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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5525 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 49 of 132 22 October 2009 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think he confuses modern written Chinese with the modern form of classical Chinese, which was still in use as THE written language until recently. The issue we are discussing in this thread has nothing at all to do with reconstructing old pronunciations. Modern written vernacular is similar to spoken Chinese. Naturally, the more scholarly the medium, the more different the text will be from the spoken language, but mainly in VOCABULARY, just like in any other language. When a Chinese person reads his newspaper, he hears the sounds represented in pinyin, at least if he's native form is Mandarin.
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| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5757 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 50 of 132 24 October 2009 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As a learner of Chinese and learner of Vietnamese's old Chinese style script called Chu Nom, I can say that although you need about 3 to 4000 characters to be literate, Chinese characters are perfectly suited to Chinese and remarkably suited to Vietnamese (albeit not 100%).
Although to many, learning characters is painstaking...as for the many Chinese languages it is a good tool for communication which can bridge dialects and languages. Don't forget that it is the culmination of thousands of years of Chinese history and culture and the Chinese are a proud peoples. Lastly, there is the issue of homophones. Although Vietnamese has a lot of homophones, it is nothing compared to Mandarin. Trying to communicate in Mandarin using pinyin is futile, especially when it comes to more advanced subjects. In summary: 1. Although it is painstaking to learn so many characters, they are a good tool for bridging across many Chinese languages/dialects. 2. It has a huge cultural significance to the Chinese. 3. It helps greatly with the issue of homophony. Edited by Qinshi on 24 October 2009 at 9:57am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| knadolny Diglot Newbie United States capturingchinese.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5518 days ago 11 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese | Message 51 of 132 27 October 2009 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think this topic was argued vehemently in pre-revolutionary China. Illiteracy was a big problem back then and they were looking for a way to teach not yet a billion people how to read. Some scholars were fans of Esperanto and others pushed for the simplification of the characters. I believe Taiwan has almost 100% literacy so learning the Characters can be done.
Now it might be inefficient to learn, but once you learn the characters they are unbelievably concise. You can write a four character sentence instead of a paragraph of English. Not to mention the good points made above. On my first trip to Japan, I was so excited I could read just about everything here and sad when I went to Korea where I could read nothing. The characters have an amazing power to unite the Chinese culture. It's one reason why China could stay unified for so much longer than the Roman empire. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Saraneth Newbie United States Joined 5523 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese | Message 52 of 132 27 October 2009 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
English-speakers can disambiguate homophones in a conversation based on context, which is also how people understand spoken Chinese. Even in English, if you throw out a word /'raɪt/ in conversation without a sentence to go along with it, people aren't going to be sure what you're talking about. If all those versions of write/rite/right/wright are spelled the exact same way, and you have a dozen more words spelled the exact same way but with different meanings, you're going to run into some problems with the efficiency of written communication using an alphabet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ChristopherB Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 6320 days ago 851 posts - 1074 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, German, French | Message 53 of 132 27 October 2009 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Obviously the effort required to learn at least 3000 characters is a huge burden. But once you know them, they actually make reading easier, so I would have to say yes and no: yes for acquisition, but no for actually reading and using them once you have them.
The main reason why I say no, is that unlike in English for example, if you run into a word you've never seen before, you very often only have the context to save you from using a dictionary. Whereas in Chinese, you have the additional benefit of knowing the individual meanings of the characters. I've heard legal and medical texts in Chinese are actually easy to read because of their straightforwardness and literal use of character meaning, probably not unlike Latin with regards to such texts in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| MinTeoh Newbie New Zealand learnchineseeveryday Joined 5510 days ago 5 posts - 4 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 54 of 132 28 October 2009 at 5:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Chinese characters have thousands years of history, while pinyin system has less than 50
years.
Edited by MinTeoh on 28 October 2009 at 5:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5525 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 55 of 132 28 October 2009 at 9:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think the real reason is homophony, no-one would be able to tell if your tattoo said "strength" or "dysentery" 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 56 of 132 28 October 2009 at 9:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, people get Chinese character tatoos because characters are awesome. How often do you see somebody with an English "Strength" tatoo? This admiration of a foreign writing system seems to be pretty much limited to Chinese; don't see many tatoos (or t-shirts even) featuring Arabic or Thai just for the heck of it. However, in China I saw one t-shirt with loads of English consonants arranged into strings of words... Edited by Sprachprofi on 28 October 2009 at 9:59am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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