6 ms·

Compare the writing to russian/greek/korean however. The helpfulness of phonetic alphabets can't be overstated. Being able to transcribe and sound-out words is

by cheepin 12y ago

Compare the writing to russian/greek/korean however. The helpfulness of phonetic alphabets can't be overstated. Being able to transcribe and sound-out words is a huge amount of memory you don't have to use that can instead be used for things like grammar/idioms/vocab. I like to think of it as the difference between using some sort of intellisense and memorizing the standard library/documentation when programming.

wonderzombie 12y ago
Seconded. I started learning Mandarin some years ago. The written language remained opaque for a very long time since you need to learn a rather long list of hanzi before you can read anything interesting. And there's little guarantee you'll be able to pronounce any of it anyway. Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.
- ithkuil 12y ago
  I had that same problem while learning Arabic, and that was just about missing short vowels.
  - entropy_ 12y ago
    Well, when it comes to Arabic, the short vowels should be written out as accents of sorts. However, they are quite often missing in actual written text. However, even as a native Arabic speaker I will struggle with text written like that and it will take me a while to read it. That's because most Arabs(at least the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptians I've mostly been exposed to) do not speak the written Arabic. Rather, we speak a colloquial language that will differ from one region to another. These are visibly descended from the formal, written, Arabic but they are not at all the same language. They have many different words, a completely different grammar, and very different pronunciation. So as far as most Arabs I know, the written Arabic is pretty much yet another foreign language they learn rather than their native language. The similarity between the written and spoken is similar to the difference between say Latin and languages that were descended from it(such as French).
msvan 12y ago
Chinese writing is phonetic, just not for your first 1000-2000 characters. I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters, because things get dramatically easier when you have learnt a lot of them. These are all pronounced "ding": 丁订盯顶钉, because they all have that T-like phonetic component. Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no. I will agree though that it is daunting to get started with.
- SeanLuke 12y ago
  > These are all pronounced "ding" Sort of. The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write. Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
  - jliechti1 12y ago
    I don't know if simplification has broken a great deal of the relationships, but it certainly has broken some. Here is a specific example: Traditional Chinese 車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident) 不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but) Simplified Chinese 车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation) 不过 (same meaning/pronunciation) Notice the 咼 in the Traditional 過 and 禍. This phonetic component gives you some indication that is is pronounced like "luo, huo, guo, wo". In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively. The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
    - kusimanse 12y ago
      But even in that case the relationships weren't completely broken. While 过 changed, 娲wa, 祸 huo，涡 wo，窝wo，锅 guo，蜗 wo，etc. still share the radical to the right, and 过 is a very common character, you shouldn't need to guess how to read it.
Tomte 12y ago
Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool. I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like). But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun! So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier. Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word. "Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar". I felt like the king of the world. :-)
- moron4hire 12y ago
  My parents were both linguists in the military in the 80s, so when I had gotten to around 8 years old or so, they started trying to teach me Russian. Needless to say, it didn't stick, but I've recently been trying it again. I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/dp/2203009144 http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/... And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed. The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    Trust me you're not going to pronounce Russian fluently. So my advice as a native speaker is: speak slowly and clearly. Speak as it is written. And good luck.
  - geoka9 12y ago
    > The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. Heh, I have the opposite problem: I tend to mumble when speaking English (I'm a native Russian speaker). Wanna trade?

by cheepin 12y ago

wonderzombie 12y ago

Seconded. I started learning Mandarin some years ago. The written language remained opaque for a very long time since you need to learn a rather long list of hanzi before you can read anything interesting. And there's little guarantee you'll be able to pronounce any of it anyway. Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.

ithkuil 12y ago
I had that same problem while learning Arabic, and that was just about missing short vowels.
- entropy_ 12y ago
  Well, when it comes to Arabic, the short vowels should be written out as accents of sorts. However, they are quite often missing in actual written text. However, even as a native Arabic speaker I will struggle with text written like that and it will take me a while to read it. That's because most Arabs(at least the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptians I've mostly been exposed to) do not speak the written Arabic. Rather, we speak a colloquial language that will differ from one region to another. These are visibly descended from the formal, written, Arabic but they are not at all the same language. They have many different words, a completely different grammar, and very different pronunciation. So as far as most Arabs I know, the written Arabic is pretty much yet another foreign language they learn rather than their native language. The similarity between the written and spoken is similar to the difference between say Latin and languages that were descended from it(such as French).

msvan 12y ago

Chinese writing is phonetic, just not for your first 1000-2000 characters. I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters, because things get dramatically easier when you have learnt a lot of them. These are all pronounced "ding": 丁订盯顶钉, because they all have that T-like phonetic component. Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no. I will agree though that it is daunting to get started with.

SeanLuke 12y ago
> These are all pronounced "ding" Sort of. The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write. Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
- jliechti1 12y ago
  I don't know if simplification has broken a great deal of the relationships, but it certainly has broken some. Here is a specific example: Traditional Chinese 車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident) 不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but) Simplified Chinese 车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation) 不过 (same meaning/pronunciation) Notice the 咼 in the Traditional 過 and 禍. This phonetic component gives you some indication that is is pronounced like "luo, huo, guo, wo". In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively. The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
  - kusimanse 12y ago
    But even in that case the relationships weren't completely broken. While 过 changed, 娲wa, 祸 huo，涡 wo，窝wo，锅 guo，蜗 wo，etc. still share the radical to the right, and 过 is a very common character, you shouldn't need to guess how to read it.

Tomte 12y ago

Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool. I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like). But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun! So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier. Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word. "Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar". I felt like the king of the world. :-)

moron4hire 12y ago
My parents were both linguists in the military in the 80s, so when I had gotten to around 8 years old or so, they started trying to teach me Russian. Needless to say, it didn't stick, but I've recently been trying it again. I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/dp/2203009144 http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/... And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed. The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  Trust me you're not going to pronounce Russian fluently. So my advice as a native speaker is: speak slowly and clearly. Speak as it is written. And good luck.
- geoka9 12y ago
  > The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. Heh, I have the opposite problem: I tend to mumble when speaking English (I'm a native Russian speaker). Wanna trade?