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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 mo
by 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 agoSome 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 agoMandarin does do that, but it's not quite the same thing.
- yen223 11y agoLots 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 agoAt 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