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I spent the last 4 years in Taiwan, although I also lived in China for 5 months before that. Traditional characters are easier to read, in my opinion. There's

I spent the last 4 years in Taiwan, although I also lived in China for 5 months before that. Traditional characters are easier to read, in my opinion. There's more radicals to guess the meaning. I can also use my program https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io to decompose the character if I write it wrong. Simplifying the number of strokes made it faster to write. This helped literacy because the education system is built on copying characters by rote - a terrible method, in my opinion. I prefer reading in parallel, with the pinyin and literal translations below (also in Pingtype). What Chinese really needs, and doesn't contradict the history, is spaces between words. Imaginehavingtoreadenglishwithoutanypunctuationandyoullsurelyrecognisethatitsabarriertolearning.

azurezyq 8y ago
For your last point, you can probably check with your Chinese friend and I'm pretty sure they don't buy the idea. Basically our brain already has built-in text segmentation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_segmentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_segmentation). I tried to think how I actually do that. It's more like prefix matching over a moderate large dict. It's not complicated and worked pretty well for Chinese. For your particular example, maybe the difference lies in word lengths. Most Chinese words are under 2~3 characters, makes prefix matching way more efficient.
JdeBP 8y ago
Lack of punctuation is not the same as lack of spaces, though.
628C6l0 8y ago
English needed spaces because the graphemes are of variable length, so without spacing there is no telling in any quick way where one meaning unit ends and another begins. The idea that Chinese "needs" spacing is a little like a UTF-16 advocate saying "what UTF-32 really needs is surrogate pairs". No, spacing is not some kind of high tech invention by English, it's a necessity that follows from the its special design (also think the use of null characters to terminate strings)

azurezyq 8y ago

For your last point, you can probably check with your Chinese friend and I'm pretty sure they don't buy the idea. Basically our brain already has built-in text segmentation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_segmentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_segmentation). I tried to think how I actually do that. It's more like prefix matching over a moderate large dict. It's not complicated and worked pretty well for Chinese. For your particular example, maybe the difference lies in word lengths. Most Chinese words are under 2~3 characters, makes prefix matching way more efficient.

JdeBP 8y ago

Lack of punctuation is not the same as lack of spaces, though.

628C6l0 8y ago

English needed spaces because the graphemes are of variable length, so without spacing there is no telling in any quick way where one meaning unit ends and another begins. The idea that Chinese "needs" spacing is a little like a UTF-16 advocate saying "what UTF-32 really needs is surrogate pairs". No, spacing is not some kind of high tech invention by English, it's a necessity that follows from the its special design (also think the use of null characters to terminate strings)