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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6342 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes  | Message 113 of 132 20 November 2012 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Need not worry about the fate of chinese words. We have already entered information age. The whole game is going to be played differently from now on.
if one asks me which is the champion of all writing systems in terms of ease and logics, I'd say this has to be hangul from korea. An average adult can learn it in 24 hours, and most importantly memorize it for goods! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 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 114 of 132 23 November 2012 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's a word composed of characters being quite unusual : 尷尬, the number nine 九 is used as a radical here. Many native speakers of all languages have sometimes problems with spelling. Edited by clumsy on 23 November 2012 at 5:46pm 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 115 of 132 23 November 2012 at 8:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's incontestably true, of course. But there are some subtleties that are peculiar to Sinitic languages (and Japanese, to some extent): * The figure 80% is arrived at in two different studies cited in the article. 80% have trouble writing characters. That's significantly higher than I believe you'll find in most other languages, though I don't have any studies to back it up. * The phenomenon is as common in highly educated people. In most languages, the people with college and university degrees will have comparatively few spelling mistakes. This is not the case in Mandarin. Reposting a quote from Victor Mair I used earlier:
Note that Victor Mair, professor in Chinese linguistics who travels to China and Taiwan regularly, teaches Literary Sinitic, whose wife is Taiwanese, has never met a single person who could write the word "sneeze" unaided by a computer, when prompted, even though he's asked "scores", including people with master's and doctor's degrees (probably often degrees in Chinese linguistics). Imagine a professor of English holding a doctor's degree who could not, when asked, write on a piece of paper a word as common as "sneeze" without checking with her cell phone. Yet in Mandarin this is more than just the norm, it's almost without exceptions. * The very nature of the spelling mistake is different. Again Victor Mair:
--- The situation with writing in Sinitic languages is on a completely different scale compared with the spelling problems in languages with alphabetic writing systems. Not only is the holder of a doctor's degree in my example above unable to correcly spell the word, she's likely to even be unable to write it down in a fashion that will make it recognizeable to a reader. There's no comparing that to an English speaker forgetting how many 'l's there are in 'parallel' or misplacing an apostrophe. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| alphabetsoup Newbie United States Joined 4600 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes | Message 116 of 132 27 November 2012 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As many in this thread have stated, the use of hanzi helps reduce ambiguity when reading. While there have been
problems of people forgetting how to write commonly used words or phrases, I think the problems of using characters are greatly outweighed by the pain of having everything written in a phonetic script. What I also don't understand is the overwhelming support of pinyin being used as the phonetic alphabet. When I took Chinese in school and from a private tutor, the teacher introduced Chinese sounds by having us learn consonants (bo po mo fo de te ne le) and rhymes and medials (a o ang eng er). The Taiwanese system of zhuyin fuhao/bopomofo works better in the way the language is taught and understood by native Chinese, in my opinion. Instead of completely eradicating hanzi, why not simply introduce a sort of furigana for uncommon characters? It would remove many of the problems most people have with a character system overall. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4448 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 117 of 132 27 November 2012 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Whether you like Chinese characters or not there is over 2000 years of history to it.
When the Chinese first started to inscribe their words on turtle shells, there was never any plan to spell the sounds phonetically like in the ancient Near-East and later spread to Europe including Greeks and Romans. And throughout history China has always been a class society divided into 2. The Emperor, the royal family with his court officials on top and peasants & laborers at the bottom. Knowing how to read the old Chinese classics and write could get people promoted to the civil service. There was no effort to adopt a phonetic system like the Koreans. The most they came up with after the communist revolution was a simplified version of the characters to extend education to the masses. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| leonidus Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6330 days ago 113 posts - 123 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 118 of 132 28 November 2012 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Because Chinese writing system is so hard that even educated Chinese forget how to spell without consulting a dictionary, I think it makes perfect sense to learn only to read characters. Learning just to read them (3000-3500 to read a newspaper) is already a daunting task, and will take 2-3 years of intensive study. Learning to write them by hand would increase that amount of time at least two-fold, if not more.
If even Chinese people can't master this skill after many years in school, who of us is ready to dedicate half of their life to get that sort of recognition that any 18-year old graduate from a European school can get without much extra effort, and which is no recognition at all in European languages. Life is all about priorities. If you're a dedicated scholar, who made the study of Chinese literature the goal of your life, it makes sense, although this sense is not obvious either. You need to read first, write second, and who needs to read your scribbles these computer-age days anyway. So, in my personal studies of Mandarin I chose to ignore learning to write characters by hand. So far I haven't regretted this decision. Visual memory helps remember the character shape and recognize it in text, as long as there is a lot of practise, of course. Sacrificing less important for more important is how the world works. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6663 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 119 of 132 28 November 2012 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Most people can't really write by hand in the west anymore either. Cursive letters are often illegible to people under
30. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5963 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 120 of 132 28 November 2012 at 4:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
For those of us who interact with native speakers on a regular basis in daily life, being able to hand write is a must as well as being able to read handwriting. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people vigorously use white boards or had to read someones' handwritten note at a gathering about say putting your name on paper cups, read handwritten name tags, etc. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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