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The efficiency of Chinese characters | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4834 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 81 of 81 18 September 2011 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Yes there's a lot of technical words that most people don't have to deal with in their daily lives. But that is the same in Chinese. All languages have that "problem". Sure, you could say, well but if they know the meaning they can try to guess how to write it with characters. However, as many examples given in this topic prove, it doesn't really work that way. Sure you could conceivably understand that telephone is electricity + talk after you know that that is the case but could you have figured out before that? Only with luck. Imagine you hear the word telephone for the first time and wanted to guess how it's written. Why wouldn't you write it "far"+"talk"? or "far"+"sound" or something else? And this is when you know the meaning!! What about when you hear some technical word whose meaning you simply don't know? When you're using a language that is written with an alphabet, though, you can figure out how it's written. You can, in the worse case scenario, narrow it down to very few possible spellings all of which you can try to find in your dictionary (which by the way is much more easy to use than a dictionary based on characters as I'm sure you know). Also, take the example of English. Technical words aren't constructed at random most of the time so they also provide clues based on meaning. They draw a lot of influence from latin and greek so you quickly learn that things like "bio" are associated with life and "hydro" is associated with water. I didn't have to use a dictionary to figure how the meaning or the spelling of words like "hydrodynamics" the first time I heard them. While I agree that just knowing the 25-35 symbols might not be the whole story when the language you're writing has very irregular spelling, it certainly is much more close to doing the trick than characters.
I understand that that is just your opinion but because of that I hope you'll understand that I need a little more evidence to believe something like that. Also, as I've said before, let's imagine for a minute that it did help foster their intellect. Surely there are many other equally as beneficial ways of doing this without forcing children to learn a writing system that their language could, otherwise, do without. Teach them maths, teach them music, teach them science, teach them a new sport, teach them how to play chess and/or other puzzles/games.
Vlad I don't question that you know one or even such a few cases but the link posted by KimG (message 66) suggests that's not true for the population at large and that in fact literacy is compromised because of the fact that there are so many and so complex characters and shapes. People simply forget them. I doubt people forget an alphabet. They may not know how to spell correctly (just like a Chinese who hasn't forgotten any character may) but they don't forget the symbols and know what sounds they represent. If they try to write something they'll most likely write something that at least sounds like the word they are trying to say. How can a Chinese speaker write telephone if he's forgotten the character for electricity?
That is an unfair example and you know it. You're comparing a word written in English with a word written in Chinese. Chinese has notoriously smaller words. The fair comparison would be pinyin vs. Chinese characters which is Mandarin in both cases. Aren't the Chinese characters called hanzi in Mandarin? Well...seems to me hanzi requires a lot less strokes than those two characters.
Let's take this line of reasoning a bit further. What if now a symbol in my writing system encodes entire sentences. Information is now even more packed so according to you it would be a good thing. Yet that would imply learning perhaps millions of characters. I know this is a contrived example but I used it only to show you that how much information is packed in a symbol loses importance when it comes to overall efficiency when that tradeoff implies the number of characters in your system jumps by orders of magnitude which is exactly the case.
I absolutely agree that what matters the most is the time it takes for people who already speak the language (and not foreigners) to learn the characters because they are, after all, the majority of people learning them. And it is for this very reason that I don't understand why you dismiss the time it takes Chinese children to learn them. Yes, ideally one would compare the performance of adults, with fully developed mental capabilities, but that's simply not the typical learner of characters. Kids are. And the fact that it takes them 10 years matters and matters a lot.
Well I never tried memorizing the characters but to say that 3000 characters with their intricate designs can be learned in just a month is, for me, very very hard to believe. In fact, most stories I know are nothing like that. Also let's say that was possible. Still, like you said it yourself, Mandarin simply uses a different written standard that must be learned as well in order to read and write. How much longer would that take? Sorry but I simply can't believe you could that in just a month or even two. Also, for the reasons I presented in this and other posts, I don't think it's true that there's any payoff to learning the characters. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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