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I learnt both Chinese and English as a child and all the way through my formal education (up to 18), and I must say, that the phenomenon of forgetting easy char

I learnt both Chinese and English as a child and all the way through my formal education (up to 18), and I must say, that the phenomenon of forgetting easy characters is pretty common. Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are ridiculously complex. The resultant expressive power is obvious, and it's no wonder why these are the few languages in which calligraphy blossomed into a fully-fledged artform, which I personally practice as well. As with everything, we're going to artificially and naturally select the best language. I personally think that 'best' here is defined by flexibility and beauty. Flexibility - no way would you have come up with a word like "globalization" in Chinese, it lacks the prefix/suffix system to do that. It also doesn't have the phonetic flexibility to include foreign terms like Japanese does. Eg: "Basketball" in japanese can be pronounced "baskeboru" but it's "lan qiu" in Chinese. I think one overlooked point is that Chinese isn't a beautiful language, at least not in the opinion of youth today. It's conciseness has spawned some of the best poetry (i think) on earth. But as much as the French complain about how it's hard to sound romantic in English, it's even harder in Chinese (not to mention some of the dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien). Kinda reminds me of how people despise Lisp (of which I'm also a fan of). It's an obscure language, but it's the most expressive one that I've seen, and will continue to admire it for it's beauty forever. That's probably the reason why it's still around after all this time. Will the Chinese language suffer a similar fate to Lisp over the long run? I doubt so, since natural languages are a whole different beast. But the problems are real, and with more than a billion people potentially using the same character set, this will be interesting to watch. --- TL;DR - Chinese is difficult to learn. It's not as flexible as English; you can add "ization" to "global" easily in English, not so in Chinese. It's also not a beautiful language in the way that youth see it; Chinese makes for great poetry about the mountains and the ocean, but not for whispering sweet nothings into a partner's ear (at least compared to a language like French)

aikinai 16y ago
Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious) In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society." That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.
- yewweitan 16y ago
  Yep, you're right, and I could have chosen a better example =). Globalization is usually referred to as 国际化, "international" + suffix to mean "evolving to something"; ie - becoming international. So yes, this is one of the ways whereby when Chinese is succinct, it's really succinct, hence loved by many of the older generation. But since Chinese doesn't share the recursive and context-free grammatical structure of English, and because tense isn't explicit, you lose some flexibility. Eg: Instant Messaging can be shortened to IM, and can be turned into a transitive form but adding 'ing' to form IMing. And of course, I'm confident that a language affects the way you think, as well as the memes that can be passed around. Best example, the word LOLcat and the associated lulz could never have evolved in the Chinese language. Something else could have evolved perhaps, but different things for sure, with a different focus. Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve. Or put slightly differently, Chinese is kinda like Java. Japanese is more Clojure-ish, with the ability to abandon formal declarations (arigato + many trailing speech placeholders) yet retain the good parts of its core.
  - Charuru 16y ago
    It's not just the example. Your entire point is ehrm, incorrect. Chinese uses radicals and entire characters to serve as the prefix/suffix. It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang, and there are spontaneous word generations all the time... I mean how else could new ideas be expressed? >Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve. Lol wut. There is some interesting bias and stereotyping going on here, but I find this so novel and shocking that I'm unable to respond.
    - w1ntermute 16y ago
      > It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang Except that you can't just "create" new characters on a computer, as opposed to alphabetic languages, where creating a new word on a computer is trivial.

aikinai 16y ago

Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious) In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society." That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.

yewweitan 16y ago
Yep, you're right, and I could have chosen a better example =). Globalization is usually referred to as 国际化, "international" + suffix to mean "evolving to something"; ie - becoming international. So yes, this is one of the ways whereby when Chinese is succinct, it's really succinct, hence loved by many of the older generation. But since Chinese doesn't share the recursive and context-free grammatical structure of English, and because tense isn't explicit, you lose some flexibility. Eg: Instant Messaging can be shortened to IM, and can be turned into a transitive form but adding 'ing' to form IMing. And of course, I'm confident that a language affects the way you think, as well as the memes that can be passed around. Best example, the word LOLcat and the associated lulz could never have evolved in the Chinese language. Something else could have evolved perhaps, but different things for sure, with a different focus. Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve. Or put slightly differently, Chinese is kinda like Java. Japanese is more Clojure-ish, with the ability to abandon formal declarations (arigato + many trailing speech placeholders) yet retain the good parts of its core.
- Charuru 16y ago
  It's not just the example. Your entire point is ehrm, incorrect. Chinese uses radicals and entire characters to serve as the prefix/suffix. It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang, and there are spontaneous word generations all the time... I mean how else could new ideas be expressed? >Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve. Lol wut. There is some interesting bias and stereotyping going on here, but I find this so novel and shocking that I'm unable to respond.
  - w1ntermute 16y ago
    > It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang Except that you can't just "create" new characters on a computer, as opposed to alphabetic languages, where creating a new word on a computer is trivial.