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And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding. Far from looking up every o

And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding. Far from looking up every other character or so. Only a few % of encountered characters are not among the first 2000. I thought of trying to read the three body problem along the audiobook, however the one I found online doesn't seem to contain all the chapters.

yorwba 8y ago
> And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding. Learning Chinese based on characters is going to be very frustrating. Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly with guessing the meaning of the word. In the SUBTLEX-CH frequency data, 94% of characters are among the top 1000, but only 82% of words. So it's quite common to see a sentence where you know all the characters, but don't understand it because you don't know how they group into words.
- tralarpa 8y ago
  > Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly with guessing the meaning of the word. It's really infuriating how many two-character words contain an extremely frequent character (like 要 yào) and you have still no idea what the word means.
  - 3pt14159 8y ago
    As someone that knows a bit of Russian and French Chinese seems like a language almost invented to be hard. Let me get this right; Chinese: 1. Has different character sets, including traditional and simplified. 2. Has tens of thousands of different characters. 3. Has both conjugates and homophones. 4. Makes new words by combining characters. 5. Has completely different ways of speaking; none of which are easy. 6. Generally assumes that the other communicator can use the context to denote the tense. Like. Guys. Common. If you were combining characters to make words why bother with tens of thousands of characters in the first place?
    - Tyr42 8y ago
      Also no spaces. This hurts so bad.
    - dionian 8y ago
      1. "Simplified" is technically a script variant of traditional developed in the last half century or so, only in the PRC - but they are ultimately still the same system. Those who can read traditional chinese script can read simplified with ease. 2. Only ~2000 needed for normal vocab. Compare this with 10000+ for english. 3. Mandarin in particular has a lot of homophones but it's practically not a problem since terms are comprised of one or more sound and thus easily disambiguate. 4. This is a good thing, vocab is much lower (see point 2) 5. Same with any language? 6. All humans use context
    - PavlikPaja 8y ago
      1. Most of the simplifications are regular. 2. You only need to know several thousands. 3. Chinese uses no cojugation (I guess you meant something else). All languages has homophones 4. That's good. That's why you only need several thousand words. 5. I'm not sure what you mean. 6. It simply doesn't convey tense most of the time. Those tens of thousands is what you get if you count the most obscure characters you can find, that nobody really uses.
- KennyCason 8y ago
  I find it pretty rare not to be able to group words to be honest. I do agree with your first points however.
- dionian 8y ago
  similarly, learning by individual character (thousands) is much harder than learning by radical (dozens - ~250 total)
kkarakk 8y ago
sidenote: does three body problem not translate well to English? coz I read an English translation and found the writing quite simplistic. the concepts used were great and I've never read anything like it in hard scifi but the writing wasn't as good as i'd expected for such a lauded book.
- hderms 8y ago
  I think it's pretty common complaint to say Chinese doesn't translate simply to English. Like Chinese poems are said to contain wordplay based on alternate pronunciations or homophonic information which simply can't be translated.
- PavlikPaja 8y ago
  I didn't read it in English, but I read it's bad. Basically if it's translated from Chinese, you can almost bet it's bad.

yorwba 8y ago

> And Chinese vocabulary is rather small and extremely systematic, so those 1000 or so characters form a solid base for understanding. Learning Chinese based on characters is going to be very frustrating. Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly with guessing the meaning of the word. In the SUBTLEX-CH frequency data, 94% of characters are among the top 1000, but only 82% of words. So it's quite common to see a sentence where you know all the characters, but don't understand it because you don't know how they group into words.

tralarpa 8y ago
> Most words have two characters and knowing their meaning only helps slightly with guessing the meaning of the word. It's really infuriating how many two-character words contain an extremely frequent character (like 要 yào) and you have still no idea what the word means.
- 3pt14159 8y ago
  As someone that knows a bit of Russian and French Chinese seems like a language almost invented to be hard. Let me get this right; Chinese: 1. Has different character sets, including traditional and simplified. 2. Has tens of thousands of different characters. 3. Has both conjugates and homophones. 4. Makes new words by combining characters. 5. Has completely different ways of speaking; none of which are easy. 6. Generally assumes that the other communicator can use the context to denote the tense. Like. Guys. Common. If you were combining characters to make words why bother with tens of thousands of characters in the first place?
  - Tyr42 8y ago
    Also no spaces. This hurts so bad.
  - dionian 8y ago
    1. "Simplified" is technically a script variant of traditional developed in the last half century or so, only in the PRC - but they are ultimately still the same system. Those who can read traditional chinese script can read simplified with ease. 2. Only ~2000 needed for normal vocab. Compare this with 10000+ for english. 3. Mandarin in particular has a lot of homophones but it's practically not a problem since terms are comprised of one or more sound and thus easily disambiguate. 4. This is a good thing, vocab is much lower (see point 2) 5. Same with any language? 6. All humans use context
  - PavlikPaja 8y ago
    1. Most of the simplifications are regular. 2. You only need to know several thousands. 3. Chinese uses no cojugation (I guess you meant something else). All languages has homophones 4. That's good. That's why you only need several thousand words. 5. I'm not sure what you mean. 6. It simply doesn't convey tense most of the time. Those tens of thousands is what you get if you count the most obscure characters you can find, that nobody really uses.
KennyCason 8y ago
I find it pretty rare not to be able to group words to be honest. I do agree with your first points however.
dionian 8y ago
similarly, learning by individual character (thousands) is much harder than learning by radical (dozens - ~250 total)

kkarakk 8y ago

sidenote: does three body problem not translate well to English? coz I read an English translation and found the writing quite simplistic. the concepts used were great and I've never read anything like it in hard scifi but the writing wasn't as good as i'd expected for such a lauded book.

hderms 8y ago
I think it's pretty common complaint to say Chinese doesn't translate simply to English. Like Chinese poems are said to contain wordplay based on alternate pronunciations or homophonic information which simply can't be translated.
PavlikPaja 8y ago
I didn't read it in English, but I read it's bad. Basically if it's translated from Chinese, you can almost bet it's bad.