are way too lenient. hanzi is a particular difficult writing system.

adrianN 11y ago
Yes, it is difficult even for Chinese native speakers. Character amnesia is a thing. Read for example this classic essay http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html written by an actual linguist.
Arnt 11y ago
So it is. Rather like how the English word order rules are particularly difficult, e.g. look at the weird table in http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/adjectives.htm http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/adjectives.htm, or German plurals. Most children learn their native language(s) properly at about the same age, which suggests that the languages are comparably difficult to learn, and perhaps that if a language takes too long, it'll be simplified. But there's nothing that pushes languages to have the same difficulties.
- ggreer 11y ago
  An important difference is that English lets you get your point across even if you mess up word order, conjugation, and/or spelling. With logographic systems, there is practically no connection between written symbols and their sounds. Even competent writers can know what a symbol means, but not know how to pronounce it. Or they'll be able to use a word in speech, but not be able to write it down. The first time I saw this happen with native Mandarin speakers, I thought they were playing a joke on me. The main advantage of logographic languages is written information density. If you've ever seen a Chinese or Japanese copy of a Harry Potter book, you'll understand. (They're quite thin.) Also, Twitter is a totally different experience when using hanzi or kanji. The character limit is enough for a paragraph instead of a sentence.
- pja 11y ago
  Using adjectives in the “wrong” order doesn’t really change the meaning significantly though, it just sounds a little weird to a native speaker. I don’t think anyone claims that spoken Chinese is particularly hard compared to other languages, but that the written form is measurably harder than languages that use an alphabetic orthography. (I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?)

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

If you're going to spoit nonsense about how writing systems hold people back, you might as well attack Japanese, since its use of the same characters is much more complicated. Chinese is pretty simple: one character, one syllable, one pronunciation. Japanese kanji? One character, many pronunciations, context-sensitive.

mystikal 11y ago
Some Chinese characters are pronounced differently depending on the surrounding characters. Example: sometimes in Mandarin a 4th-tone character is changed to 2nd-tone because saying two 4's in a row is hard.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Mandarin does do that, but it's not quite the same thing.
yen223 11y ago
Lots of Mandarin words have multiple context-sensitive pronunciations too. And yeah, all the problems with Mandarin are very much present in Japanese as well.
Grue3 11y ago
At least Japanese has a phonetic syllabary to supplement the kanji. If Chinese had adopted Bopomofo [1] it would've solved a lot of problems (and no, pinyin is not a substitute since it sticks out like a sore thumb in writing). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

reuven 11y ago

I have been learning Chinese for about 18 months. Before I started my studies, I had similar opinions to the author of this article -- that Chinese characters are antiquated, hard or impossible to learn, and a hindrance to anyone who wants to learn or use Chinese. Since starting my Chinese studies, I've changed my mind entirely. First and foremost, the characters are far from random; the system is very different than an alphabetic one, but it works -- providing the reader (or even the learner) with hints as to the meaning and pronunciation. It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. But yes, it means that if I see a character I haven't learned before, I can be a bit stuck. And yes, Chinese children spend lots of time learning characters in school. Secondly, Chinese has a ridiculous number of homophones. Even if you take the tones into account, there are lots and lots and lots of characters that sound precisely the same when spoken. However, they look completely different. For example, the character 店 (for a shop) and 电 (electricity) look totally different, but sound precisely the same, diàn. This makes understanding the language difficult (as I'm learning), but a switch to Pinyin (the Latin-character transliteration) would make the written language as ambiguous and hard to read as the spoken language is to hear. Thirdly, there's a huge amount of national pride associated with characters. I can't imagine telling the Chinese people, or even a subset of them, that they'll be abandoning characters in favor of Pinyin. Now, does this mean that Chinese is unlikely to overtake English as the international language of business and academia? Yes; I think that English has firmly cemented itself in that position for a long time to come. (I say this one day after returning from teaching a course in Brussels, where my students were from Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Serbia... and spoke English among themselves.) But there's a difference between saying that English will continue to dominate in business, and saying that Chinese characters have to be tossed out. The latter just isn't going to happen.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Another point I would add: the Chinese language - to my knowledge - has the most functional and discrete method of forming complex concepts by smashing characters together. Many times in classes I have made up words or phrases simply by stringing characters together, and lo and behold, my teachers never blinked. It is astounding how easy it is to build your understanding of the language exponentially the more you learn. Add in the total lack of grammatical tidbits like articles and verb tenses, and you come to a language - tens of thousands of characters no withstanding - that is quite intuitive and fun to learn. Just sucks to speak.

DominikR 11y ago

Interestingly, Kemal Atatürk made similar reforms in Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire. He abolished the use of the Arabic script and introduced a new Turkish script based on the Latin alphabet. His reasoning was the same one used in this article. But there were other goals too, like promoting Turkish nationalism against a wider Muslim identity.

ignord 11y ago

Lived in Taiwan 3 years - picked up Advanced spoken proficiency and intermediate reading / writing in Traditional Mandarin. Studied Simplified Mandarin @ Brigham Young University. While studying we became conversant in modern Mandarin and also Ancient text including The Dao De Jing, Mencius, Confucius etc. There is a beauty and depth to the language not available in the romance languages or German: may I recommend www.zhongwen.com as an introduction. With modern keyboard input methods producing Chinese text is not a difficult task although learning the writing system is not for the faint of heart. Not just due to the characters but also the syntax of the language. English generally is a head-first language where as Chinese is a head-last language. Combine this with careful character placement within the syntax and you have a minefield awaiting the non-native writer. What English lacks in concentrated depth and beauty it makes up for in flexibility and diversity.

gbog 11y ago

That's not really sensible to call a Horror-show the very writing system upon which one of the longest and most fertile culture on Earth has been built... But it is also right to say that the difficulties of learning Chinese makes it an unlikely candidate for a universal language.

Xophmeister 11y ago

I generally find this article lacking in anything beyond personal opinion. However, I think the kernel of the problem is hinted at when he writes about chemical elements (and the article it links to is more suggestive of this): That is, synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese -- due to the large number of homophones -- which is compounded by the inflexibility of the writing system. If this is true -- I'm not a Chinese speaker, but I'm married to one and have had this discussion before! -- then that is a burden on development as it clearly makes communication of new ideas clumsy.

rahimnathwani 11y ago
"synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese" It's not. You just slam two existing characters together. So many possibilities. Computer? Electric brain. If you want a new individual character, just put them on top of each other and invent your own single character (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duang) as long as you don't expect it to be added to unicode.

Xophmeister 11y ago

happyindeed 11y ago

The past/perfect tenses, the infinitives and gerunds, the active/passive/possessive/nonpossessive, the he/she/his/her, of the English language is... a pain. Chinese is much simpler! :D

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yen223 11y ago
They barely even share that. The word for "not" in Mandarin is 不是, but in Cantonese it's 唔係. "Book" is 书 in Mandarin, but 冊 in Hokkien. There are enough differences between the various "dialects" in both the spoken and written form, that there's a debate as to whether they should be considered "dialects" at all, or a separate language altogether.

deleted 11y ago

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Houshalter 11y ago

I read an interview with Andrew Ng, a well known Chinese AI research that works for Baidu. He talked about his work on speech recognition. And how it's such a big deal in China. I guess they use it a lot more than in the US. That makes more sense in the context of this article.

ksec 11y ago

I am afraid I am not qualify to say whether the Chinese Character is, or not a brake on development of its language. But I do have a story to share, just one story, nothing more. When I was a kid studying in UK, during an Art Session we had to cut a black card and overlay on top of white paper to create some form of Art. I have absolutely no idea what to do! Compared to some of my classmate who start creating and cutting some beautiful images, I was starring in the air and didn't know what to do. I try cut a few things but they all look so dull, ugly and meaningless in my mind. After 30 mins of not going anywhere, my teacher came around and pat on my back, he said, "Beauty is in the eye of beholder. It doesn't really have to mean anything, it could just be some random cutting, some shape or even some words like your name. It doesn't matter. Try your best" At that moment i really needed some encouragement, So i thought, since everyone were doing something good and fancy, why dont I cut out a Chinese word? He did said some words. Since i am the only Chinese in the class, surely no one would be doing it and no one would understand it anyway. So in the remaining 15 min or so I drafted out the Chinese letter "愛", ( meaning love ), it is complex enough and easy to explain. In the end when everyone were presenting their work to our teacher, I still remember the look on his face when he saw mine, he was, awkwardly staring at it for 30 seconds, without making a single noise. The silence was quite intense I was thinking I make some crap... "What is this?" He asked. "A Chinese Letter" "What does it mean?" "Love" "This is beautiful! This is actually a letter?" "Yes" I thought all these were just some encouragement so i dont look too bad. When we left the classroom, I turn around and my teacher was still standing there staring at my form "art". Later on that Week my teacher asked me privately to make him a few more of these Chinese Characters, I wrote out a few so he could choose, he was truly fascinated at the act form of these Characters. I couldn't grasp the idea then. Because I never saw them as act, merely as what the article suggest as a painful tool to write. It was only as i grow older and older, did i start to appreciate this beautiful form of Chinese glyph. I hope you all too, would some day appreciate the beauty of these characters.

jensen123 11y ago

Guess I'm somewhat ignorant about history, so maybe this is a stupid question. But I've been wondering about this: Until about 500 years ago, I guess China was ahead of Europe culturally, economically, scientifically etc, but then Europe raced ahead. How much does this have to do with the printing press? How easy is it to use a traditional printing press with Chinese characters compared to the Latin alphabet? Obviously, access and spread of information must have a lot to do with a society's development. Did the traditional printing press cause information (i.e. books and newspapers) to become cheap and widespread in Europe, but not in China? Writing Chinese characters on a computer is relatively quick and easy. I wonder if this has something to do with the rapid development that we're seeing in China now? Some might say that embracing capitalism is why China is developing so fast now, and I guess that is partially true. However, wasn't China kinda capitalist before the Communist revolution? It didn't develop that much back then. Edit: I found a bit of info on this on the Wikipedia page for the printing press. According to that "a single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing prevalent in East Asia". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

eccstartup 11y ago

In fact, Chinese can express more meanings than English, not by using more characters, but by multiple meanings of the same character. So, if you want to express the world better, try this language.

tokenadult 11y ago

沒錯。After reading the fine article kindly submitted here and all the previous comments, I think I should draw on my education and life experience to comment too. I have been studying the Chinese language since 1975, my undergraduate major subject in university was Chinese language, and have I lived after university graduation in the Chinese-speaking world for two three-year stints (mid-1980s and spanning the turn of the last century). I have worked for many years as a Chinese-English translator of written texts and as a Chinese-English interpreter for official visitors to the United States. Besides learning Mandarin well enough to work as an interpreter, I have also studied other Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka. My university studies acquainted me not only with Modern Standard Chinese but also with Literary Chinese. The blog post kindly submitted here is by a linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, who specializes in the English language and who co-edited the most definitive grammar of the English language.[1] Pullum is not a specialist in Chinese language but he cites the numerous writings of Victor Mair,[2] who does have deep professional knowledge of the Chinese language. Simply put, the author's comments are linguistically and sociologically correct. My nieces and nephews who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world were faced with a considerably more difficult task in learning to read and write than was strictly necessary, solely because of clinging to the tradition of writing Chinese in the traditional characters rather than the alphabetical writing systems that are used EVERYWHERE in the Chinese-speaking world for initial reading instruction. The late Y.R. Chao, an eminent Chinese linguist, made the simple point about alphabetical writing of Chinese: if one claims that alphabetical writing cannot be understood, that is equivalent to claiming that Chinese people cannot speak to one another over the telephone. But in fact Chinese people can speak to one another over the telephone just fine--I have seen it done, and I have been party of many international voice-only conversations in Chinese. See a whole book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by the late John DeFrancis,[3] a linguist who specialized in the study of the Chinese writing system, for more details. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468 http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language... [2] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13 [3] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686 http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...