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Ruling on Chinese Characters | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5341 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 33 of 44 22 October 2010 at 7:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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thought about sharing this with you all, since we are discussing about culture and literacy rate in China. This event happened during the Qin Dynasty between 213 and 206 BC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_of _scholars 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6851 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 34 of 44 22 October 2010 at 8:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'd certainly reinstate the traditional characters. Simplified characters can go back to their historically correct status as shorthand variants. I'd keep Putonghua as the lingua franca but I'd promote the use of dialects, including the creation of dialectal characters when necessary so that they can be written. I'd actually be tempted to reinstate Classical Chinese as the standard written language (except when recording speech, of course), but I might risk a serious rebellion if I did that.
Ari has an excellent point about the written language differing from the spoken language. Many people view writing as simply a way of recording speech, and this is a view that goes back at least 2500 years in the West. That is not so in Chinese, and especially in Classical Chinese. But even in modern Chinese, the more formal the writing, the more it resembles the classical language. You simply can't do away with the characters without substantially altering the language itself. Romanized Chinese would be gibberish in many cases. The notion of forcing people to adopt a foreign writing system for no better reason than that you think it would be better for them is very imperialistic and would be a terrible blow to their culture. You wouldn't like being forced to use Chinese characters to write English, would you? Not to mention, arguments that one system, usually the Latin alphabet, is inherently better than another just reek of ethnocentrism at best, and xenophobia at worst. China has a low literacy rate because it has a high poverty rate and low level of compulsory education. They're coming along, and I'm sure they'll get there–Hong Kong and Taiwan have–but as was mentioned earlier, it's going to take time. You can't teach 1.3 billion people to read overnight. If the taxi driver mentioned above went to school only as long as he was required, in a poor rural area, and did the minimum to get by, and has spent the rest of his life driving a cab and not caring about reading, then it is no surprise that he couldn't read the directions. But don't blame the writing system. The problem is that his education was lacking. I'm sure he can read a few basic characters. The ones for 'male,' 'female,' and 'bathroom' come to mind, which even my wife who speaks not the first word of Chinese can recognize. Or perhaps his fare's handwriting was just really sloppy. :D Anyway, rant over. Chinese should be written using Chinese characters. End of story. 4 persons have 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 35 of 44 22 October 2010 at 8:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I have certainly not "totally learned" Mandarin. I might go back and learn to write once I'm satisfied with my reading ability, but learning to write now would be wasting a lot of time I could spend on reading practice and vocab cramming. Most people who learn languages don't go all the way to native fluency and if you're going to cut out some parts, it seems reasonable to cut out the parts that you're not going to use.
You can't go very far without learning stroke order, but you don't have to memorize the actual strokes. Without stroke order you can't write a character even if you know what it looks like. But yeah, lots of foreigners in China can't write with a pen. I can't and I don't feel like it's hindered me to a significant extent, and I'm actually living in China at the moment.
It's not only possible, it's pretty much the whole purpose of the writing system. Lots of people in Hong Kong can read and write Mandarin effortlessly but can't speak it. They use Cantonese pronunciation for the characters, though. The reason Chinese characters didn't evolve into phonographs was because everyone pronounced the characters differently. As to not pronouncing them at all, I seem to recall a thread here a long time ago about a dude who learned to read Taiwanese newspapers in three months, without actually being able to pronounce anything. Not sure how authentic that was. Edited by Ari on 22 October 2010 at 10:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6051 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 36 of 44 22 October 2010 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I support doing away with the Roman alphabet in America and creating a new set of 20,000 characters. Who's with me? Edited by irrationale on 22 October 2010 at 1:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 38 of 44 22 October 2010 at 3:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
When I said I thought the characters were hard it didn't mean I didn't like how they looked. I worked on writing 100 simplified ones a few months ago but I had some questions that made me put the project on hold. The biggest one (which you just answered) was: Can you learn to read this and know the corresponding pin yin without saying it accurately with tones first? The other one was: Will this produce enough results for me to make it worthwhile or should I put my effort into things I know I can do well at in a shorter time? I would think it was neat to be able to read a simple paragraph of Chinese and that seems like a reasonable goal. I have stuck with studying 1 language for some time now (I put a lot of effort into getting the pronunciation) but I might add learning to read and write characters too. I didn't want to study all the latin languages at the same time because I was afraid I'd get them mixed up (and I'd rather focus on one at a time anyway). That being said, you can learn a lot about a latin language just by listening to it. That just doesn't happen to such a degree with a very distant language which makes me hesitant to seriously try one.. Edited by fireflies on 22 October 2010 at 4:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 39 of 44 22 October 2010 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It appears that voting for the poll was disabled when the thread was moved. Can any
administrator fix that? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5449 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 40 of 44 24 October 2010 at 4:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
If we can somehow revive the spoken Chinese as spoken 2,000 years ago, we might be able to use classical Chinese as if it were the vernacular as well. I've heard that most words of the spoken Chinese of that time were monosyllabic, then the Chinese languages started to phonologically simplify and became so darn homophonic and started using multisyllabic words. I just wish something could be done about the words that can be expressed with a single character in classical Chinese but are now said in the vernaculars with compound words. Anyways, I agree that classical Chinese is pretty cool. Edited by chucknorrisman on 24 October 2010 at 4:58am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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