6 ms·

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

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.
  - w0utert 11y ago
    Haha, yeah well, of course it's not perfect, but let's not pretend Latin languages don't have their own unique set of problems ;-) I'm acutely aware that 500 Kanji isn't nearly enough to read even the most basic of texts, unfortunately... But considering it 'only' took me 1.5 years to get to this point at a leisury pace, I would assume that anyone should be able to get to ~2000 Kanji within 2 years if you really put the effort in. If you get to JLPT N5 (~2000 Kanji) you should be able to read anything but Japanese literature. Don't know how this works for Mandarin or other Chinese dialects, but I would assume there's a base set of around the same size that should be sufficient for daily life. The article title was implying the Chinese writing system is a 'brake on development', which IMO is nothing but hyperbole, and neglects that logographic writing systems also have their advantages.
mrweasel 11y ago
>or even guess the meaning of words when you see them That's the thing I don't get. You may be able to guess the words, but would the characters allow you to pronounce it? In English, and most other languages, you can spell your way through pronouncing a word, even without knowing it's meaning. Is that possible in Chinese or Japanese? It also seems like you would need to be constantly updating computers to allow them of deal with new characters. The argument that "these characters aren't widely used" isn't really helpful. The characters either exists or they don't. Because you might need it in the future means that you need to deal with it's existence. X isn't a widely used letter in many language, so should we just throw it aside? In case of the biang it might be more akin to throwing out a word, because it's rarely used, but still.
- ximeng 11y ago
  You can often guess meaning or sound from the character. E.g. 海, 洲, 流 (sea, continent, flow) all have three dots on the left indicating they relate to water. And 领, 玲, 铃 are all pronounced ling due to the 令 component. Characters that aren't widely used you don't need to learn to write, and reading is much easier than writing. If you see a big complicated character in a noodle-y context you pretty much know it's going to be biang. If you don't know the pronunciation of a character it's not too far from not knowing the meaning of a random English word like "kaiserin", apart from being slightly harder to guess pronunciation on average.
- looki 11y ago
  There are so-called phono-semantic compound characters [1] which consist of two other characters, a part indicating its meaning, and one part indicating its reading. This has helped me tremendously while memorizing the readings of Japanese kanji - and guessing the readings of unknown characters does work incredibly well after you have learned the most common ones which are used as components in more complex characters. As a very simple example, 仲 is a combination of 人 (person) and the reading of 中 and means relation, relationship (which is vaguely indicated by the human character). You are correct, though: This is not failsafe and characters can have multiple readings or lack this phono-semantic notion altogether (also, since the characters are originally Chinese it doesn't work as well in Japanese, I believe), but I think it is the closest thing to guessing a word's pronunciation that these languages offer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Phono-semantic_compound_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

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.
- w0utert 11y ago
  Haha, yeah well, of course it's not perfect, but let's not pretend Latin languages don't have their own unique set of problems ;-) I'm acutely aware that 500 Kanji isn't nearly enough to read even the most basic of texts, unfortunately... But considering it 'only' took me 1.5 years to get to this point at a leisury pace, I would assume that anyone should be able to get to ~2000 Kanji within 2 years if you really put the effort in. If you get to JLPT N5 (~2000 Kanji) you should be able to read anything but Japanese literature. Don't know how this works for Mandarin or other Chinese dialects, but I would assume there's a base set of around the same size that should be sufficient for daily life. The article title was implying the Chinese writing system is a 'brake on development', which IMO is nothing but hyperbole, and neglects that logographic writing systems also have their advantages.

mrweasel 11y ago

>or even guess the meaning of words when you see them That's the thing I don't get. You may be able to guess the words, but would the characters allow you to pronounce it? In English, and most other languages, you can spell your way through pronouncing a word, even without knowing it's meaning. Is that possible in Chinese or Japanese? It also seems like you would need to be constantly updating computers to allow them of deal with new characters. The argument that "these characters aren't widely used" isn't really helpful. The characters either exists or they don't. Because you might need it in the future means that you need to deal with it's existence. X isn't a widely used letter in many language, so should we just throw it aside? In case of the biang it might be more akin to throwing out a word, because it's rarely used, but still.

ximeng 11y ago
You can often guess meaning or sound from the character. E.g. 海, 洲, 流 (sea, continent, flow) all have three dots on the left indicating they relate to water. And 领, 玲, 铃 are all pronounced ling due to the 令 component. Characters that aren't widely used you don't need to learn to write, and reading is much easier than writing. If you see a big complicated character in a noodle-y context you pretty much know it's going to be biang. If you don't know the pronunciation of a character it's not too far from not knowing the meaning of a random English word like "kaiserin", apart from being slightly harder to guess pronunciation on average.
looki 11y ago
There are so-called phono-semantic compound characters [1] which consist of two other characters, a part indicating its meaning, and one part indicating its reading. This has helped me tremendously while memorizing the readings of Japanese kanji - and guessing the readings of unknown characters does work incredibly well after you have learned the most common ones which are used as components in more complex characters. As a very simple example, 仲 is a combination of 人 (person) and the reading of 中 and means relation, relationship (which is vaguely indicated by the human character). You are correct, though: This is not failsafe and characters can have multiple readings or lack this phono-semantic notion altogether (also, since the characters are originally Chinese it doesn't work as well in Japanese, I believe), but I think it is the closest thing to guessing a word's pronunciation that these languages offer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Phono-semantic_compound_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...