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I used to think the writing system was horrible as well, but it actually has a ton of advantages as well. Pros and cons, like anything else.
by mazerackham 9y ago
I used to think the writing system was horrible as well, but it actually has a ton of advantages as well. Pros and cons, like anything else.
- spiznnx 9y agoIt's not horrible, but it just takes too long to learn as an auxiliary language. Just as the most powerful software usually loses market share to the easiest.
- carlmr 9y agoEnglish is far from the easiest though. It's one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn. The grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary is too inconsistent and large. Spanish is a much easier language. It has clear pronunciation rules, a more limited latin-based vocabulary and few grammar exceptions.
- Grue3 9y ago> It's one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn. It's really not that hard. The sheer amount of media available in English makes it easier to learn than the languages where you have to specifically seek out texts written by native speakers. The fact that it's very analytic [1] is also helpful. I found Spanish harder because the numerous verb conjugations are too difficult to remember. My native language's conjugations are even harder, but luckily I've been learning it since I was a baby. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
- matz1 9y ago>The sheer amount of media available in English makes it easier to learn than the languages where you have to specifically seek out texts written by native speakers It seems that way because you only look or notice English content.
- Grue3 9y agoBecause it's often the best content available for any given topic. If I had any reason to specifically seek out Spanish, French, German content I'd probably be a little better at these.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- audunw 9y agoIts main advantage is that you can use the same writing system with different languages, but it’s not like it’s ever going to be used with English or Spanish, so that’s not something that benefits it much as a world language. The cons of the written language far outweigh the pros. It can’t be denied that it takes far longer to learn than anything else.
- SllX 9y agoI've been exposed to the Chinese writing system via Japanese, who basically adopted it and made it their own, even perfected it in some ways (e.g. stroke order discipline and SKIP method dictionaries). It's true the writing system doesn't make it ideal for a global lingua franca, but one of the main advantages I appreciate about it is its ability to disambiguate common strings. In the Latin+Hindu-Arabic numeral world, we tend to argue about the best way to write dates, everything from 99/9/19 to 2037.04.01 to 4/1 or 13/5/2003 to 5/15/2019. The ISO published a standard, people more or less try to follow it, but in common usage it is still fairly ambiguous. Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日 Personally I find this to be beautiful in its simplicity. We tend to use a separator anyway, dots or slashes or dashes or what have you, but add one kanji as a suffix and nobody will argue about whether 4/5/2018 is April 5th or May 4th because 日 (once you've learned what it means) will clearly mark the day and 月 will clearly mark the month. You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second. I wouldn't say all of written Chinese would make for a good lingua franca, but a limited subset seeing more use globally would be very cool.
- Symbiote 9y agoI can't use emoji on here, but you could use them to write the date. 2017Earth04Moon06Sun perhaps. Or, we already have (but don't use) the astronomical symbols. Most people understand the male and female symbols.
- 9y ago
- 628C6l0 9y agofor one thing it's very economical spatially, something you'll quickly appreciate if you ever do any work (e.g. concept-mapping) where it's nice to be able to see and keep track of like 200 items on the screen at the same time. (a more homespun example is if you'd like to put a large number of meaningful words into one row (like your browser's bookmark bar)) also, it can be read horizontally AND vertically without needing to disassemble the graphemes or rotating your head 90 degrees. good luck doing that with english!