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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 o

by 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.

by jbooth 10y ago

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.