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Because of the difficult writing system (thousands of characters to memorize, rather than a mere 26), Mandarin is unlikely to replace English as a world languag
by my_first_acct 8y ago
Because of the difficult writing system (thousands of characters to memorize, rather than a mere 26), Mandarin is unlikely to replace English as a world language.
- currymj 8y agoi don't know about this. how much worse, really, are hanzi (which do have a loose structure to them, it's not just brute memorization) than the deranged English spelling system? if there's anyone who learned both as additional languages I would be interested in hearing.
- my_first_acct 8y agoHere is an article on the subject: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html ("Why Chinese is So Damn Hard") And evin bad spelers can riit undrstandabbel englush.
- bllguo 8y agothis is fantastic, thanks. I can definitely attest that Chinese people are very proud of the difficulty of their language. One possible factor that isn't mentioned: I believe that culturally, the Chinese value learning and education more.
- sidlls 8y agoYour belief needs evidence. Or a more precise definition of "learning" and "education." My experience, both East and West, is that the typical person is just too busy trying to survive to care much about learning or education (in almost any sense).
- gowld 8y agoYou can bluff your way through English spelling and let the computer fix 90+% of it and let human readers fix most of the remainder. Can you do that with Mandarin characters?
- yorwba 8y agoYes. If you just type ahead in Pinyin and accept whatever the input method makes out of it, human readers will be able to fix the remainder. It works analogously with handwritten characters, where you don't need to remember every stroke, so long as the general shape is recognizable. u ll maek urlself look dum tho
- scarcely 8y agoWhen I was little a game I would often play with myself is to switch on the Pinyin IME, keep pressing random keys for a minute or two, and then try to make sense of the ridiculous stuff I typed out. It was a lot of fun because you can always make some kind of sense of it.
- adrianN 8y agoIt's bad enough that educated Chinese native speakers can't write common words like "sneeze" without the assistance of a computer: * http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
- cauldron 8y agoAnd quality of mandarin content is deterioting ever faster these days, thanks to low quality school education, generally shit-tier English translators, and the self-media sensationalism cottage industry that Wechat and Toutiao from Bytedance helped created.
- fleshfly 8y agoI always considered this a bizarre argument. Chinese characters are more alike English words than English letters. English also has thousands of words, prefixes required to achieve competency. Chinese characters consist of only around 200 radicals, more than 26, but hardly thousands. I would say the smallest unit in Chinese is a stroke, of which there are 10. Theres just an extra dimension about where strokes are placed relative to each other that makes the characters seem complex, but if you study it for a few days you would find that there arent actually that many degrees of freedom. In other words, - strokes to letters - radicals to prefixes, suffices - characters to words