7 ms·

David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplificati

by wyuenho 10y ago

David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics. Case in point: Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japanese reader can comprehend about 3000 Han characters, incidentally, is also the average number required for a Chinese speaker to read newspaper. Japan's literacy rate has been around 99% for so long that the government has basically stopped reporting that statistic. In the past 30-40 years, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, all regions that continue to use the "complex" traditional Han script, has achieved 95+% literacy rate. We don't hear many people in those regions complaining about how hard traditional Han characters are. As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census. All of the above tells us that the complexity of a language's written script has very little to do with literacy. The dominant factor in improving literacy is the introduction of free primary and secondary education across a region. No other factor even comes close to achieving a high literacy rate. So stop with this non-sense that the Han script is too complex to teach, learn and use now. 100s of millions of people have done it. Another point of this article is that the Han script is too rigid, which is not true. The 6 ways of constructing new Han characters has been recognized for millennia, it's just over the dynasties, the rulers have been reluctant to invent new ones to cater to new ideas. It's the people who forces down a way to use it that's rigid.

jbooth 10y ago
I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin. That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.
- wyuenho 10y ago
  If the aim is to improve literacy rate, focusing so much energy into to changing the entire set of characters for a written language is just incredibly stupid. It has a small marginal improvement but an tremendous repercussions. The Chinese simplification process has produced so many characters that completely changed the meaning of the character. The process has also merged so many characters that people's family names are not distinguishable. The Chinese simplification process is one the of the greatest tragedy in the history of social experiments. What the Communist should do is to revert to traditional Chinese before it's too late, and start investing more in free education. As to the difficulty in writing the Han script, you can compose the characters just like every other language. You just need to learn the radicals. If you are trying to comprehend written Chinese in Pinyin, which was invented only for Mandarin, you'll find that it's next to impossible as the Pinyin system removes too much context. There are only 4 tones in Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese's 9, so there are a lot of characters that sound exactly the same in Mandarin. There is an equivalent of Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo in Chinese called 施氏食獅史, which is a poem of a story about a person name Shi eating a Lion. 92 characters all sound exactly the same.
  - jbooth 10y ago
    Learning the radicals does allow a certain amount of 'chunking' and makes things easier, but it's by no means a consistent system like an alphabet. Sometimes one radical is sound and another is meaning, sometimes neither, sometimes there's like 5 of them crammed in there, and every character has a different little mnemonic story. Alphabets with consistent rules are objectively much less work to learn. Anyways I certainly wasn't advocating some sort of government-imposed wholesale switchover and banning the characters.. we couldn't even manage a switch to metric in the US, that would be crazy. As for pinyin being insufficient.. people disambiguate those words from context all the time in spoken conversation, right? Why wouldn't pinyin with tone marks work as a written language? I'm far from fluent or conversational, honestly asking.
    - echaozh 10y ago
      Hmm, characters are square and have fixed width. The fonts are automatically fixed width when printed or even handwritten (well enough). With pinyin, you know, like any other phonetic languages, even Japanese, you can hardly match line width with syllables so perfectly. And that's why the Chinese classic poetry, in my biased opinion, is a level higher than, say, its English counterpart, as it requires more effort to not only rhyme the lines, but also match the length of each line.
pramalin 10y ago
//As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.// The reason for lower literacy rates in India may not anything to do with how complex their scripts are. Elites just passed on their Sanskrit scriptures orally among themselves to exclude others from learning them. Their laws also denied education to the working class. In modern times, many children just can't go to school for many reasons. There are no schools accessible or affordable, they may need to fetch firewood, water, may need to take care of cattle, family members, and so on. (My mom curse their parents to this day, because they stopped her school in her 4th grade, to take care of her baby sister). In south India, there are free meal schemes for school children to alleviate these problems to some extent.
wrp 10y ago
The above post repeats some widely believed but inaccurate statements about literacy in Japan. The frequently mentioned 9x% literacy rate is a myth. In the premodern period, it was much less than 1% of the population. In 1948, the rate of full literacy was reported to be 6.2% of the population. In 1955, a literacy census reported that functional illiteracy ran at 60% of the adult population. See Rubinger[1] for the premodern period and Unger[2] for post-WW2. Unger also maintains a bibliography on Japanese literate on his web site.[3] [1] Richard Rubinger. 2007. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan. [2] J. Marchall Unger. 1996. Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan. [3] https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/books/literacy-and-script-reform-in-occupation-japan/ https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/books/literacy-and-script-reform-...
- wyuenho 10y ago
  I find it extremely difficult to believe Japan was able to become a major technological, economical and military world power before WW2 with an essentially illiterate population. I'll keep these works in mind, thanks.

by wyuenho 10y ago

jbooth 10y ago

I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin. That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.

wyuenho 10y ago
If the aim is to improve literacy rate, focusing so much energy into to changing the entire set of characters for a written language is just incredibly stupid. It has a small marginal improvement but an tremendous repercussions. The Chinese simplification process has produced so many characters that completely changed the meaning of the character. The process has also merged so many characters that people's family names are not distinguishable. The Chinese simplification process is one the of the greatest tragedy in the history of social experiments. What the Communist should do is to revert to traditional Chinese before it's too late, and start investing more in free education. As to the difficulty in writing the Han script, you can compose the characters just like every other language. You just need to learn the radicals. If you are trying to comprehend written Chinese in Pinyin, which was invented only for Mandarin, you'll find that it's next to impossible as the Pinyin system removes too much context. There are only 4 tones in Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese's 9, so there are a lot of characters that sound exactly the same in Mandarin. There is an equivalent of Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo in Chinese called 施氏食獅史, which is a poem of a story about a person name Shi eating a Lion. 92 characters all sound exactly the same.
- jbooth 10y ago
  Learning the radicals does allow a certain amount of 'chunking' and makes things easier, but it's by no means a consistent system like an alphabet. Sometimes one radical is sound and another is meaning, sometimes neither, sometimes there's like 5 of them crammed in there, and every character has a different little mnemonic story. Alphabets with consistent rules are objectively much less work to learn. Anyways I certainly wasn't advocating some sort of government-imposed wholesale switchover and banning the characters.. we couldn't even manage a switch to metric in the US, that would be crazy. As for pinyin being insufficient.. people disambiguate those words from context all the time in spoken conversation, right? Why wouldn't pinyin with tone marks work as a written language? I'm far from fluent or conversational, honestly asking.
  - echaozh 10y ago
    Hmm, characters are square and have fixed width. The fonts are automatically fixed width when printed or even handwritten (well enough). With pinyin, you know, like any other phonetic languages, even Japanese, you can hardly match line width with syllables so perfectly. And that's why the Chinese classic poetry, in my biased opinion, is a level higher than, say, its English counterpart, as it requires more effort to not only rhyme the lines, but also match the length of each line.

pramalin 10y ago

//As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.// The reason for lower literacy rates in India may not anything to do with how complex their scripts are. Elites just passed on their Sanskrit scriptures orally among themselves to exclude others from learning them. Their laws also denied education to the working class. In modern times, many children just can't go to school for many reasons. There are no schools accessible or affordable, they may need to fetch firewood, water, may need to take care of cattle, family members, and so on. (My mom curse their parents to this day, because they stopped her school in her 4th grade, to take care of her baby sister). In south India, there are free meal schemes for school children to alleviate these problems to some extent.

wrp 10y ago

The above post repeats some widely believed but inaccurate statements about literacy in Japan. The frequently mentioned 9x% literacy rate is a myth. In the premodern period, it was much less than 1% of the population. In 1948, the rate of full literacy was reported to be 6.2% of the population. In 1955, a literacy census reported that functional illiteracy ran at 60% of the adult population. See Rubinger[1] for the premodern period and Unger[2] for post-WW2. Unger also maintains a bibliography on Japanese literate on his web site.[3] [1] Richard Rubinger. 2007. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan. [2] J. Marchall Unger. 1996. Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan. [3] https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/books/literacy-and-script-reform-in-occupation-japan/ https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/books/literacy-and-script-reform-...

wyuenho 10y ago
I find it extremely difficult to believe Japan was able to become a major technological, economical and military world power before WW2 with an essentially illiterate population. I'll keep these works in mind, thanks.