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"Assuming you already know them" is a big deal. Chinese people who went to school do mostly know them. And some other people know about corner cases.
by adrianratnapala 10y ago
"Assuming you already know them" is a big deal. Chinese people who went to school do mostly know them. And some other people know about corner cases.
- thaumasiotes 10y agoYes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is. But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text. The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.