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The argument that Chinese writing has to be made phonetic because Chinese is too hard only holds sway to non-Chinese. Most Chinese people do not consider Chines
by knolax 8y ago
The argument that Chinese writing has to be made phonetic because Chinese is too hard only holds sway to non-Chinese. Most Chinese people do not consider Chinese writing to be too hard. Therefore the most common argument for phonetic writing is compatibility with international standards. As of now the Latin alphabet is the international standard.
- FabHK 8y ago> only holds sway to non-Chinese. Well, I'd say it holds sway to learners that a) know a better system, and b) learn as adults. Both factors allow them to form a better judgment than kids that don't know any better.
- knolax 8y agoExcept all Chinese speakers in the current generation are taught Pinyin in school.
- FabHK 8y agoAnd many speakers write characters (on their computer or devices) using Pinyin, and forget how to write rare characters, see * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia * http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25291 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=25291 (and the articles linked from it)
- knolax 8y agoYes and English speakers forget the spelling of rare words, especially if they were to spend extended periods of time using nothing but text-to-speech. Those that do use Pinyin to write on their computers also know that the large number of homophones makes it an order of magnitude slower than using radical based input methods to directly type the characters such as Canjie, Wubi, Boshiamy etc.