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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6376 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 121 of 132 29 November 2012 at 7:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
But this ambiguity of meaning only exists because of the writing system! If the baihua movement had been successful people would actually be writing vernacular Mandarin and there would be no problems of ambiguity. In fact, I'm not sure there'd be much of a problem, if any, even if you continue writing in the exact same way as now. Any book that can be read aloud and understood by the listener doesn't have problems with "ambiguity". I get half a million ghits on "有聲書", meaning "audiobook". All these books could be written in a phonetic script and retain as much meaning as the audiobook versions. And of course we have the Dungans.
The "reduce ambiguity of meaning" or "homophone" arguments don't have any solid footing. It's just made up. There's no ambiguity problem unless one is intentionally trying to make one.
Well, I guess the people who advocate script reform usually support Pinyin as it's already widely used in China and understood by pretty much everyone who is literate. It's been shown to function as a replacement for Hanzi (many works have been written and published in it), whereas Zhuyin Fuhao is not adapted for running text. Pinyin has capitalization rules, word spacing and it's also easier to use to write sound combinations that don't exist in Mandarin, which is important when writing foreign names, for example.
I think this is the opinion of Victor Mair, and it makes sense to me, too. Abolishing the hanzi is just not going to happen anytime soon; they're far too nationalistically important for that. They're also beautiful and culturally and historically important. I'd be very sad if they were abolished. I love them. However, seeing as they're not very efficient, the question is what can be done to alleviate the problems they carry. If I was named dictator of Sinitic writing systems, here's what I'd do: * I'd encourage a system of ruby/furigana characters to help people with the sound of less common characters. * I'd develop a rules set for word spacing and implement it. * I'd mandate the use of the underline or the underlying dot or a similar system to mark proper names. * Possibly I'd develop a set of "phonetic only" characters that shall be used when writing foreign names, loan words and anything where you forgot how to write the specific character in question. * Since hanzi can pretty much only be used for Mandarin and (more or less) Cantonese, I'd set up commissions to develop and/or standardize phonetic writing systems for the other sinitic languages, teach them to the people who live in those regions and subsidize authors who want to write in those languages. * I'd set up a commission to standardize the Cantonese writing system and develop similar rules for it as I mentioned for Mandarin. I'd make Cantonese and Cantonese writing a mandatory subject in Hong Kong and maybe Guangdong province. * I'd combine Jyutping and Yale to make a good Canto romanization scheme that's easy on the eyes and teach it to kids in HK and GD. * Oh, and I'd probably reinstate traditional characters on the mainland. The Singaporeans can keep them, though. Ha! That'll learn 'em. Edited by Ari on 29 November 2012 at 9:40am 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6376 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 122 of 132 29 November 2012 at 7:35am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
What? Both the Chinese republic and the early Communist Party tried to adopt a phonetic writing system. Here is a sample of John DeFrancis' book Nationalism and Language Reform in China. It's well worth reading. My favorite is the Peking University professor who argued that Esperanto should be the official language in China. In another piece by John DeFrancis we can read what Mao himself thought on the matter:
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| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4972 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 123 of 132 05 December 2012 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
May be truth... Actually I myself have problems writing even the simplest characters, despite having no problem reading them.
I would agree with most of those points, sometimes it is hard to learn all the character spelling for every single politician or place name. In news if there was terrorist attack in a small village in Iraq how can they know how to transcribe it? ---------------------------- It has nothing to do with this thread, but I feel an urge to write it somewhere. The Chinese character 目 means eye, but it can have sometimes other meanings 'list' among them. 品目 - list of articles 目錄 - list of content I wonder if it's because it actually looks like a sheet of paper with lines writen through it. Edited by clumsy on 05 December 2012 at 7:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4459 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 124 of 132 05 December 2012 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Sorry to dive in late like this, but I've only just stumbled over this thread. I may be wrong and the Hanzi may somehow be fundamentally different to the Japanese Kanji, but if I can learn to write 2042 Kanji in (... quickly checks records ...) about 4 months, then I'd have to say that that estimate is out by a factor of 5 at least and probably an order of magnitude. That was using Heisig's method, and typically 30mins/day. Now reading the Kanji is a bit different (in that most of them have multiple readings and so you might as well learn how to "spell" each word once you know each of the possible characters). But I'm lead to believe that the Hanzi are different (so that each character generally has one sound). So whatever other reasons there might be for moving away from Hanzi, "they're really hard" doesn't seem to be a valid one. "They take longer to learn than a reasonable size alphabet/syllabary" is undoubtedly true, but that's a different argument altogether. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6376 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 125 of 132 06 December 2012 at 8:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Your experience is not typical. Natives take much longer than you do at learning to write that many characters. Quoting David Moser quoting DeFrancis:
You might learn to write 2000 characters in four months, but most natives can't do it that fast. And of course, the characters need not only be learned, but also maintained. People aren't having problems with characters they never learned, but rather with ones they've already forgotten.
Well, yes and no. There are quite a few commonly occurring characters that have at least two common sounds, with some having three or four different ones. And lots of characters have some variant sounds that are however very rare. So yeah, more than half probably only have one sound that's commonly used, but it's nowhere near all of them. We haven't discussed Cantonese speakers in this thread, for whom the writing system is even less efficient, of course. Even Mandarin speakers have lots of expressions that don't have commonly agreed-upon characters, Canto speakers even moreso (and the other Sinitic languages cannot be written in characters at all, which means that they cannot be written in China, period). In Cantonese, I'd wager that more than half of characters have double pronunciations, due to the division between "colloquial" and "literary" readings. I think most non-Mandarin Sinitic languages have this phenomenon; I know at least Taiwanese does. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| firearasi Triglot Newbie China Joined 5547 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Japanese, English Studies: Italian, Korean, Sanskrit | Message 126 of 132 11 February 2014 at 3:37am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It maybe inefficient for hand-writing, but currently the computer input methods are very
efficient. And characters are made for quick recognition, I can scan about 6 lines at a glance when I am reading light novels(I don't know if one can do this for English books). Source: native speaker. Sorry for my English. Edited by firearasi on 14 February 2014 at 3:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4238 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 127 of 132 13 February 2014 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Looked like many people already said everything that needs to be said. When it comes to printing space, Chinese
is a compact language. Even compared to English & French when you write 1 paragraph in English, it would take more space to write a similar paragraph in French or Spanish. In most cases it takes less printing space to write the equivalent in Chinese. Try to stretch each character phonetically like Vietnamese you actually take up more alphabetic characters. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| aabram Pentaglot Senior Member Estonia Joined 5327 days ago 138 posts - 263 votes Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 128 of 132 25 February 2014 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I disagree. The very fact that due to homophones chinese input has to rely on predictive input and makes you choose from 10+ characters at times makes it quite inefficient. Choosing wrong character may alter the meaning or at least confuse while reading. Even our native Chinese language teacher often has wrong characters here and there in her handouts, mainly mixing up shi or de but also other characters. It is even worse with proper names containing rarer characters. It's just so inefficient to look through several sets of propositions to find that elusive character. Edited by aabram on 25 February 2014 at 1:53pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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