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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5177 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 89 of 132 29 May 2011 at 11:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The four most common I know of in no particular order are: 1) Gei mun? 几文（钱）？ 2) Gei kao? 几块（钱）？ 3) Gei dor qin? 几多钱? 4) Dim mai? 怎么卖? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| jsun Groupie Joined 5089 days ago 62 posts - 129 votes | Message 90 of 132 30 May 2011 at 2:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The situation of today "dialect" speakers is like forcing an Englishmen to write in French but
that Englishmen reads the French he writes in English. Mandarin speakers always say other Sinitic languages as the dialects of Mandarin however they can't understand their dialects in written forms. What does that mean? Spoken different and written different! Another language! 
bei2 tiu4 lou6 lai4 haang4 haa2 Give (classifier) road to walk (haa2 is a particle meaning an attempt) That means "please let me live" Don't tell me "走吓" is equivalent to "走一下" 吓 is directly after verb like an unchanged conjugation. Cantonese also has a prominent feature that is thought to be from Zhuang, a Tai-Kadai language - this feature is abundance of final particle in the end of the sentence. This final particle can be of 1,2 or 3 characters and it determines the whole meaning of a sentence. If you use it wrong, you will be misunderstood. Nowadays, Cantonese learners tell me that books don't teach that and TV subtitle doesn't help (because it's in written Mandarin and they don't have that feature). For the awareness of written Cantonese: I personally create romanized karaokes for songs that are written in real Cantonese. There are some written-Mandarin songs I've done because people requested it. I don't want to let people down, especially those who love Cantonese. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8S5gA1y5hI&feature=player_em bedded I also created real written Cantonese subtitle for TV programmes. Because the subtitle on TV is just Mandarin translation of Cantonese. http://www.metacafe.com/watch/6197877/written_cantonese_subt itle/ Edited by jsun on 30 May 2011 at 3:19am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5770 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 91 of 132 30 May 2011 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's a pretty accurate description of what happened - during the Norman conquest. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Matheus Senior Member Brazil Joined 5085 days ago 208 posts - 312 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, French | Message 92 of 132 30 May 2011 at 5:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I haven't read all the thread yet (stopped at page 5).
I actually find Chinese Characters very handsome. I agree with those who said that they will not get rid of their writing system because of foreigners (who can't learn), when they're already the largest nation in number of people. 1,3 billion and 90% literate, It's ok, it'd be a problem if it was much less than 90% of more than 1 billion people. It's also used in Japanese, so please add more people to that. In China, there are a lot of different dialects, but they can communicate together if they use the written system (correct me if I'm wrong). I'm lazy to learn the characters, but I would hate so much if they started to write in Latin letters. It's beautiful to see a very difficult writing system alive nowadays. People complain too much about it, when they should have been learning. I hope they never get rid of the characters. It's their culture, it's cool, and EFFICIENT for THEIR language. Who doesn't like Chinese characters? So if you can't learn, don't try to change it in order to easy your studies. The Native speakers are good with it, that's what matters. Edited by Matheus on 30 May 2011 at 5:14am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5700 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 93 of 132 30 May 2011 at 8:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Wow these two are amazing. This is precisely the sort of thing I wished had existed when I was trying to learn canto. Would that this way were standard! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 94 of 132 30 May 2011 at 9:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't quite understand. Can you explain the difference in easier terms?
There are movies with Canto subs (most of them produced in the 80's), but they're not easy to find nowadays. There is also a webpage (don't have the link now as I'm at work) with the scripts of Stephen Chow movies, although they're in simplified characters. I've used these to get a grip on the final particles (Stephen Chow is a master of using them).
Looks awesome! I'll take a better look on these when I get back from work. Thank you for making these resources for us learners! It's very appreciated. I can also mention the Cantonese Wikipedia as a source of written Cantonese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ikerito Diglot Newbie China Joined 4855 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: GermanB1 | Message 95 of 132 18 February 2012 at 6:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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well, compared to alphabet, the Character is indeed less efficient in terms of learning and spreading. BUT, the main reason why China has never gotten rid of it while Vietnam and Thailand have, besides the cultural one, is that China is so large that the diversity in accent dismiss the probability in any alphabet. Linguistically speaking, however, it doesn't matter whether you learn those character or not if you only want to attain a survival level or a travel one. With Pinyin it works just fine. BTW, Mao was largely in support of Latinizing Mandarin ;P
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| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 96 of 132 18 February 2012 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Which Chinese province has the lowest literacy rate?
It's.... Tibet! Where 90% people are Tibetans (according to Wikipedia). They use phonetic script, as everyone knows. It's poverty that hampers literacy, not the writing system. If you think Chinese characters are too hard to learn... try learning Yi! Chinese characters may be hard to learn, but Ithink many people misunderstand how they are composed. I have seen opinions like: If you don't know the character, you won't know how to read it, and its meaning. Is it true? not much, If you are a Chinese kid and you know the name for the flying mouse-like creature (bat) as bianfu, and you will see in the text 蝙蝠, you can guess its meaning from context! These characters say to you: We are kind of snake-like animal, and you pronounce us something like : bian/pian fu. So you can guess the meaning from the context! especially if you are Chinese, and you know how to pronounce "bat" in Chinese. If you are a foreginer, it's harder, but you can still guess the pronuntiation and general meaning (kind of tree, kind of haired animal, kind of sea animal etc). Edited by clumsy on 18 February 2012 at 2:30pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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