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Read Asia's Orthographic Dilemma by William Hannas. Apparently, not only is there a ridiculous number of symbols to learn, the dogma that all the spoken version
by billswift 16y ago
Read Asia's Orthographic Dilemma by William Hannas. Apparently, not only is there a ridiculous number of symbols to learn, the dogma that all the spoken versions share the same written language is not true.
Also, writers commonly make up their own written forms of words on the fly, especially for technical and academic writing, so even an experienced reader is left struggling, trying to figure things out.
- olifante 16y agoI found Hannas' book boring. I much prefer John DeFrancis' The Chinese Language - Fact and Fantasy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fantasy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fant...) and Sampson's Writing Systems. These are the books that taught me that Chinese writing is more usable and more adapted to the particular needs of the Chinese language than we in the West tend to believe. In particular, the phonetic element in Chinese characters is much more important than I imagined. Also, while it is true that the road to fluent reading is much longer for the Chinese than for readers of phonemic scripts, this is partly compensated by the higher reading efficiency of fluent Chinese readers. One way to look at Chinese writing is to see it as a highly defective phonemic writing system with semantic annotations. In other words, Chinese characters constitute a morphophonemic writing system, much like English (for/four/fore) but with a much stronger emphasis on the morphemic aspect.