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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.
by 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 agoLearning 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 agoHmm, 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 agoListening 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 agoThat'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.