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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4462 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 129 of 132 25 February 2014 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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My favorite words in Japanese and names of plants, animals and onomatopoeia because
they are preferably written in kana. ;) In Chinese, the biggest ''problem'' is not forgetting tones of characters, they're easily forgotten, just like noun genders in German. Edited by Medulin on 25 February 2014 at 7:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4462 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 130 of 132 25 February 2014 at 7:34pm | IP Logged | ||
Not true. Latin alphabet texts are legible at extremely small font sizes (for example Verdana 6 pt). Good luck reading a Mandarin text printed in 6 pt font, it can be difficult to read even in 12 pt font. As for, using computer all the time for writing Mandarin, it's like seeing a doctor who has to check every single symptom and diagnosis in medical books, computer programs and on the Internet. People shouldn't rely too much on this kind of help, but use their brain! Chinese people learn writing for 20 years of their lives, so they are expected to know how to write 6k of the most frequent Hanzi, at least in my book. Computer technology is no excuse for lousy spellers (or lousy doctors). Edited by Medulin on 25 February 2014 at 7:41pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3826 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 131 of 132 26 February 2014 at 12:16am | IP Logged | ||
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Many are illiterate now outside of computers of quick cursive. I've seen many in Hong Kong just scribbling
character outlines of sorts or using a computer system, one admitted she only knew how to create the strokes for only the basic characters and such, she has to scribble a bit in some areas where she forgot the exact sequences when writing a note to self containing more advanced vocabulary. To tell the truth, when I started learning, I just wanted to start absorbing vocab, but since I was oversees for long times, I could only have written works of tv shows, and the shows are not subtitled in anything other than characters! It would be so much faster to just absorb as you go along for many if characters were not in the way. I added something to chrome to show the pronunciations but they are only for Mandarin, not for Cantonese. Edited by Stolan on 26 February 2014 at 3:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4618 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 132 of 132 03 March 2014 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think the "difficulty" of learning characters for the Chinese population (underlined by the Mao quote earlier) was
and is mostly due to China's historically poor economic condition, and less to the language itself. You can't learn to read and write very well when you have to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week (starting at a very young age), no matter what alphabet or characters you need to write with. Many people in rich countries like Canada and France are illiterate still, although comparatively English and French should be (supposedly) easier than Chinese. I don't think that's true and, while I'm no expert, I think the objective difficulty of Chinese is grossly exaggerated. Although that's not to say there are no ways to make the writing/reading a bit easier (separating words and highlighting proper names would be a big help). I don't find it particularly hard to learn the characters at all, but somehow I find it very difficult to read text in pinyin. Incidentally, I never do read pinyin and since I started learning Chinese I forced myself to use the characters most of the time and focus on them instead of pinyin. Maybe that's the reason. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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