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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4635 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 105 of 132 18 November 2012 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Many people of various languages are illiterate and thus don't read or write, but communicate without problem by
speaking their language correctly, but concerning writing, pinyin seems kind of useless to me and I don't rely on it for much in my learning although they are necessary for a beginner like me. I try to learn as quickly as possible to read the characters alone to be done with pinyin as it's imprecise as to meaning. The characters on the other hand seem very precise and efficient to me and the fact that they are complex images help me to remember their meaning, as opposed to alphabetical images which are simple and don't always convey meaning easily. In polish, for instance, I always get mixed up because of all the similar looking words with similar meanings. Although I'm only a beginner, I don't find that same problem in chinese (it might come later of course). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 106 of 132 19 November 2012 at 8:28am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Well, you could write that, but it'd be incorrect Mandarin. 蝴 is not a word. You wrote "One of the most unique aspects of Chinese is that each syllable of every single word, has a meaning of itself. Without characters, this is lost completely." My point is that this is a product of the writing system. The 蝴 of 蝴蝶 doesn't mean anything, because it's just a single syllable of a multi-syllable word. It only gains a pseudo-meaning because the writing system forces it to. To argue that a system is efficient because it's good at preserving anomalies it has itself created seems like a strange argument.
Assuming you're talking about homophones, I'm not at all convinced that Mandarin has more homophones than English, and if it does, the difference isn't that large. A homophone is a word that sounds just like another word. English has quite a few homophones. People who talk about homophones in Mandarin usually talk about characters that sound like other characters, forgetting (as usual) that most characters aren't words. For a fair comparison, you'd have to include in a list of English homophones syllables like the "psy" in "psychology" and the "si" in "siamese twins". Such a list would be huge, just like one in Mandarin would be.
Irrelevant. I have stated several times that I'm not advocating the abolishment of sinographs. I'm just trying to show you that it's not by any stretch of the imagination an efficient writing system.
The literacy rate in Taiwan is an anecdotal example and hardly proof of anything. The fact that focused schooling can make people literate isn't a surprise. I never claimed it was impossible to learn to read Chinese. Also note that the level of competence required to count as "literate" in at least Mainland China (don't know about Taiwan) is significantly lower that what is demanded of English speakers in the US. A Chinese child needs to be able to write 950 characters (as usual, nobody cares about words, just characters) to be considered literate, which isn't enough to write anything but the most basic of common words and phrases. I'd love to hear what the cutoff point is in Taiwan. Let's compare for example the number of Chinese born abroad who speak Mandarin fluently but can't read or write it with the corresponding number for just about any other language. Or foreigners living in China who can speak but not read and write. Or look at Chinese who live for a long time abroad and how quickly they lose their writing ability. Or even native college-educated people who can't spell "sneeze". Let's examine the fact that this shopkeeper feels the need to phonetically annotate a character that's about as frequent as the English words "fudge" and "snail". Let's look at little things like this shopping list, written by a Chinese social science researcher (certainly considered "literate"), where three of the thirteen characters are rendered in pinyin. These are all signs that the writing system is difficult and cumbersome.
The spoken language wouldn't be affected one bit. People don't speak in characters. The written language would be brought somewhat closer in line with the spoken language, which was the very point of the baihua movement which made Mandarin a written language a hundred years ago. the slogan was "我手寫我口", "my hand writes my mouth". One wanted to move away from Literary Sinitic and write in the vernacular language Mandarin. Instead one has landed in a semi-vernacular semi-literary style which corresponds neither to the spoken language nor to the classical written one. To claim that the language would be "drastically changed" is hyperbole. Several books and academic papers have been and are being published in pinyin and nobody involved seems to feel the language has been "drastically changed". The way it's written down has been changed, but the language itself less so. That's not really relevant, though, as you're once again arguing against the abolishment of the character system, which is not something I'm suggesting. Once again you're arguing that the writing system is efficient because it preserves an anomaly (the halfway-classical writing style) it has itself created.
My mistake; I apologize. Edited by Ari on 19 November 2012 at 10:40am 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4338 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 107 of 132 19 November 2012 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yes hahaha :) thanks 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4338 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 108 of 132 19 November 2012 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Well, to me, any change in spoken Mandarin as a result of the loss of characters IS a drastic change. And of course, with just a handful of publications being published in pinyin (which is atrocious and should be banned), the language won't be affected. What about on a large scale though?
The average Taiwanese person knows at least 4000 characters. This is also the same with mainlanders. In Taiwan, after graduating from Highschool, you know at least 4000. People who go to university know more of course. Edited by ZombieKing on 19 November 2012 at 3:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4338 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 109 of 132 19 November 2012 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Until now I've decided to abstain from touching on the subject of actual difficulty in learning Chinese characters... But I guess it's worth talking about.
Chinese characters are easy. 90% of all characters are phonetic for crying out loud. Chinese does not use an "ideographic" (a very misleading term that shouldn't be used) script. Only a small amount of characters are actually pictographic for example. Sure, with all the sound changes that Mandarin (for example) has gone through, many phonetic elements of characters no longer properly function as phonetic elements; however, the Mainland Chinese government has largely remedied that by simplifying about 1700 characters. Many characters that were no longer phonetic, became phonetic, and virtually all characters that were phonetic to begin with, remained phonetic. Chinese characters are only hard to learn for foreigners that don't speak Chinese. If you speak Chinese, the characters are logical and easy (for the most part). And don't bring up anything about illiterate people, as literacy has more to do with quality of education than quality of the writing system, as shown in my example of Taiwan. So with that said, how are characters inefficient? They work, they're easy to learn, and they're logical. Except maybe to people who don't speak Chinese. But honestly, non Chinese, non native speakers of Chinese don't deserve to have any say in the fate of characters. Edited by ZombieKing on 19 November 2012 at 3:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 110 of 132 20 November 2012 at 8:53am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oh, don't worry, I'm sure it's banned in China. They're great at banning stuff.
Source? Also. "know" is a pretty fluid concept. I doubt they can write 4000 characters by hand. And I'm pretty sure 4000 is insufficient to be an effective reader, too.
Easy compared to what? Compared to a phonetic script? You can't be serious.
Very true. I've heard the percentage 80%, but yeah, mostly phonetic(-signific compounds).
The simplification process has far from "largely remedied" the problem. It's true that a few characters have been changed so they better represent Mandarin pronunciations (making them useless for other sinitic languages like Cantonese in the process, by the way), but it's a drop in the ocean. Compared to Mandarin "phonetic" characters, English orthography is a wonder of regularity.
Again, compared to what? If you're seriously claiming Chinese characters are easier to learn (for a native speaker) than pinyin is, I honestly don't know what to respond.
Alright, I'm going to put out some things I hope we can both agree on. Let's see how far we get. * Native, highly educated speakers of Mandarin who have been reading and writing it all their life often have trouble writing even common characters. Searching for 提筆忘字 on Google gives me over half a million hits. Quoting Victor Mair (here):
And because I'm such a fan of Victor Mair, I'll throw in another quote (from Nontrivial Script Fail):
(Note the "native and nonnative" part.) * A phonetic system is fully capable of writing Mandarin. This is also incontestable to me. There are many examples. The publication of books in pinyin, for example. Or the significant amount of literature in romanized Taiwanese. Or hell, look at Dungan. It's a dialect of or language closely related to Mandarin (decent but not complete mutual intelligibility) which has been written in cyrillic since the fifties (and in Latin letters for a quarter of a century before that). They don't even indicate tone and still have no homophone problem, since context gives enough information, and in the few places where you might have confusion, they usually just use a different synonym (like writing "maidiao" for "sell" so it won't be confused with "buy"). And yes, they write plenty of formal texts, literature and poetry. * The Chinese script has some severe limitations. Check out this article by David Moser, entitled "Some Things Chinese Characters Can’t Do-Be-Do-Be-Do". He demonstrates several limitations in the writing system which is not present in pinyin. Really, read it; it's super interesting. The above points I trust are more or less objectively true. I would add that even the things that Chinese characters do that alphabetic systems don't it does rather badly. Chinese is filled with characters with multiple pronunciations, for example. And you have lots of characters with wildly diverging meanings that have nothing to do with each other. 長 can mean "long", but also "to grow" (probably etymologically related) and "skilled" (probably a phonetic loan). 花 can mean "flower" and "to spend (money)". 道 can mean "road, way" and whatever it means in words like 公道 and 知道 (I assure you it has nothing to do with roads). And of course most Mandarin grammatical particles are just characters that mean something completely unrelated, used because they sound vaguely similar to the characterless particles. This is aggravated by the simplification, which has given us beautiful pairings like "send out/hair", "queen/back" and "face/noodles".
As far as I know, most people who have been calling for script reform have been Chinese. Lu Xun, called by many "the most important Chinese writer of the 20th century" famously said 漢字不滅，中國必亡 ("Unless Chinese characters disappear, China will perish"). Mao Zedong planned to replace the characters with pinyin, and he was Chinese, too. I'm not Chinese, of course, and I also don't advocate the abolishment of the characters. I'm making a statement about its efficiency, or lack thereof. Edited by Ari on 20 November 2012 at 8:58am 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 111 of 132 20 November 2012 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For those who want a source on forgetting to write characters, here's an article about it: Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan. Some select quotes:
(Emphasis mine. "Easy to learn", was it?)
These quotes do not describe an "efficient" writing system. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4867 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 112 of 132 20 November 2012 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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How do Chinese read?
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