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Do alphabets need to be so complicated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 115 14 October 2010 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thee where actually a few places in Medieval Europe where literacy was fairly common among ordinary folks - and it may come as a surprise that Novgorod in RUssia was one of those places. The archeologists have found a lot of scribbled runic notes on bark. But Novgorod also was special among Russian cities by having some kind of democracy, modelled af the 'thing' of the Nordic countries.
Apart from that: one of the worst things that can happen to a language is that linguists and teachers with a prediliction for historial linguistics and etymology are allowed to dictate spelling that are at odds with the spoken language (although that may be done to avoid giving one single dialect the role of primus inter pares). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 115 15 October 2010 at 12:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I always wondered if Chinese speakers work harder to be able to read and write their language than those who speak languages with alphabets. I have sometimes wondered if other countries would have much lower literacy rates than China if they also used Chinese.
Chinese is considered difficult to learn because of the writing system in part. I definitely see thousands of characters as a major obstacle to progress towards literacy in that language (in other words more foreigners would speak and write it if it was written in an alphabet). I guess alphabet languages also link their scripts to form daunting numbers of words but its still easier because you have less to remember when writing and they represent the sounds that form the words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 11 of 115 15 October 2010 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Okay, first of all, I recall reading several articles concluding that the character-based writing system is not a significant contributor to illiteracy, but it was too long ago to look them up now.
While I agree that the Chinese writing system is more difficult than alphabet-based systems, I think the difference is exaggerated. When a foreigner learns English, she has to learn the spelling of every word. The spelling is indicated but not completely predicted by the sound. The same is true to some extent of Chinese characters. Once you are used to the system, learning a new character is almost as effortless as learning the spelling of a new word in English. There is a difference in difficulty, but it's not as great as it looks from outside. Second, the reason Chinese characters never evolved into phonographs: China is a huge country. Within it, the languages spoken traditionally numbers up to something like 50. Up until a hundred or so years ago, people wrote in Classical Chinese, which differs from all of these dialects and mostly uses words consisting of a single character. This could be read by anyone who had learned to read in any place in China, regardless of what language they spoke. A phonetic system could simply not do that. I forget exactly when, but comparatively recently, linguistically speaking, Classical Chinese was abolished in favor of "vernacular Chinese". Of course, this meant choosing one of the many languages to use to communicate in (Mandarin). Because of this, almost all written Chinese today is Mandarin, though native speakers of other languages often read them with their own pronunciation of the characters. In the last few decades, written Cantonese has been gaining ground in Hong Kong, and you can find it in magazines, comic books and on the Internet, though as of yet I've never seen an actual, regular book written in Cantonese. This is semi-legible to Mandarin speakers, as two thirds of the vocabulary is shared between the languages and the grammar is almost identical. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6043 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 12 of 115 15 October 2010 at 3:44pm | IP Logged | ||
Not true at all. You are being ridiculous. English spelling is much easier than Chinese writing.
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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 13 of 115 15 October 2010 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | ||
I admit that I'm mostly basing it on personal experience, but while I found the characters a hurdle in the beginning, learning new characters now is pretty effortless. Just like a learner of English will find the spelling completely nonsensical in the beginning (look at words like "enough" and "dough") but eventually gets used to it. I'm not claiming that the difficulty is the same, but I think the difference is smaller than most people who haven't studied Chinese think. In English, learning a new word can go like this: A: "'Eureka moment'? How do you spell that 'eureka'?" B: "E-U-R-E-K-A." A: "Ok, got it, thanks." In Chinese, it can be something like this: A: "'回憶'? How do you spell that?" B: "The '回' of '回來', plus the '意' from '意思' but with a heart radical." A: "Ok, got it, thanks." 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 14 of 115 15 October 2010 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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The very nature of the characters is so different from our alphabet where most letters are 1 or 2 strokes.
I can appreciate that after a point Chinese writing is combining characters you already know and writing them involves using stroke order rules. However its still in another league of difficulty. That character you used: 憶 is far more complicated to actually write out than any quirk of alphabet spelling. People who learn Chinese are often regarded with awe but no one is that wowed by people who learn English (and that makes sense!). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 15 of 115 15 October 2010 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, "憶" has 16 strokes when "typed" (that is, written carefully). The English translation "remember" has 8 letters. One letter equals two strokes? The character has four component parts out of an "alphabet" of maybe two hundred, arranged in a two-dimensional layout. The word has eight component parts out of an alphabet of 26, arranged in a linear layout.
Of course, there are more striking differences. The Chinese characters build on each other in a way that English words don't. The character 憶 is a heart radical added to the character 意, which has the same pronunciation. The character 意 is actually also a heart radical (at the bottom, it has a different name in Mandarin, but the same name in English) added to the character 音, which has a similar but not identical sound. The character 音, in turn, is composed of the two characters 立 and 日. So you can say that the character 憶 is spelled "心心立日" (or rather "心立日心", which would be the order you write them in). Again, I'm not saying it's easy, but whereas it looks almost impossible from the outside, it actually makes sense from the inside. Characters build on each other and you remember them, not as a huge collections of isolated symbols, but as Lego-like pieces forming larger structures, where every construction is a potential building block in a new construction. I find that most people talking about the incredibly difficult writing system of the Chinese languages are people who have not learned or have just started learning it. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 115 15 October 2010 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Remember is 8 strokes so its 1/2 the effort (1 stroke in cursive). Also 'remember' does not require the spatial precision (in 2 dimensions as you said) of that character. I'd say learning to arrange 200 component parts in 2 dimensionns is a lot harder than 26 in a line. But that is just my opinion. I am not saying Chinese is the hardest thing ever...merely that its harder. I have heard that many people born in the US only understand spoken Chinese and cannot write it. Also some very simple common words have characters with many strokes. 我 vs i... 7 strokes... 葡 vs grape 16 strokes 游 vs swim 16 strokes 爱情 love...12 + 13 = 25 strokes. 睡醒 to wake up 14+ 19= 33. You would have to be joking to say its not much harder than an alphabet. I am not sure why you would want to try and say its almost as easy when it is clearly more complex (because of the stroke #s at the least).I know its not impossible but you have to admit its more difficult than English spelling. Edited by fireflies on 15 October 2010 at 8:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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