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Do alphabets need to be so complicated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 65 of 115 18 October 2010 at 11:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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Some time ago on this forum, this subject came up. I speculated that the Chinese writing system helped keep down Chinese literacy rates, compared to an alphabetical system. A Chinese assured me this was not so, but it seemed to me at least a little counter-intuitive to say that. Chinese characters may require up to 33 strokes to write, there are thousands of them and many look quite similar to each other.People can have literacy problems even with alphabets of 20-35 letters, but having to learn thousands of characters simply magnifies problems, I would have thought.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 66 of 115 18 October 2010 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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One Chinese character does not correspond with one alphabetic letter.
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| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 68 of 115 18 October 2010 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
That is very true. Literate people can have very imprecise spelling too (and bad handwriting). Penmanship used to be an art that people were trained in but that is not the case today. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5174 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 69 of 115 18 October 2010 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
It has just occurred to me that knowing Chinese characters might be similar to having a good sense of art, I mean some people can imagine pictures with no difficulty and others of us struggle. If you allow me the point of Chinese characters being very artistic (sometimes modern art!) representations of things, perhaps it develops an artistic sense in native Chinese speakers so that they find it easier to remember such abstract, symbolic representations of things. There again, in the modern world we have many standard and non-standard ways of "graphing" a word without using an alphabet. The most cursory look around any town will convince anyone of this. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 70 of 115 19 October 2010 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
I never said it did. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dragonsheep Groupie United States Joined 5271 days ago 46 posts - 63 votes Studies: Tagalog, English* Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 71 of 115 21 October 2010 at 4:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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Learning characters also requires a certain degree of effort.
Characters limit literacy to only the percent of the population that is disicinplined and academic enough to become literate. It sorta helps with "natural selection" in a societal sense. The less disciplied are weeded out and forced into shape to become literate, which is essential to survival in a modern world. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 72 of 115 21 October 2010 at 4:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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There is no sense in making a basic task harder than it has to be on purpose just to exclude people (unless you want to create a tractable peasant class on purpose). There are plenty of other subjects you can hone your thinking skills and discipline in that are naturally and uniformly hard across all the languages.
I don't believe that the Chinese government wants to make literacy a struggle in this day and age. Edited by fireflies on 21 October 2010 at 4:32am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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