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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6854 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 9 of 132 23 September 2009 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Really, how many threads must we have on this topic? It's been discussed to death. You cannot write Chinese with an alphabet without major changes to the language itself. End of story. Do a search if you want more explanation, because we just got done discussing this in another thread in this very same subforum.
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| Me has to learn Groupie Germany Joined 5561 days ago 64 posts - 75 votes Speaks: German* | Message 10 of 132 23 September 2009 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | ||
The English language has many words that sound the same but are spelled differently. Words like 'meat' and 'meet' and many other homonyms are not that different from characters except that they are based on Latin letters and you can mostly guess the pronunciation. Is it possible in Hangul to spell words differently in order to disambiguate them? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5612 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 11 of 132 23 September 2009 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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IMHO, I'm rather unclear about Latin, Koine Greek, or other ancient western languages, but I'm pretty sure traditional character system plays a crucial role in mastering classical Chinese, perhaps so does it in getting started from ancient Japanese or Korean. In my case, classical Chinese is certainly not a foreign language, instead, it's just a more complex system of Chinese language which generally people may get over the difficulties by looking up a classical dictionary, while Latin and Koine Greek are usually regarded as nearly foreign languages for Europeans and Americans in the class of elective course. Frankly, I don't think it's wise to rely fully on others to translate all kinds of famous classical books for you, if possible, I suppose you might as well read through the original texts personally, of course, that's not to say I haven't got any confidence in those scholars who wrote some famous books. And I've ever watched an interview programme about Vietnamese social life, it was a pity for that Vietnamese couple (on TV) to put up some characters that they don't understand at all on the wall at their wedding.
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| Me has to learn Groupie Germany Joined 5561 days ago 64 posts - 75 votes Speaks: German* | Message 12 of 132 23 September 2009 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't speak Greek but I'm curious if a native speaker can understand classical texts (partially). As for me I already have trouble understanding Middle High German. Though if you are aware of vowel and consonant shifts and know some vocabulary of those times you can get the gist. Old High German is definitely a foreign language for me. Edited by Me has to learn on 23 September 2009 at 2:41pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5612 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 13 of 132 23 September 2009 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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According to my observation, particularly based on his opinion on Chinese Latinization (anti-Latinization), I think Mr OneEye is one of the few who've caught the key points in learning Chinese (Mandarin). Congratulations!
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| Me has to learn Groupie Germany Joined 5561 days ago 64 posts - 75 votes Speaks: German* | Message 14 of 132 23 September 2009 at 2:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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As I think about the topic if it weren't for Chinese characters you would have problems to understand Classical Chinese. Since modern pronunciation doesn't apply a letter based system like Pinyin would make the language unintelligible. Please correct me if I've written nonsense.
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 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6898 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 132 23 September 2009 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||
I have to agree. It is natural that some of the same questions pop up once in a while, say once a year or thereabouts, but the same debate every second week ends up very tiring and is counterproductive. Here is a recent, almost currently ongoing, thread on the same subject. That's a better place to continue the discussion, benefitting from all the other input and views that have already been posted there. Edited by Hencke on 23 September 2009 at 8:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6706 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 16 of 132 23 September 2009 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, I don't know. This is actually a different discussion from the others, if you think about it. The others were about whether or not you could replace characters with pinyin, which, despite the protests of OneEye and others, is IMO feasible.
If you want to discuss efficiency, then Chinese characters are far more efficient than Roman letters, at least before the popularization of computers. They take up far less space on the page, and often imply the meaning of characters through use of radicals, making easier to interpret and remember meanings of characters than these illogical letters. Sure, characters may not help you with pronunciation, but if you think of writing as mnemonics that help you remember the language that you already know (as any native speaker already knows their language) then you start to understand why pronunciation is not the most important part of characters. Their use in other languages shows how portable these benefits are. They present meanings instead of sounds, and the meanings remind the reader of the sounds. English (and other languages that use alphabets) do it backward, presenting sounds that remind the reader of meanings. So inputting them into a computer may make them seem inefficient, but that's only a small fraction of the uses that Chinese characters have been put to over the years, uses that they were eminently suitable for. They did survive for thousands of years for a reason, after all. Edited by Raincrowlee on 23 September 2009 at 11:13pm 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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