4 ms·

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

by 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"??"
- swang 11y ago
  You're right, I should not equate English with pinyin. I think however, pinyin as the solution is more indicative of how Western focused (especially with the proliferation of English) the entire world is. Or at least specifically with this author's viewpoint. I have learned pinyin, and basically it is the easiest way to input onto a US-English keyboard (as he says), but you essentially lose all underlying meaning of the character's history if you're learning Chinese based off pinyin. Essentially the same as removing all meaning of what a prefix, suffix and root of a word is in English. For example: "Imperialism": I am sure you can tell me that the suffix is ("-ism") and what it's meaning is ("belief in"/advocacy) and you can probably tell me the origins/meanings of "Imperial" (empire) and so if you put those two words together an English speaking person would understand "Imperialism" as advocacy of an empire. But what is "Imperialism" in English if it is spelled "diguozhuyi"? That is what you lose when you switch to a pure romanization. And writing this post to you know makes me realize what I hate so much about the article. He throws away any meaning Chinese characters have for the sake of simplicity for his self benefit. Taiwan has an alphabet like equivalent called "zhuyin" or bopomofo after the first 4 characters. The author never mentions this because I'm guessing he just asked some colleague in China rather than look into it. Zhuyin has pros and cons, the 2 biggest cons I see are 1: It wasn't invented in mainland China and 2: even the Taiwanese view it as sort of thing a child uses (adults use full Chinese characters). But technically it has about 38 characters, although you could fit it into a qwerty style keyboard based on the assumption that there are only 21/22 characters that can begin a word and 17 that can follow (oversimplification) so it is doable.

by swang 11y ago

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"??"

swang 11y ago
You're right, I should not equate English with pinyin. I think however, pinyin as the solution is more indicative of how Western focused (especially with the proliferation of English) the entire world is. Or at least specifically with this author's viewpoint. I have learned pinyin, and basically it is the easiest way to input onto a US-English keyboard (as he says), but you essentially lose all underlying meaning of the character's history if you're learning Chinese based off pinyin. Essentially the same as removing all meaning of what a prefix, suffix and root of a word is in English. For example: "Imperialism": I am sure you can tell me that the suffix is ("-ism") and what it's meaning is ("belief in"/advocacy) and you can probably tell me the origins/meanings of "Imperial" (empire) and so if you put those two words together an English speaking person would understand "Imperialism" as advocacy of an empire. But what is "Imperialism" in English if it is spelled "diguozhuyi"? That is what you lose when you switch to a pure romanization. And writing this post to you know makes me realize what I hate so much about the article. He throws away any meaning Chinese characters have for the sake of simplicity for his self benefit. Taiwan has an alphabet like equivalent called "zhuyin" or bopomofo after the first 4 characters. The author never mentions this because I'm guessing he just asked some colleague in China rather than look into it. Zhuyin has pros and cons, the 2 biggest cons I see are 1: It wasn't invented in mainland China and 2: even the Taiwanese view it as sort of thing a child uses (adults use full Chinese characters). But technically it has about 38 characters, although you could fit it into a qwerty style keyboard based on the assumption that there are only 21/22 characters that can begin a word and 17 that can follow (oversimplification) so it is doable.