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Common perception of Chinese characters | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 9 of 12 20 May 2011 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Interesting. For me it's the other way around. I've spent more time reading characters than Pinyin by a factor of at least a hundred (I read books in characters, but I've never seen a book in Pinyin), but I still find that when I get to an example sentence in a dictionary, I'm immediately drawn towards the Pinyin and I read it at least twice as fast as I read the characters. A couple more years of reading characters should probably rectify that, but the Latin alphabet is obviously deeply ingrained in me in a way characters will take a long time to approximate. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5206 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 10 of 12 21 May 2011 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Ari, I think it might have something to do with the wide variation of word length that you get when you romanize Japanese. From what I've seen of Pinyin, it seems like each character is represented by 2-4 letters. But in Japanese, 塊 turns into an eight letter word, and 絵 is just one letter. On average it trends toward longer words than you see in Pinyin, especially with long verb endings added on.
I think it messes up the visual "look" of the language in a way that makes it uncomfortable (for me) to read, especially since people can't really seem to agree on proper spacing. Another thing that makes it annoying is that with some romanized words you can think of twenty different kanji combinations that share that spelling, and inevitably some share similar meanings so context can't always narrow it down completely. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6948 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 11 of 12 21 May 2011 at 6:08am | IP Logged | ||
That's true, and I think that the way we learn characters also has something to do with it. Chinese learners generally learn through pinyin, so when they encounter a character for the first time and are trying to memorize it, they make a mental connection with the pinyin, and when they don't understand a character or text, pinyin is what they fall back on. In contrast, Japanese learners discard romanization very early on in the process, and we use hiragana as our learning aid and our crutch. So it's understandably very hard for us to mentally equate romanization with characters. I think a fairer comparison would be pinyin and hiragana; I can visualize the characters when reading hiragana much more easily, and depending on the complexity of the character or text, my eyes are often drawn to the hiragana in the same way Ari's are to the pinyin transcription. Edited by Lucky Charms on 21 May 2011 at 6:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 12 of 12 21 May 2011 at 10:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I started Mandarin with something between 800 and 1100 kanji under my belt and I can't read pinyin. It doesn't connect to the way the word is supposed to sound in my brain. Put the language on hold, and two years later I still can read most of the words I used to be able to read. That is, my brain recognizes it's Mandarin Chinese and my inner narrator switches to "Ella Chen". It's quite funny actually.
Oh, and when I see a text with a line of Japanese text and then romanization my gaze gets drawn to the romanization, even though it takes me much longer to understand that and I understand less words than I understand in kanji. It's just that I read so much with Latin letters that my brain believes they should be easier to understand. Ah, just realized that I didn't say anything about the main topic, which, sadly I do not have anything to say about. As my first encounter with a proficient Chinese speaker was when I was barely eight, I do not remember having any conscious knowledge of the language without believing that it could be learnt; I just assumed that if you would dedicate yourself to the language, all of it would start to make sense to you sooner or later. (That's still the way I treat anything new and strange.) Edited by Bao on 21 May 2011 at 12:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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