6 ms·

Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. Many studentds in China can understand a subject but had the

by est 2y ago

Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. Many studentds in China can understand a subject but had the pronouciation completely wrong. In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were. Chinese characters also had the benifits of photographic memory, presumably you are trained with the right method. The key is to detach the "listening/speaking" phonetics from the characters, wire your brain directly to visual ideograms along with reading/writing. Plus the grammar don't have conjugation nor declension, without the tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness and shit, which makes the scripts very fast to parse. I'd argue reading a paragraph of text is extremely fast in Chinese. You can grasp the general meaning from a large chunk of text without sequencially reading every word. It's like one of these novel apps that hightlight important vowel from English sentences for fast reading but still, you have to go to the translation layers of recall - sound - meaning process. Sadly this art is lost because ideograms are fading in favor of PinYin in cyber world. The rise of shot-vids make literacy an expensive skill.

dehrmann 2y ago
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. I realized this in Taiwan when I started being able to recognize characters, know what it means in English, and have absolutely no idea what the word is in Mandarin. The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.
- saithound 2y ago
  > The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one. I'm almost certain that this is true of Chinese script (after all, it was and is used for writing many languages!), but it might not be deducible based on this sort of experience. I say thus because I had a very similar experience after I had to spend a month in the UAE. Thanks to frequent bilingual signs, I started recognizing common Arabic words, but I had no idea what the words are in Arabic or how to say them. But as far as I know, written Arabic is not at all orthogonal to spoken Arabic, every word is written exactly as it sounds.
  - cjohnson318 2y ago
    Arabic is significantly more difficult for English speakers than a Romance language, but you're still able to draw a straight line from symbols to sounds. Once you learn the alphabet, sounding words out in your head isn't difficult. (Naturally, you will not sound like a native speaker for a long time.)
cyberax 2y ago
> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. Yes, they are. Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet. While a minority of characters are indeed pure logograms (小，大，田，etc.), most modern Chinese words are two-syllabic. And syllables often don't have meaningful connection to the meaning of the word: 东西（"east-west" literally, but means "a thing, object"), some characters have lost _any_ semantic meaning in most words (“子”), and many more characters can only be used as a part of another word ("bound forms", e.g. "据"). Classical Chinese was more logographic and less phonetic, but modern Chinese is not really close to it anymore.
- est 2y ago
  > Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable. I challenge you to sort Chinese characters. This is an idea from James Gleick's The Information. The Chinese may never be able to invent morse code alone, because encoding Chinese scripts is extremely hard, even today (think of all those massive code-points in CJK Unicode, with dups and errors) Chinese text on the Internet may have some emulation of phonemes, but it's never systematically standarized. It just borrows some aspects here or there.
  - vntok 2y ago
    > I challenge you to sort Chinese characters. Chinese characters are in fact definitely sortable. There are multiple keys, the most popular ones being by stroke or by sound. Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke-based_sorting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke-based_sorting
    - est 2y ago
      good luck dealing with duplicates and hand-written variants.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        That's a problem in most alphabets as well. Several Latin letters (and the number symbols we use as well) have significant differences between printed and handwritten versions, and several handwritten versions around (g and z have some of the most variations).
lolinder 2y ago
> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were. This is, in fact, the default stance held by most non-CCP linguists. If you read what experts in the Chinese language family say, it's basically "Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible and more distinct than the Romance languages, but because the government of China says they're just dialects and we (as linguists) recognize that the line between dialect and language is basically arbitrary, we'll call them dialects so we can just study the languages and avoid getting sucked into nasty political discussions." As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy—and this works both to define distinct languages that are otherwise mutually intelligible and to merge dialects that aren't.
- djtango 2y ago
  I'm sure there are plenty of scholarly academics with a whole body of literature to argue otherwise, but I've never bought all the arguments of how different Cantonese and Mandarin are. To my mind assimilating Cantonese from Mandarin or vice versa is way easier than French <> Italian or Italian <> Spanish. Spanish <> Portuguese is an interesting contender. Good luck pretending Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct languages while comparing German and French lol. I say this as someone with a whole lot of Cantonese dna in my heritage before people get all up in arms. I've personally always figured the barriers to learning both Mandarin and Cantonese was cultural and there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual
  - broken_clock 2y ago
    How many of these languages do you speak? I currently speak and understand English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin to varying degrees. I was forced to take French for 2 years in high school. Never even took it seriously. But because of that, after 6 weeks of private Spanish tutoring, I was able to hold hour+ long conversations with strangers while backpacking LatAm. I've spoken Cantonese my entire life (but not truly native level). I took an entire year of college level accelerated "Mandarin for Other Chinese Language Speakers". I took it quite seriously. I'm backpacking China right now. I still can't even talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes without having to use a translator or look up words. > there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual There are also plenty who move to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and can't pick up Cantonese at all. Turns out having an authoritarian government force Mandarin on you will make the Cantonese speakers bilingual rather quickly.
djtango 2y ago
> which makes the scripts very fast to parse Yes my wife is bilingual and she thinks in English but prefers reading in Chinese because it's more terse
sandbach 2y ago
It's true that Chinese words don't inflect, but not all the grammatical categories you list are missing. There are aspect markers like 了 and 正在, and nouns are definite or indefinite even if they're not marked as such by articles: 有 can only have an indefinite object, for example.

by est 2y ago

dehrmann 2y ago

> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. It's like an intermediate language (IL) of mind. I realized this in Taiwan when I started being able to recognize characters, know what it means in English, and have absolutely no idea what the word is in Mandarin. The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one.

saithound 2y ago
> The written language is almost orthogonal to the spoken one. I'm almost certain that this is true of Chinese script (after all, it was and is used for writing many languages!), but it might not be deducible based on this sort of experience. I say thus because I had a very similar experience after I had to spend a month in the UAE. Thanks to frequent bilingual signs, I started recognizing common Arabic words, but I had no idea what the words are in Arabic or how to say them. But as far as I know, written Arabic is not at all orthogonal to spoken Arabic, every word is written exactly as it sounds.
- cjohnson318 2y ago
  Arabic is significantly more difficult for English speakers than a Romance language, but you're still able to draw a straight line from symbols to sounds. Once you learn the alphabet, sounding words out in your head isn't difficult. (Naturally, you will not sound like a native speaker for a long time.)

cyberax 2y ago

> Chinese characters are not some kind of alphabet. Yes, they are. Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet. While a minority of characters are indeed pure logograms (小，大，田，etc.), most modern Chinese words are two-syllabic. And syllables often don't have meaningful connection to the meaning of the word: 东西（"east-west" literally, but means "a thing, object"), some characters have lost _any_ semantic meaning in most words (“子”), and many more characters can only be used as a part of another word ("bound forms", e.g. "据"). Classical Chinese was more logographic and less phonetic, but modern Chinese is not really close to it anymore.

est 2y ago
> Modern Hanzi are a very bad phonetic alphabet alphabets, universally have one common property: they are sortable. I challenge you to sort Chinese characters. This is an idea from James Gleick's The Information. The Chinese may never be able to invent morse code alone, because encoding Chinese scripts is extremely hard, even today (think of all those massive code-points in CJK Unicode, with dups and errors) Chinese text on the Internet may have some emulation of phonemes, but it's never systematically standarized. It just borrows some aspects here or there.
- vntok 2y ago
  > I challenge you to sort Chinese characters. Chinese characters are in fact definitely sortable. There are multiple keys, the most popular ones being by stroke or by sound. Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke-based_sorting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke-based_sorting
  - est 2y ago
    good luck dealing with duplicates and hand-written variants.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      That's a problem in most alphabets as well. Several Latin letters (and the number symbols we use as well) have significant differences between printed and handwritten versions, and several handwritten versions around (g and z have some of the most variations).

lolinder 2y ago

> In fact many would argue Chinese languages were never unified (mandarin/cantonese/etc) but the scripts were. This is, in fact, the default stance held by most non-CCP linguists. If you read what experts in the Chinese language family say, it's basically "Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible and more distinct than the Romance languages, but because the government of China says they're just dialects and we (as linguists) recognize that the line between dialect and language is basically arbitrary, we'll call them dialects so we can just study the languages and avoid getting sucked into nasty political discussions." As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy—and this works both to define distinct languages that are otherwise mutually intelligible and to merge dialects that aren't.

djtango 2y ago
I'm sure there are plenty of scholarly academics with a whole body of literature to argue otherwise, but I've never bought all the arguments of how different Cantonese and Mandarin are. To my mind assimilating Cantonese from Mandarin or vice versa is way easier than French <> Italian or Italian <> Spanish. Spanish <> Portuguese is an interesting contender. Good luck pretending Mandarin and Cantonese are distinct languages while comparing German and French lol. I say this as someone with a whole lot of Cantonese dna in my heritage before people get all up in arms. I've personally always figured the barriers to learning both Mandarin and Cantonese was cultural and there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual
- broken_clock 2y ago
  How many of these languages do you speak? I currently speak and understand English, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin to varying degrees. I was forced to take French for 2 years in high school. Never even took it seriously. But because of that, after 6 weeks of private Spanish tutoring, I was able to hold hour+ long conversations with strangers while backpacking LatAm. I've spoken Cantonese my entire life (but not truly native level). I took an entire year of college level accelerated "Mandarin for Other Chinese Language Speakers". I took it quite seriously. I'm backpacking China right now. I still can't even talk to anyone for more than a couple minutes without having to use a translator or look up words. > there are plenty of people in Guangzhou who are perfectly bilingual There are also plenty who move to Guangzhou and Shenzhen and can't pick up Cantonese at all. Turns out having an authoritarian government force Mandarin on you will make the Cantonese speakers bilingual rather quickly.

djtango 2y ago

> which makes the scripts very fast to parse Yes my wife is bilingual and she thinks in English but prefers reading in Chinese because it's more terse

sandbach 2y ago

It's true that Chinese words don't inflect, but not all the grammatical categories you list are missing. There are aspect markers like 了 and 正在, and nouns are definite or indefinite even if they're not marked as such by articles: 有 can only have an indefinite object, for example.