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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 att

by 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.
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - wyuenho 10y ago
    Listening is very different from reading. When you are reading phonetic symbols, at least when you first learn the language, you have an extra step of mapping the symbols to the sounds, then the meaning. Familiarity of a language is achieved by removing the step that maps to sound, essentially by mapping the "shape" or the combination of letters in a word to a token of meaning. With pinyin, since the Han script has almost an exact 1-1 mapping from syllable to character, but far less number of commonly used syllables in Mandarin, you simply cannot reconstruct the meaning by looking at the pinyin spelling of a Han character and retrieve the meaning of the character the pinyin spelling maps to. That's what I mean by context.
    - jbooth 10y ago
      That's a really interesting point, thanks :) I'm tempted to try and argue for the sake of it but I'm not even conversational besides 'baby' and 'food' topics and nowhere close to literate. So thanks again for the comment.
spacehunt 10y ago
But it's not just 26 letters, it's also the 26^n combinations of letters that one has to learn. You might argue that it's not really 26^n because there are rules about vowels etc; but then there are also rules and patterns regarding how the strokes combine together to form Chinese characters, and if there's one thing the human brain is really good at it's recognizing patterns.
komali2 10y ago
It's true - Chinese kids age 7 can write less words in Mandarin than American kids age 7 can write in English. However, it doesn't change the fact that the difficulty of the language has nothing to do with literacy rate. China has a low literacy rate because huge swaths of the population don't have access to education. I learned Japanese and Chinese to a fluent level, and at least from my biased point of view Japanese is a tremendously more difficult written language. Not only do you have just as many "characters" (kanji, hanzi, 汉子, 漢子, whatever) as you do in Mandarin, those characters can have many different pronunciations. You also have katakana (phonetic, 46 + modifications), hiragana(phonetic, 46 + modifications), and just for fun the occasional English (phonetic, 26). And yet, Japan has a 99% literacy rate. Compare that to the USA's 97.9% literacy rate, a country that teaches English (26 letters, phonetic), and I think the argument that difficulty of the language reflects the literacy rate falls apart.
- Nadya 10y ago
  You aren't biased - just educated in the languages. ;) To illustrate the difficulty of Japanese for others, I'll provide an example: 生 - raw (nama) 生まれる - to be born (u・mareru) 生きる - to live (i・kiru) 生活 - living; life (sei・katsu) 生地 - cloth; fabric (ki・ji) I'll stop there. There are more readings for that single kanji but they are obscure or an "alternative" to a more commonly used kanji. To my understanding, this problem does not exist in Chinese - which uses a single reading mapped to a single character. The same character, in Mandarin, would be read 'shēng' with many of the same meanings (to be born, life, raw) The above example is one of many kanji with multiple readings in Japanese. How do you know which reading to use? Context and because you know the word. :) That problem isn't unique to Japanese, English suffers from it as well! Think of homophones like tear and tear. You use context to figure out how it is read. It adds some level of difficulty but isn't impossible.
  - spacehunt 10y ago
    There are lots of characters that have more than one reading in Cantonese, Mandarin and other Chinese languages -- in fact 生 has 2 readings in Cantonese: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation

by jbooth 10y ago

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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- wyuenho 10y ago
  Listening is very different from reading. When you are reading phonetic symbols, at least when you first learn the language, you have an extra step of mapping the symbols to the sounds, then the meaning. Familiarity of a language is achieved by removing the step that maps to sound, essentially by mapping the "shape" or the combination of letters in a word to a token of meaning. With pinyin, since the Han script has almost an exact 1-1 mapping from syllable to character, but far less number of commonly used syllables in Mandarin, you simply cannot reconstruct the meaning by looking at the pinyin spelling of a Han character and retrieve the meaning of the character the pinyin spelling maps to. That's what I mean by context.
  - jbooth 10y ago
    That's a really interesting point, thanks :) I'm tempted to try and argue for the sake of it but I'm not even conversational besides 'baby' and 'food' topics and nowhere close to literate. So thanks again for the comment.

spacehunt 10y ago

But it's not just 26 letters, it's also the 26^n combinations of letters that one has to learn. You might argue that it's not really 26^n because there are rules about vowels etc; but then there are also rules and patterns regarding how the strokes combine together to form Chinese characters, and if there's one thing the human brain is really good at it's recognizing patterns.

komali2 10y ago

It's true - Chinese kids age 7 can write less words in Mandarin than American kids age 7 can write in English. However, it doesn't change the fact that the difficulty of the language has nothing to do with literacy rate. China has a low literacy rate because huge swaths of the population don't have access to education. I learned Japanese and Chinese to a fluent level, and at least from my biased point of view Japanese is a tremendously more difficult written language. Not only do you have just as many "characters" (kanji, hanzi, 汉子, 漢子, whatever) as you do in Mandarin, those characters can have many different pronunciations. You also have katakana (phonetic, 46 + modifications), hiragana(phonetic, 46 + modifications), and just for fun the occasional English (phonetic, 26). And yet, Japan has a 99% literacy rate. Compare that to the USA's 97.9% literacy rate, a country that teaches English (26 letters, phonetic), and I think the argument that difficulty of the language reflects the literacy rate falls apart.

Nadya 10y ago
You aren't biased - just educated in the languages. ;) To illustrate the difficulty of Japanese for others, I'll provide an example: 生 - raw (nama) 生まれる - to be born (u・mareru) 生きる - to live (i・kiru) 生活 - living; life (sei・katsu) 生地 - cloth; fabric (ki・ji) I'll stop there. There are more readings for that single kanji but they are obscure or an "alternative" to a more commonly used kanji. To my understanding, this problem does not exist in Chinese - which uses a single reading mapped to a single character. The same character, in Mandarin, would be read 'shēng' with many of the same meanings (to be born, life, raw) The above example is one of many kanji with multiple readings in Japanese. How do you know which reading to use? Context and because you know the word. :) That problem isn't unique to Japanese, English suffers from it as well! Think of homophones like tear and tear. You use context to figure out how it is read. It adds some level of difficulty but isn't impossible.
- spacehunt 10y ago
  There are lots of characters that have more than one reading in Cantonese, Mandarin and other Chinese languages -- in fact 生 has 2 readings in Cantonese: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation