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(Disclaimer: I can't speak a single Chinese word.) TL;DR: The author tries to write "Chinese characters are damn weird" in five different ways (items 1,2,3,5,7
by yongjik 13y ago
(Disclaimer: I can't speak a single Chinese word.)
TL;DR: The author tries to write "Chinese characters are damn weird" in five different ways (items 1,2,3,5,7). OK, I got the point, but a bit less repetition might have been better.
Also, if you want to objectively assess just how difficult the Chinese language is, I guess native Chinese speakers are exactly those people you don't want to ask. After all, Chinese is the native language for them: how can they reliably compare it to any other language which are foreign to them?
Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both. I had memorized roughly a thousand Chinese characters in high school. Sure, it would be nothing compared to what's actually needed to read Chinese, but learning each character isn't much more difficult than learning how to pronounce catastrophe, cooperate, thesaurus, and the likes.
- thedufer 13y ago> Native English speakers are either overestimating the difficulty of memorizing Chinese characters, or underestimating how comparably opaque English spellings are, or maybe a bit of both. You seem to be implying that you've provided evidence that Chinese is not, in fact, more difficult than English. Or at least that you have reason to believe that. What is that reason? Is it so hard to believe that maybe Chinese is objectively more difficult to learn?
- yongjik 13y agoWell, as I said, I personally found remembering Chinese characters about as difficult as remembering English spellings. Of course, either comprises a very small part of the difficulty of learning either language (and I don't speak Chinese so I can't really say anything about it), but since everybody seemed to be fixating on Chinese characters... (shrug) I am ready to be persuaded if there's a convincing argument that Chinese is objectively more difficult. What I was trying to say is that asking Chinese people how hard it is proves nothing. And (I presume) a native English speaker comparing Chinese and European languages doesn't instill a lot of confidence, either. Of course Chinese is harder than French... to an average English speaker.
- thedufer 13y agoIt seems like the more apt comparison would be between Chinese and Russian or Arabic. New alphabet, little-to-no cognates, but still phonetic. In an all-languages-are-equal world, an English speaker would have equally difficult times learning any of those; I wonder how it goes in practice.
- tarikjn 13y agokeep in mind Chinese people themselves start forgetting a lot of the characters after living a couple years abroad