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Recommended reading: http://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform.html http://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform... Summary
by Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Recommended reading:
http://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform.html http://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform...
Summary: emperical evidence shows that students who were taught Pinyin (romanized, phonetic Chinese writing) were far better off than students who learned with Hanzi characters (the pictograms you're familiar with). Despite this, Chinese written language reform is unlikely to happen due to political pressures from the elites, whose family's positions are secured by the higher barrier to entry to becoming an intellectual. It takes more work to learn Chinese than almost any other language because they want it to.
For this reason, even setting aside the other moral quandries presented by China, I'm against teaching Mandarin in schools. Though, as an optional class for high-school-level children, it makes more sense.
Edit: probably worth clarifying that I study Hanzi characters and I am fluent in Japanese.
- zavi 8y agoThe advantage of pictograms is you can infer meaning from component radicals when looking at more complicated pictograms. Pinyin is useful but limited, e.g. there is a number of different pictograms that are all pronouced 'shi4' so simply by looking at pinyin you won't be able to differentiate without additional context that might not be available in written scenario.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoHomonyms exist in every language. The advantages do not outweigh the drawbacks.
- zavi 8y agoThere's order of magnitude more homonyms in Mandarin than English to the point where having a pictograms system starts making sense. That's why 80 percent of characters are multipart with one of the radicals carrying the pronunciation.
- knolax 8y agoHomonyms don't exist in every language to the extant that you can write an entire essay with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
- tivert 8y ago> Homonyms don't exist in every language to the extant that you can write an entire essay with them. Homonyms like that don't exist in any living language. Spoken Classical Chinese is a dead language, like Latin. You only get that effect when you use modern Mandarin pronunciations, they wouldn't have been homonyms if you didn't use anachronous pronunciations. It's sort of like writing a poem that means one thing in Latin and an entirely different thing in modern Italian.
- knolax 8y agoYet Classical Chinese is still a large part of Chinese literary canon, partially because the writing system allows for written Classical Chinese to comprehended by modern readers. There are no examples to "Lion-Eating Poet" in Italian and English precisely because phonetic writing systems cause most writing to be incomprehensible as pronounciations change. Your example is also egregious also because the entire point of "Lion-Eating Poet" isn't that "it means different things in classical and modern Chinese" but that semantical meaning can still be transmitted by the writing system completely independent of pronounciation.
- tivert 8y ago> Yet Classical Chinese is still a large part of Chinese literary canon, partially because the writing system allows for written Classical Chinese to comprehended by modern readers. But only essentially though translation. It's different enough that a typical Chinese reader can't jump into those works with ease. Latin works are still part of the Western literary canon, and for many centuries Europeans went though the trouble of learning Latin to read them. You can still find fossilized Latin phrases in modern languages like English, et cetera. That doesn't mean Latin is a truly living language. > There are no examples to "Lion-Eating Poet" in Italian and English precisely because phonetic writing systems cause most writing to be incomprehensible as pronounciations change. > Your example is also egregious also because the entire point of "Lion-Eating Poet" isn't that "it means different things in classical and modern Chinese" but that semantical meaning can still be transmitted by the writing system completely independent of pronounciation. There can be no exact analogy because phonetic writing systems are more conserving of pronunciation while systems like Chinese are more conserving of semantics. That's why I said it's "it's sort of like." My point was the poem is more of a stunt than a real statement about a real language.
- foobiekr 8y agoAnd yet people speak Chinese without displaying characters for help in comprehension.
- jason_slack 8y ago>'shi4' but isn't that when you use context around the word to know what the meaning is? The same happens in English...you don't always know without context. 学习中文很有趣！ Xuéxí zhōngwén hěn yǒuqù! hanzi or pinyin reading either way I know what this is intended to say.
- smallnamespace 8y agoExcept Mandarin has a lot more homophones than English does, likely under the long influence of the writing system. For spoken Mandarin, you can probably infer enough from the conversational context, but for official documents, business and technical terminology, or any literature, full romanization renders the text much less incomprehensible. This isn't helped by the fact that Classical Chinese, from which most complex vocabulary is derived, is even more homophonic than daily speech.
- simplify 8y agoThat's just spoken language. There are many words that are "literary", which means they are used primarily in writing and not spoken language. Without hanzi it would be very difficult to understand what is written.
- jason_slack 8y agoYup this can be true. If you read something like duo(3) it could be a measure word for flowers (朵) or maybe mean “to hide or avoid” (躲)
- Lfwinster 8y agototally agree with other two comments, tbh, nobody uses pinyin anymore after grade six, it is really just a stepping stone for kids to learn chinese before they can memorize all the common characters help them to read. As a Chinese i actually hate pinin as an adult because my name would appear in Pinin on my passport and it loses all its meaning.
- jason_slack 8y ago
- tivert 8y ago> The advantage of pictograms is you can infer meaning from component radicals when looking at more complicated pictograms. Pinyin is useful but limited, e.g. there is a number of different pictograms that are all pronouced 'shi4' so simply by looking at pinyin you won't be able to differentiate without additional context that might not be available in written scenario. I kinda find it hard to believe that could be much of a real problem. Pictograms may allow homonyms to proliferate more than in an alphabetic writing system, but as long as the language still lives as a spoken language, there will be limits on them that prevent them from becoming too much of a problem. A spoken language with too many homonyms just isn't useful, so it will be adapted to eliminate the problem. All bets are off when the spoken form is dead, though.
- FabHK 8y agoYou have the same "advantage" with word components in alphabetic languages, such as "picto+gram", "sub+marine", and what have you.
- knolax 8y agoYes and in alphabetic languages those word components are much more ambiguous, especially in abbreviations. 加州 is a lot less ambiguous than CA, hence the greater prevalence of the former in daily use.
- FabHK 8y ago> alphabetic languages those word components are much more ambiguous I don't think so. The components of a polysyllabic word can give (more or less) strong hints to its meaning, but typically the word and its meaning must still be learned. But the same holds for radicals in Chinese characters, and even polysyllabic words in Chinese (电视/電視 is electric + vision, and that's TV. Television is distant + vision, and that's also TV.） That two characters with 14 bits each carry more information than two characters with 5 bits each is clear, but not a huge advantage of non-alphabetic writing, or a decisive one (compared to the disadvantages).
- knolax 8y agoYes but the point is that CA and 加州 are both two syllables in speech. In your example, "televison" is 4 syllables whereas "电视" is only two. As you've noted, the writing system has over time created a higher information to syllable ratio. A transition to a writing system with a lower information to syllable ratio would require a complete change in vocabulary and the translation of pretty much all written text.
- FabHK 8y ago> the translation of pretty much all written text Yes, agreed. It would by no means be trivial. Question is whether it would be worth it (in terms of freeing up time for children to study something else, for example).
- jason_slack 8y agoTo be honest, I don't understand your reasons at all. http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoI can sum it up as "it's deliberately hard and teaching it to children has been shown to slow their learning"
- beat 8y agoExcept both of those are wrong. Remember, literacy was a rare and elite thing throughout the Western world as well, until the 19th century started seeing the first attempts at universal education. Widespread literacy is a 20th century thing. And China lagged behind the West, having spent the first half of the 20th century throwing off colonial oppression rather than developing a sophisticated, modern education system. So until recently, it cost China nothing to use pictograms rather than romanization. So no, not "deliberately hard". Since then, China built a modern education system, and has literacy rates on par with western nations. So it's not preventing China from teaching children to read. Therefore, your claim that "teaching it to children has been shown to slow their learning" constitutes an extraordinary claim, and requires some extraordinary evidence. Occam's Razor suggests that you think it's hard because it's unfamiliar, not because it's hard.
- FabHK 8y agoI'd think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that the Chinese writing system is harder to master (and it thus takes longer) than alphabetic ones. It's an extraordinary claim that learning 6000 symbols is just as easy as learning 26 symbols (hey, make it 52, or, since we're on HN, 128 or even 256 :-)
- beat 8y agoIt's not a claim I'm making, because it's an irrational comparison. My son knew the alphabet by the time he was three years old. Did it give him a 6000 word vocabulary? No. Standalone Roman letters are meaningless, unlike Chinese characters. And there are other tradeoffs. Chinese writing is much more compact and easier to read, relative to alphabetic writing. A layer of translation has been removed. I'm not convinced that learning to write Chinese with a "literate" vocabulary is substantially harder than achieving equivalent literacy in a language with alphabetic writing. It might look easier to you if you've never learned both. But proof is in the pudding - China's literacy rate is on par with Western literacy rates, for similar educational effort.
- andrepd 8y agoIt is likely that this measure is being pushed by China in their bid to expand their global influence. Many such projects are being pursued right now in developed nations; one of them is probably pushing Mandarin as a second language.
- tzs 8y agoIn Kenya, that would be more like Mandarin as a fourth language. They commonly know their tribal language first, then Swahili and English, which are both official languages of Kenya. From fourth grade on English is the primary language used for teaching in school.
- nyolfen 8y agochina has seemed to have recognized that chinese is too hard for most people to learn as a second language, and have been sponsoring efforts at establishing esperanto as an intl langauage
- chillacy 8y agoThey’ve been sponsoring an Esperanto radio station for awhile (like half a century at least) but there haven’t been any increased pushes I’ve seen lately.
- paradoxparalax 8y agoI have never heard about esperanto while in China, that was half of my lifetime, so I think there must be some exaggeration here. The efforts at establishing Confucius Institute branch schools all over the world to teach Mandarin I have clearly seen.
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- fireattack 8y ago>due to political pressures from the elites As a Chinese, I can't think of ANY Chinese people would prefer to reform Hanzi to Pinyin and I'm surely not within "elites". >whose family's positions are secured by the higher barrier to entry to becoming an intellectual Holy shit, it's 2019 not 1950. China has a literacy rate of 96.4% [1]. What exact barrier are "elites" trying to set with that? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_...
- meesles 8y ago> China has a literacy rate of 96.4% So what? Literacy raises the average but doesn't prevent huge class gaps in populations. OP's point is valid in the same way that the 1% in the USA can pay for their kids to attend elite schools, be hired be elite firms regardless of ability, and continue the elite family tree often at the expense of the poor. China is no different.
- knolax 8y agoSo both China and the US should adopt newspeak?
- sanxiyn 8y agoYes, it is ridiculous "more good" is spelt "better". I am unsure whether the exact form of "doubleplusgood" is optimal, but something like that makes perfect sense. Given that China successfully adopted simplified Chinese characters, English-speaking world is perfectly capable of adopting Newspeak, and it will bring long term benefit, just as simplified Chinese characters did. But like many long term beneficial things it won't happen due to short term cost.
- knolax 8y ago>Yes That's a myopic view of language. Changes like "better" --> "more good" don't last for long as irregularities will naturally form, making your "optimal" language yet another legacy constraint. Besides, the vast majority of complexity of language exists because they carry semantic meaning. For example, the redundancy in the terms "Pig" and "Pork" might have initially been due to a need to signal sophistication, but they survive in modern usage because it's a concise way to differentiate the animal from the meat. >Given that China successfully adopted simplified Chinese characters Simplified characters are more on par with spelling changes than newspeak. It only reduces the stroke count of certain radicals, it doesn't make any changes to the underlying vocabulary or grammar, whereas both newspeak and phonetic writing would.
- knolax 8y ago>is unlikely to happen due to political pressures from the elites, whose family's positions are secured by the higher barrier to entry to becoming an intellectual. I'm sorry but this is veering into the realm of conspiracy. If you actually talk to any Chinese people you'll realize that most are very opposed to the Latinization of the writing system. In fact the "elites" you speak of were themselves the ones most interested in simplifying the writing system and possibly adopting the Latin alphabet. Their former attempt, simplified Chinese, is often met with rancor in modern day Taiwan and Hongkong, whereas the latter attempt is often tauted in China as an example of CCP backed globalization gone too far.
- digianarchist 8y agoPinyin or Bopomofo [0] doesn't really matter what symbols are used. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
- knolax 8y agoThe anger isn't towards Pinyin specifically, but towards attempts to switch the writing system to phonetic writing. Pinyin is still taught in schools today starting from preschool. Most of the current generation of Chinese people are familiar with both and the common sentiment is that truly phonetic writing systems aren't practical, and that CCP attempts to use Pinyin as a "real" writing system were misguided and yet another example of the government trying to destroy Chinese culture.
- digianarchist 8y ago> "If you actually talk to any Chinese people you'll realize that most are very opposed to the Latinization of the writing system." Bopomofo isn't Latin characters...
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- jxy 8y agoI don't know what your "fluent" means. But I recommend keep studying Japanese until you can read newspaper in native level speed and try to imagine the newspaper in 仮名 only 漢字無し, then in romanized latin letters. Ane for fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
- PavlikPaja 8y agoBetter off how?
- pluskid 8y agoTurning character into pinyin introduces so much ambiguity and lose so much information at local level that we need to go back and forth multiple times to infer what that word really is according to the partially parsed part of the sentence. While written sentence in character we don’t even need to do linear character by character scan, usually a glimpse of it will give you most of what you need to understand it.
- mac01021 8y agoIf you include an indication of the tone along with the pinyin, doesn't it end up being just about as informative as spoken word?
- ssnistfajen 8y agoThere are still way too many hompohones which can introduce a lot of amibiguity. Even Korean still includes Hanja to clarify technical terms in law/medicine. Modern Standard Mandarin has way fewer syllables than Middle Chinese and Southern Chinese languages which makes homophones a lore more common. Vietnamese didn't really have this problem because the phonology is a lot more complex and it shows through the written word. An example of homophones creating ambiguity: An Jung-geun was a Korean independence activist who assassinated a former Japanese Prime Minister in 1909. He is often called 義士 in Korean textbooks which means "hero, man of honor". However, 義士(의사) is pronounced in the same way as 醫師(의사) which means "doctor". The Hangul spelling is identical thus it has led to many younger Koreans to think An Jung-geun was a doctor and question why would a doctor intentionally kill someone. It's more of a tongue-in-cheek joke but it shows the problem of completely detaching a writing system from a language that does not sufficiently distinguish words without context. In Chinese this is not a problem because by people usually learn this type of stuff on paper first. The additional context helps reduce the ambiguity in spoken conversation. Being able to talk to each other without writing is not sufficient proof that a writing system can be abolished with minimal impact, because it ignores the fact that the writing system is what helped to dispel the ambiguity in the first place.
- mac01021 8y ago
- ssnistfajen 8y agoThis ain't the 1800s. The vast majority of Chinese citizens who have finished elementary school are able to recognize at least 2000 characters. Knowing how to read and write Hanzi is no longer an indication of "intelligence" or "elite status". In Japan, maybe, but their language is completely different. In case you've missed the last half-century, there has already been two Chinese written language reforms (though the second one didn't stick). It's called Simplified Chinese. The rationale in your comment is absolutely bizarre and it reeks of arrogance with a side sprinkle of ignorance.
- magissima 8y agoNot in Japan either really.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- notahacker 8y agoThis would be a better reason to discourage the rest of the world from learning English, a language whose native speakers often use familiarity with its laughably bad orthography as a proxy for assessing intelligence, and also a language which unlike Mandarin has seen few serious attempts at reform (not only because of lack of centralised bodies, but also because English linguistic prescriptivists have generally preferred inventing tendentious grammatical style rules to classify "good writing" over cutting the bits which might confuse people). On the other hand, English is quite a useful language to be able to speak, much like Mandarin.
- FabHK 8y agoAgreed. DeFrancis (in his delightful The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) wrote (quoting from memory) that Japanese has the worst writing system among the character-based ones, and English the worst among the alphabetic ones. What a pleasure Spanish writing is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language%3A_Fact_and_Fantasy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language%3A_Fact_a...