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>It's a hugely inefficient way to write. Agreed. Remindeds me of an anecdote from David Moser: "I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chin

by ddeck 10y ago

>It's a hugely inefficient way to write. Agreed. Remindeds me of an anecdote from David Moser: "I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??" Regarding the grandparent's point of joining characters, my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey. [1] Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

bsdetector 10y ago
> my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey. Turkeys are not native to Asia so it had to be added late to the language, which is why it doesn't make much sense. The problem with Chinese is that when you have a new thing like turkeys you have to either create a new character, which then people have to memorize forever, or you have to string together sort-of related ideas into a compound word that has only some tangential relation to its parts. When you have thousands of words that are only somewhat related to their parts, the parts lose their meaning and become not much more than a really large and complicated alphabet. Chinese was over-engineered to work great for maybe a few thousand words, but the world keeps getting bigger and bigger and every new thing makes the Chinese language worse.
anabis 10y ago
This has been mitigated to a large degree by phones. Even pre-smartphone, they were used to look up difficult characters.

by ddeck 10y ago

bsdetector 10y ago

> my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey. Turkeys are not native to Asia so it had to be added late to the language, which is why it doesn't make much sense. The problem with Chinese is that when you have a new thing like turkeys you have to either create a new character, which then people have to memorize forever, or you have to string together sort-of related ideas into a compound word that has only some tangential relation to its parts. When you have thousands of words that are only somewhat related to their parts, the parts lose their meaning and become not much more than a really large and complicated alphabet. Chinese was over-engineered to work great for maybe a few thousand words, but the world keeps getting bigger and bigger and every new thing makes the Chinese language worse.

anabis 10y ago

This has been mitigated to a large degree by phones. Even pre-smartphone, they were used to look up difficult characters.