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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 73 of 81 09 September 2011 at 4:38am | IP Logged | |||||
@ cathrynm
Well the example of the microphone/maikefeng I just gave you shows that's not the case.
Obviously enough, the compounds of characters came after the characters but that doesn't in any way mean that the words they represent only came after that. Yes there was apparently a point in time in which there was some sort of paradigm shift and the amount of compounds increased but that didn't happen in prehistoric times or anything like that. According to bathrobe's: "Sentences effectively consist of unbroken strings of single-syllable characters, each having their own particular meanings. For this reason, Chinese is popularly regarded as a 'monosyllabic language' -- a language composed exclusively of single-syllable words.While this perception was largely true for the Classical language, in the modern language the situation is not so simple." So as recently as the time when Classical Chinese was used (until the late 19th century) monosyllabic words dominated. Obviously the words for floor, understand, rose or spider already existed back then and probably were, at least in their written form, monosyllabic. So if there really was a time (no matter how long that "time" may have been)when these words went from monosyllabic to polysyllabic what happened? Words like rose and spider suggest they didn't try to make them a compound of meaningful characters because the characters they're spelled with don't have individual meanings. So what did they do? Did they coin new but meaningless characters just so they could write those words the way they were pronounced at the time? Maybe assigned a new reading to preexisting characters? And what about floor and understand? They are now based on meaning. Floor, for instance, is ground + board. What was it like before floor was written like this? I'm guessing it would be a huge coincidence if the previous word for floor was pronounced like the combination of the sounds of the characters for ground and board. So, once again, what happened? Did the word floor start to be pronounced in a (conceivably very) different way all of a sudden? Or were these characters assigned new readings? Edited by MarcoLeal on 09 September 2011 at 4:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6125 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 74 of 81 09 September 2011 at 5:49am | IP Logged | |||||
I see, well I study Japanese not Chinese. I suppose then it's that Chinese has less of a tendency to absorb phonetic words than Japanese does. Japanese also has these kinds of Chinese character compounds, but they're not a large part of the vocabulary. A lot are these Buddhist Sanskrit terms -- very difficult words. Awkward to write by hand because if the characters are completely random it's hard to recall which to use. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5094 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 75 of 81 09 September 2011 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know the answer to your question as it relates to Chinese, but yes, that's pretty much exactly what Japanese did. They already had a very different spoken native language when they adopted Chinese characters. So they solved this problem by assigning new pronunciations to the characters to fit with their native words-- and that is why we now we have multiple pronunciations for any given kanji in Japanese (kun'yomi and on'yomi readings)....Kun'yomi are the native Japanese pronunciations, and on'yomi are the Sino-Japanese pronunciations that came from the original Chinese pronunciations. For new words, Japanese can choose characters based off of meaning, to create new compounds （like 電話 for telephone), or they can choose characters based on the pronunciation. When characters are taken based on the phonetic pronunciation rather than the character meaning, this is called "ateji" which literally means "assigned characters". For example: 寿司, which means sushi. Names and loan words can be written this way. Though, I think it's far more common these days to just write new loan words with the katakana script. I don't know how loan words are handled in modern Chinese. I have been told that for foreign names, for example, they choose characters based on the pronunciation to try and match the original pronunciation (as close as possible). There may be other ways of doing it, though. Maybe someone else can chime in, as I'm also curious. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4834 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 76 of 81 12 September 2011 at 4:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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@starrye
Thanks for the info. I remember reading about how kanji were so prone to have different readings but I think I also read that this wasn't so much the case with Chinese so I'm looking forward to having this question answered by someone that studies Mandarin. Still concerning japanese, though, I wonder, if they create new readings to adjust meaning and pronunciation then I guess we can conclude that some characters that are frequently used to generate this sort of compounds must have a very large number of readings. Is this true? Can you give us an estimate of the average number of readings associated with a character? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5094 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 77 of 81 13 September 2011 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You're right, this isn't so much the case with Chinese. Though it's interesting because I've also heard that Korean did not have this issue of multiple pronunciations with hanja, and that hanja stayed closer to the original Chinese. Japan modified the characters a lot more.
Well, fortunately for Japanese students, some pronunciations are a lot more common than others, and some are rare. So I don't think it's necessary to try and rote memorize every possible reading combination for each individual character. Personally, I find it more efficient to just learn new kanji pronunciations as they come up in new vocabulary. This way, you gradually start to see which readings are most common, and you become familiar with the usage. Trying to memorize a list of kanji readings out of context can be plenty frustrating, but some people do it this way... I'm not sure of an overall estimate. On average, most kanji have at least 2 readings. At a minimum, I would say it's necessary to know at least 2 pronunciations for each character: 1 kun'yomi reading, and 1 on'yomi reading. But by knowing at least 1 reading, you have enough to be able to type the character and look it up in a dictionary. Other readings can be learned gradually as they come up. For other kanji, there could be 4 or 5 common pronunciations, or more. Characters like 生, 中, 下 and 上, for example, have several readings. 生 has at least 9 off the top of my head. Still these are pretty common characters so you will see them often enough. Where things really start to become tricky, though, is with people's names.... as cathrynm pointed out. So to answer your question, yes that's true, some characters have changed and have accumulated a large number of pronunciations throughout the years. But again, not all possible readings are frequently used anymore, some are archaic and obscure, so it depends. Just like some English spellings have become old fashioned, there are some characters and readings that aren't used anymore, or only used in literature, names, etc. Likewise, there are some characters which are not used as standalone words any longer, but still exist in compounds. It might appear to an observer that such characters don't have any meaning on their own, but at one point in history they did. The opposite is also true, that some words have accumulated multiple characters, to clarify the precise meaning and connotation of a word in writing: 分かる versus 解る 聞く versus 聴く 見る versus 観る and many others. In fact, this is is something that can't really be done with an alphabet I don't think. With an English word that might have multiple different connotations depending on the context, there really isn't any way to emphasize which one you mean. The reader just has to know or infer it. I suppose we can use things like italics or make longer sentences to describe what we mean exactly. But it's more precise and simpler with kanji. Edited by starrye on 13 September 2011 at 6:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| w1n73rmu7e Newbie United States Joined 5940 days ago 31 posts - 46 votes | Message 78 of 81 15 September 2011 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 79 of 81 18 September 2011 at 5:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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MarcoLeal,
I just wanted to comment on the original topic: It has been mentioned in this thread before that in our western languages there are also a lot of technical words that we just don't recognize, not to mention that we don't know how to spell them sometimes (in English at least), so it's not like knowing 25-35 letters of an alphabet will do the trick. Another thing is - as mentioned before - that memorizing characters and having to learn how to hand write them has a very positive effect on the brain of little kids and they just grow up smarter as does the population as a whole (my humble personal opinion). I find it mind blowing that a trash man in Taiwan (not to degrade the value of a trash man, just giving a comparative example) can hand write a letter to his boss or read the newspaper in Chinese characters at any time. When it comes to reading logographic scripts (alphabets) I think most people read by recognizing word shapes or entire clusters based on their images rather then reading every single letter in every single word, which is the same thing that is happening while reading Mandarin, so reading is done in pretty much the same way with both scripts. Typing characters is done just as fast if not faster than typing words using alphabets. Handwriting characters is also often faster than writing western words. (Count the number of strokes in 'Chinese characters' Vs. '漢子' - only an example of course), plus ask any Chinese person to hand-write something in Chinese and there really will not be any difference in speed when compared to us while writing in our western languages. Apart from the afore mentioned cultural and linguistic aspects, characters have a lot of other advantages. When it comes to information efficiency, characters are very very efficient because they can pack a lot more information into the same space when compared to western languages. Look at the Xinhua news agency's website for instance http://www.xinhuanet.com/ Compare that amount of information to BBC for instance (not a very representative example though). The main 'efficiency' problem that arises with characters thus is (or as I understand it after reading this thread) the time necessary to learn them, but then again the question is, the time necessary for who? For us westerners yes, it takes a lot of time. But if you already speak the language, learning how to read the characters and then learning how to write them is not a very tiring thing to do. You can argue that it takes Chinese kids 10 years to do so, but I don't think that this is a very good comparative example. I would for instance be interested in knowing, how fast an adult American born Chinese fluent in Mandarin but illiterate would learn how to read and write. Maybe he could do it under one month, which really is not that much if you look at the benefits that you get. Edited by Vlad on 18 September 2011 at 5:19am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 5093 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 80 of 81 18 September 2011 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
An Adult literate Chinese could easily learn to read alphabetic script in a matter of days not a month. Check out Hangul and Cyrrilic. If motivated this is not a problem. Our Vietnamese script is in some ways overly complicated but it suites our language, mainly because we are used to it. It's like reading a phonetic dictionary; however, if you remove the diacritics and take the words in context in a newspaper article for axample they are equally understandable. Where it becomes confusing in an isolating language is in very short burst of 1 or 2 words advertising for example. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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