Wow. I am an intermediate speaker of Mandarin, and I think this article is pretty unfair.
It's true that there are many tens of thousands of characters, but relatively few are actually used. To me it's very similar to there being a million someodd words in English. And nobody writes that biang character. It's notorious for being huge and weird. I could easily find some comparable ridiculous English word that we don't actually use.
I spend a few hours a day practicing writing characters, and yes, it is difficult and time-consuming. But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.
No, they can't just write pinyin instead of characters. Well, they could, but it would be profoundly annoying. It'd be like looking at a TV much too close, or looking at assembler instead of Ruby.
Yes, it was a terrible mistake to "simplify" the characters. It did not simplify the process of learning the characters in any meaningful sense, and split the user base. But I find it very hard to understand why anyone would say it is necessary to know both simplified and traditional characters. In my experience, it's just not true.
At the end of the day, we more or less choose to keep these anchors around our necks because they're fun and interesting playgrounds. I don't really need Mandarin for anything, but I still learn it, just because it's interesting, and because when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.
> But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.
What do you mean by "information density of a language"? The way you used it makes it sound like a human language must have a certain "information density" to be useful, and that in English this is achieved via complex grammar but in Mandarin it is achieved via complex characters.
That is confusing to me, because if a certain level of information density is necessary for an effective human language, then wouldn't it be necessary to have that in both the spoken form and the written form of that language?
With most languages, the written form and the spoken form are essentially the same language. Any sentence in one can be expressed in the other. People often use longer sentences and more complex sentences when writing, and use more redundancy when speaking, but that is due to the medium, not the language being expressed using that medium--with the written language the reader can control the rate of reading and can jump around in a sentence if needed to deal with complexity, so longer and more complex sentences work better written than spoken. They are still the same language. One could write just like one speaks, or speak just like one writes. Is this not the case with Mandarin?
I can tell you some thoughts I have, but please be skeptical.
If the number of combinations of sounds in your language's sound system is lower than the number of things and actions you want to talk about, words might have to get pretty long to unambiguously represent ideas. To avoid having to talk so much, we might use shorter words that would be ambiguous without context. I think this is kind of what's going on with spoken Mandarin. Too few sounds are chasing too many ideas, so there are necessarily a bunch of homophones. But it still works fine, as long as there's context, and the listener can ask for clarification.
But reading a book isn't a dialogue. The reader can't ask for clarification. Maybe this is part of the reason Mandarin tends to be written differently than it's spoken? I'm not sure, because I'm not advanced enough. Reading advanced Mandarin like in newspapers is very daunting. In text messages and IMs, my friends and I seem to write exactly how we'd talk out loud, and it works fine. But maybe this is because we're talking about simple subjects?
There are actually at least two issues here. One, Mandarin written with Chinese characters is often written differently than would be spoken aloud. Two, reading Mandarin in pinyin would be annoying.
On the first issue, I think it may be possible to write Mandarin just like you'd say it -- I think maybe it's just a tradition to make it so stilted. On the second issue, I think the problem is that there would be a bunch of annoying misparses that required back and forth clarification.
As someone who has taught themselves Chinese (lower intermediate level) as an adult, I agree with your assesement.
An equivalent premise to this author's would be to say that the inconsistent spelling and grammar of English is a millstone around its neck. The mention of the 'character amnesia' issue is similar to the same drop in spelling ability we see in Western countries amongst people who primarily write using computers.
I initially learnt simplified characters as I was travelling mostly to the mainlaind for work. Later, when I was doing more work in Taiwan, I picked up the traditional characters. It is not difficult as only some of the characters changed, and mostly it is the key radical that was simplified (like the speach radical 言) or else common characters like the default measure character 个, so once you learn these it is fairly simple to shift between the two (at least for reading).
As others have noted in these comments, pinyin is not a substitute as it is not a 1-1 mapping. That is part of the reason why spoken Chinese differs from written Chinese, being less concise and more verbose to impart additional information to assist with the decoding from sounds back to meaning.
English has a similar problem with ridiculous spellings. But I don't know many people that think this isn't a problem, there is just no way to coordinate everyone to agree to change.
> But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.
I don't know if this tradeoff is really necessary. How much extra space would it really take to write out chinese, if it had it's own phonetic script with a few dozen characters? Maybe it would need more characters than English, but certainly not thousands.
Second, there is a big difference between a complicated spoken language, and a complicated written language. Human beings are actually quite good at learning complicated languages when we are young. We just naturally absorb them. There is no worry about languages being too complicated for it's own speakers to learn.
But writing systems are learned later in life, and therefore take more effort and can lead to illiteracy. We don't absorb writing naturally like spoken language.
>when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.
I really can't believe you said that. Development means pulling poor people out of poverty and vastly improving the quality of life for the average person. Increasing literacy is also very important for that goal.
> How much extra space would it really take to write out chinese, if it had it's own phonetic script with a few dozen characters?
I'm not a linguist, but my intuition is, that's not the problem. We could come up with a system of writing Mandarin sounds compactly using English characters, but I think there would still be too few sounds chasing too many ideas. When you see Chinese characters, meaning immediately appears in your mind. When you see the sounds of Mandarin words, I guess you start thinking about numerous possible meanings.
Totally concede that the writing system takes a lot of effort to learn. I think very few people other than the Chinese will ever learn to read it, much less write it.
On "development", it wasn't perfectly clear to me what the author meant. Honestly it never occurred to me they meant that the Chinese writing system was slowing the rise of the standard of living in China. Has any country's standard of living ever increased more quickly than China's? Of course I want all people everywhere to be lifted out of poverty ASAP. I want opportunity for everyone ASAP.
I guess pinyin is more like the German tv synchronizing English series. I live in the Netherlands, where we have subtitles on English shows and films, because that is much cheaper. So we're used to English, we all speak English. We have German tv channels here as well, and especially back in the 70s and 80s, when there were only six channels on tv, that was annoying and kind of funny. Maybe Germans growing up with these German voices makes you ignorant about the fact that what you see and what you hear does not match, but for everybody else it's absolutely clear. I see this on Spanish tv as well.
But I disagree with you "comparable ridiculous English word". The thing is that any foreigner can read it, look it up, type it on a keyboard, and pronounce it, probably remember it with a little effort and then use it at parties or to impress people. But well, I guess I'm biased from my "roman" point of view, and maybe Asian people have the same "fun" with that strange Chinese character?
Sorry, but not all foreigners are able to pronounce English words. For me, English written and English spoken are two different languages. Dyslexia is common in English world. For example, dyslexia is not possible at all in my native language (Ukrainian) because we have explicit rule about 1:1 mapping between spoken and written language, which, in turn, makes English language extremely hard to learn when adult.
I sympathise with his assessment but pinyin is really not suitable as a replacement. There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word". You can make the same argument for speech but there are other cues such as temporal spacing to help a listener parse that; none exist for pinyin.
Imagine if I asked you to read English words in this way. I segment the words into individual syllables, and show you one at a time. You read each one aloud, and then (very quickly) I show you the next one. So you're constantly reading the phonemes. At the same time, you try to listen to yourself and turn the sounds into meaning.
That's kind of what it's like for me to read pinyin. Pinyin is great for learning pronunciation, but not great for getting meaning: it's just too slow.
Okay, so pinyin 2.0, with enough expressiveness to properly record spoken Chinese. Would that work better than the current pictorial system? (From an adoption standpoint.)
Recently on HN on vietnamese writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755 and how the population of Vietman grew rapidly literate with the romanisation of the written language.
Another thing comes to mind: movable type printing could not take off without the small set of characters of an alphabet.
The efforts to simplify chinese characters come from the realization that it held back the country's literacy.
No, Chinese characters do not stop "moveable type taking off". Moveable type printing was in fact invented in China, nearly 1000 years ago, and widely used.
Movable type actually proves the author's point. It was an amazing idea which didn't take off in China as fast as it did in the West, precisely because it was a huge hurdle to manufacture the ~1000s of blocks required to represent each Mandarin word.
See Wikipedia [1]. Movable type was first invented in China around A.D 1040, about four hundred years earlier than in the western world.
In Qing Dynasty, the government used it to print 64 sets of the encyclopedic Gujin Tushu Jicheng. Each set consisted of 5040 volumes, making a total of 322,560 volumes printed using movable type.
It should be noted that this Qing Dynasty encyclopedy was printed in 1726, seven centuries after the invention of movable type and more than 270 years after Gutenberg's Bible. It is also a Government sponsored project and probably wasn't cheap. The point still stands that compositing a book was far more labor intensive with chinese characters than with any alphabet. You need a few dozen types for an alphabet and at least 100 times more fore Chinese. An alphabet makes it considerably cheaper and not reserved to a tiny elite with 64 copies. That's the main point. Common people couldn't afford it.
There is no doubt possible that using an alphabet greatly helped the dissemination of knowledge. Between 1455 and 1500 there were over 30,000 distinct incunables edited in europe. Not 30,000 copies. More than 30,000 different books. [1]
Gutenberg's press went viral [2] and vastly more widespread than what was seen in Asia.
In the 15th century Korea adopted Hangul, the Korean alphabet.
"A potential solution to the linguistic and cultural bottleneck that held back movable type in Korea for 200 years appeared in the early 15th century—a generation before Gutenberg would begin working on his own movable-type invention in Europe—when Sejong the Great devised a simplified alphabet of 24 characters (hangul) for use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and compositing process more feasible. Adoption of the new alphabet was stifled by Korea's cultural elite, who were "appalled at the idea of losing hanja, the badge of their elitism."
"It was effective enough at disseminating information among the uneducated that Yeonsangun, the paranoid tenth king, forbade the study or use of Hangul and banned Hangul documents in 1504,and King Jungjong abolished the Ministry of Eonmun (governmental institution related to Hangul research) in 1506.
The late 16th century, however, saw a revival of Hangul" [3]
> Moveable type printing was in fact invented in China
I know that's my point exactly.
It was definitely not as widespread and explosive as Gutenbergs printing press though. The number of characters is two orders of magnitude smaller and cuts down the manual labor far more effectively. You can't argue against that.
Woodblock printing was in use long after the invention of movable type because of that.
I have been learning Chinese for about 18 months. Before I started my studies, I had similar opinions to the author of this article -- that Chinese characters are antiquated, hard or impossible to learn, and a hindrance to anyone who wants to learn or use Chinese.
Since starting my Chinese studies, I've changed my mind entirely.
First and foremost, the characters are far from random; the system is very different than an alphabetic one, but it works -- providing the reader (or even the learner) with hints as to the meaning and pronunciation. It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. But yes, it means that if I see a character I haven't learned before, I can be a bit stuck. And yes, Chinese children spend lots of time learning characters in school.
Secondly, Chinese has a ridiculous number of homophones. Even if you take the tones into account, there are lots and lots and lots of characters that sound precisely the same when spoken. However, they look completely different. For example, the character 店 (for a shop) and 电 (electricity) look totally different, but sound precisely the same, diàn. This makes understanding the language difficult (as I'm learning), but a switch to Pinyin (the Latin-character transliteration) would make the written language as ambiguous and hard to read as the spoken language is to hear.
Thirdly, there's a huge amount of national pride associated with characters. I can't imagine telling the Chinese people, or even a subset of them, that they'll be abandoning characters in favor of Pinyin.
Now, does this mean that Chinese is unlikely to overtake English as the international language of business and academia? Yes; I think that English has firmly cemented itself in that position for a long time to come. (I say this one day after returning from teaching a course in Brussels, where my students were from Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Serbia... and spoke English among themselves.) But there's a difference between saying that English will continue to dominate in business, and saying that Chinese characters have to be tossed out. The latter just isn't going to happen.
Another point I would add: the Chinese language - to my knowledge - has the most functional and discrete method of forming complex concepts by smashing characters together. Many times in classes I have made up words or phrases simply by stringing characters together, and lo and behold, my teachers never blinked. It is astounding how easy it is to build your understanding of the language exponentially the more you learn. Add in the total lack of grammatical tidbits like articles and verb tenses, and you come to a language - tens of thousands of characters no withstanding - that is quite intuitive and fun to learn. Just sucks to speak.
Careful with smashing those characters, you might end up saying something not quite as you intended. Seemingly harmless combinations I learned the hard (but funny) way: chu1jia1 (leave home -> become a monk), pao3lu4 (go running -> run away from the police), jie1ke4 (receive a guest -> as a prostitute)
That "biang" character is not a good example since it's not commonly used and was possibly made up by a noodle shop (it doesn't appear in dictionaries). The most common Chinese characters are made of less than 9 or 10 strokes.
Most children learn their native language(s) properly at about the same age, which suggests that the languages are comparably difficult to learn, and perhaps that if a language takes too long, it'll be simplified. But there's nothing that pushes languages to have the same difficulties.
An important difference is that English lets you get your point across even if you mess up word order, conjugation, and/or spelling. With logographic systems, there is practically no connection between written symbols and their sounds. Even competent writers can know what a symbol means, but not know how to pronounce it. Or they'll be able to use a word in speech, but not be able to write it down. The first time I saw this happen with native Mandarin speakers, I thought they were playing a joke on me.
The main advantage of logographic languages is written information density. If you've ever seen a Chinese or Japanese copy of a Harry Potter book, you'll understand. (They're quite thin.) Also, Twitter is a totally different experience when using hanzi or kanji. The character limit is enough for a paragraph instead of a sentence.
I know there have been attempts to each people purely spoken language and purely written, but those are rare. In practice the two seem strongly connected.
Using adjectives in the “wrong” order doesn’t really change the meaning significantly though, it just sounds a little weird to a native speaker.
I don’t think anyone claims that spoken Chinese is particularly hard compared to other languages, but that the written form is measurably harder than languages that use an alphabetic orthography.
(I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?)
>(I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone comment?)
In what way? It uses an alphabet just like Latin-based languages, and it's more phonetic than English (but not completely phonetic). I'm sure anyone can learn to write/read Cyrillic in a few days if they already know Latin. The actual language is harder than English because of large number of noun/adjective declensions (depending on plurality, case, gender) which would be a pain to memorize for a non-native. But being an Indo-European language it's still pretty similar to English as far as languages go. Chinese, having a completely different writing system, completely different sentence structure, completely different fixed expressions, completely different sounds (and tones!) is orders of magnitude harder.
My wife knows Russian and 5-6 other languages on a tourist level or better. She says Russian has both a difficult and a simple aspect: Newspapers use a large vocabulary so reading with moderate education is tricky, but people's accents are easier to deal with.
Have been living/working in China for nearly 2 years and studied the language in that time.
While individual characters can have many strokes (usually, like, 10 at the most), they're more like words or half-words.
While it can be tricky for foreigners to gain confidence with characters and radicals, due to the way they work, you'll realize it is surprisingly easy to remember new words (or even guess the meaning of words when you see them). Much easier than English in that regard. Once you have a certain baseline level of competence (and ability to "chunk" things appropriately), the learning curve quickly softens out.
>or even guess the meaning of words when you see them
That's the thing I don't get. You may be able to guess the words, but would the characters allow you to pronounce it? In English, and most other languages, you can spell your way through pronouncing a word, even without knowing it's meaning. Is that possible in Chinese or Japanese?
It also seems like you would need to be constantly updating computers to allow them of deal with new characters.
The argument that "these characters aren't widely used" isn't really helpful. The characters either exists or they don't. Because you might need it in the future means that you need to deal with it's existence. X isn't a widely used letter in many language, so should we just throw it aside? In case of the biang it might be more akin to throwing out a word, because it's rarely used, but still.
You can often guess meaning or sound from the character.
E.g. 海, 洲, 流 (sea, continent, flow) all have three dots on the left indicating they relate to water.
And 领, 玲, 铃 are all pronounced ling due to the 令 component.
Characters that aren't widely used you don't need to learn to write, and reading is much easier than writing. If you see a big complicated character in a noodle-y context you pretty much know it's going to be biang.
If you don't know the pronunciation of a character it's not too far from not knowing the meaning of a random English word like "kaiserin", apart from being slightly harder to guess pronunciation on average.
There are so-called phono-semantic compound characters [1] which consist of two other characters, a part indicating its meaning, and one part indicating its reading. This has helped me tremendously while memorizing the readings of Japanese kanji - and guessing the readings of unknown characters does work incredibly well after you have learned the most common ones which are used as components in more complex characters.
As a very simple example, 仲 is a combination of 人 (person) and the reading of 中 and means relation, relationship (which is vaguely indicated by the human character).
You are correct, though: This is not failsafe and characters can have multiple readings or lack this phono-semantic notion altogether (also, since the characters are originally Chinese it doesn't work as well in Japanese, I believe), but I think it is the closest thing to guessing a word's pronunciation that these languages offer.
You're right that some aspects of logographic languages can hint at meaning and pronunciation, but those are still just hints. The only way to be sure is to memorize.
Take your example of 仲. How is that pronounced? In Japanese, 人 is typically pronounced "jin", "nin", or "hito" depending on context. 中 is usually pronounced "chuu" or "naka." How do I know these things? Rote memorization. While I can recognize that 仲 contains 人 and 中, that doesn't tell me how to say 仲. The only reason I know its pronunciation is because I memorized it. (In this case, it happens to be the same as 中.)
And that's just for reading. Writing is worse. Character amnesia is extremely common among native speakers of Chinese and Japanese. From Wikipedia[1]:
> Another anecdotal example can be seen during a spelling bee show hosted on CCTV in 2013, where only 30% of participants were able to write "toad" (Chinese: 癞蛤蟆; pinyin: Lài há ma) in Chinese.
That sort of thing simply can't happen in phonetic writing systems.
I'm not disagreeing with you - I actually agree that this is a big problem with the system, but I believe most outsiders have no idea that there is any phonetic connection between the characters.
Exactly. I've started learning Japanese less than two years ago, and with some determination and a tool that supports efficient memorization (thank you http://www.wanikani.com) the writing system starts to 'click' once you've reached about 500 Kanji, which took me less than 2 years on a casual schedule. From there, recognizing and learning new words that are a combination of these 500 Kanji starts to come almost automatically (meaning, and reading). Latin languages have the same thing to some extent, but much less so, some words are composed by combining other words, but most things have their own proper noun which can only be remembered by rote memorization. For example the word 'swan' would be 「白鳥」 in Japanese, which would literally translate to (and is pronounced as) 'white bird'. Japanese, and I guess also Chinese, is full of these words.
I found the article narrow-minded and short-sighted, and can only assume the author never spent any effort learning a logographic language. I recognize the sentiment from back when I just started learning Kanji, but it doesn't take too long before your brain seems to 'rewire' for the different way to write, recognize and compose words, and you start to see the benefits.
Ah, but can you tell the difference between 白鳥 (swan) and 白烏 (white crow)?
Consider that 500 kanji is equivalent to about 3rd grade of elementary school, you need to know much more to read most texts. And as you learn more, they become more and more similar-looking.
Haha, yeah well, of course it's not perfect, but let's not pretend Latin languages don't have their own unique set of problems ;-)
I'm acutely aware that 500 Kanji isn't nearly enough to read even the most basic of texts, unfortunately... But considering it 'only' took me 1.5 years to get to this point at a leisury pace, I would assume that anyone should be able to get to ~2000 Kanji within 2 years if you really put the effort in. If you get to JLPT N5 (~2000 Kanji) you should be able to read anything but Japanese literature. Don't know how this works for Mandarin or other Chinese dialects, but I would assume there's a base set of around the same size that should be sufficient for daily life.
The article title was implying the Chinese writing system is a 'brake on development', which IMO is nothing but hyperbole, and neglects that logographic writing systems also have their advantages.
Radicals are just a system which was invented to look up characters in dictionaries, so a character is often composed of components with different functions (e.g. sound component or meaning component) and one of those components can be the radical.
Actually, most of the radicals existed long before the Shuōwén Jiězì, as recurring graphic elements[1].
They might not have been called 'radicals', or been used to look up dictionaries, but they certainly existed.
[1] Wilkinson, Endymion (2013), Chinese History: A New Manual, Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, ISBN 978-0-674-06715-8
It's funny that most of the arguments people make for retaining old languages and writing systems are "so we can read old literature or perpetuate old cultures". Surely if everyone used the same language, that would have the opposite effect and open up far more writing to more people - Chinese people could read Shakespeare. Translators would only have to convert from each old language to the lingua franca, so Hebrew speakers could read Confucius too. That's an O(n) task instead of the O(n^2) that we currently have.
Complex doesn't mean awful. Impractical and slow for our fast-paced life, sure. But the characters are beautiful and the etymology, shape and composition is fascinating.
I'm currently learning Chinese (using Remembering Simplified Hanzi from Heisig [0] for characters and Iknow [1] for words/pronunciation) and I find it a lot easier than I initially thought it would be. It helps a great deal to know that all these characters that look so complicated are mostly made of the same 200-some radicals [2], suddenly it's a lot less daunting and the characters even make sense most of the time. And sure, one might forget characters with lack of use, but the same can be said about other languages. Grammar is a hot topic on the internet, isn't it?
Lived in Taiwan 3 years - picked up Advanced spoken proficiency and intermediate reading / writing in Traditional Mandarin. Studied Simplified Mandarin @ Brigham Young University. While studying we became conversant in modern Mandarin and also Ancient text including The Dao De Jing, Mencius, Confucius etc.
There is a beauty and depth to the language not available in the romance languages or German: may I recommend www.zhongwen.com as an introduction.
With modern keyboard input methods producing Chinese text is not a difficult task although learning the writing system is not for the faint of heart. Not just due to the characters but also the syntax of the language. English generally is a head-first language where as Chinese is a head-last language. Combine this with careful character placement within the syntax and you have a minefield awaiting the non-native writer.
What English lacks in concentrated depth and beauty it makes up for in flexibility and diversity.
Interestingly, Kemal Atatürk made similar reforms in Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire.
He abolished the use of the Arabic script and introduced a new Turkish script based on the Latin alphabet.
His reasoning was the same one used in this article. But there were other goals too, like promoting Turkish nationalism against a wider Muslim identity.
Guess I'm somewhat ignorant about history, so maybe this is a stupid question. But I've been wondering about this: Until about 500 years ago, I guess China was ahead of Europe culturally, economically, scientifically etc, but then Europe raced ahead. How much does this have to do with the printing press? How easy is it to use a traditional printing press with Chinese characters compared to the Latin alphabet?
Obviously, access and spread of information must have a lot to do with a society's development. Did the traditional printing press cause information (i.e. books and newspapers) to become cheap and widespread in Europe, but not in China?
Writing Chinese characters on a computer is relatively quick and easy. I wonder if this has something to do with the rapid development that we're seeing in China now?
Some might say that embracing capitalism is why China is developing so fast now, and I guess that is partially true. However, wasn't China kinda capitalist before the Communist revolution? It didn't develop that much back then.
Edit: I found a bit of info on this on the Wikipedia page for the printing press. According to that "a single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing prevalent in East Asia".
I generally find this article lacking in anything beyond personal opinion. However, I think the kernel of the problem is hinted at when he writes about chemical elements (and the article it links to is more suggestive of this): That is, synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese -- due to the large number of homophones -- which is compounded by the inflexibility of the writing system.
If this is true -- I'm not a Chinese speaker, but I'm married to one and have had this discussion before! -- then that is a burden on development as it clearly makes communication of new ideas clumsy.
"synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese"
It's not. You just slam two existing characters together. So many possibilities. Computer? Electric brain.
If you want a new individual character, just put them on top of each other and invent your own single character (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duang) as long as you don't expect it to be added to unicode.
If you're going to spoit nonsense about how writing systems hold people back, you might as well attack Japanese, since its use of the same characters is much more complicated. Chinese is pretty simple: one character, one syllable, one pronunciation. Japanese kanji? One character, many pronunciations, context-sensitive.
At least Japanese has a phonetic syllabary to supplement the kanji. If Chinese had adopted Bopomofo [1] it would've solved a lot of problems (and no, pinyin is not a substitute since it sticks out like a sore thumb in writing).
Some Chinese characters are pronounced differently depending on the surrounding characters. Example: sometimes in Mandarin a 4th-tone character is changed to 2nd-tone because saying two 4's in a row is hard.
I am afraid I am not qualify to say whether the Chinese Character is, or not a brake on development of its language.
But I do have a story to share, just one story, nothing more.
When I was a kid studying in UK, during an Art Session we had to cut a black card and overlay on top of white paper to create some form of Art. I have absolutely no idea what to do! Compared to some of my classmate who start creating and cutting some beautiful images, I was starring in the air and didn't know what to do. I try cut a few things but they all look so dull, ugly and meaningless in my mind.
After 30 mins of not going anywhere, my teacher came around and pat on my back, he said, "Beauty is in the eye of beholder. It doesn't really have to mean anything, it could just be some random cutting, some shape or even some words like your name. It doesn't matter. Try your best"
At that moment i really needed some encouragement, So i thought, since everyone were doing something good and fancy, why dont I cut out a Chinese word? He did said some words. Since i am the only Chinese in the class, surely no one would be doing it and no one would understand it anyway.
So in the remaining 15 min or so I drafted out the Chinese letter "愛", ( meaning love ), it is complex enough and easy to explain.
In the end when everyone were presenting their work to our teacher, I still remember the look on his face when he saw mine, he was, awkwardly staring at it for 30 seconds, without making a single noise. The silence was quite intense I was thinking I make some crap...
"What is this?" He asked.
"A Chinese Letter"
"What does it mean?"
"Love"
"This is beautiful! This is actually a letter?"
"Yes"
I thought all these were just some encouragement so i dont look too bad. When we left the classroom, I turn around and my teacher was still standing there staring at my form "art".
Later on that Week my teacher asked me privately to make him a few more of these Chinese Characters, I wrote out a few so he could choose, he was truly fascinated at the act form of these Characters.
I couldn't grasp the idea then. Because I never saw them as act, merely as what the article suggest as a painful tool to write. It was only as i grow older and older, did i start to appreciate this beautiful form of Chinese glyph.
I hope you all too, would some day appreciate the beauty of these characters.
I read an interview with Andrew Ng, a well known Chinese AI research that works for Baidu. He talked about his work on speech recognition. And how it's such a big deal in China. I guess they use it a lot more than in the US. That makes more sense in the context of this article.
They barely even share that. The word for "not" in Mandarin is 不是, but in Cantonese it's 唔係. "Book" is 书 in Mandarin, but 冊 in Hokkien.
There are enough differences between the various "dialects" in both the spoken and written form, that there's a debate as to whether they should be considered "dialects" at all, or a separate language altogether.
That's not really sensible to call a Horror-show the very writing system upon which one of the longest and most fertile culture on Earth has been built...
But it is also right to say that the difficulties of learning Chinese makes it an unlikely candidate for a universal language.
The past/perfect tenses, the infinitives and gerunds, the active/passive/possessive/nonpossessive, the he/she/his/her, of the English language is... a pain.
This guy is a linguist? And his best argument is that characters take long to write using the example of a word whose only real use is the answer to the trivia question, "what is the Chinese character containing the most strokes?"
Also I would say a lot of Americans couldn't spell English words correctly to save their lives, does that mean English is a problem? (I would say in general, yes. It's a very hard language to learn)
So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /s
Edit: Also the author fails to recognize that even if a Chinese person doesn't recognize the word exactly, the radical and underlying pictograms in the word describe what that word means and sometimes the tone/pronunciation of the word. It is not just a bunch of random strokes on a paper.
>So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /s
Did you even read the article? The author wrote a critique of English and listed problems non-natives have with it and its potential unsuitability as a lingua franca. Then they received a question regarding Chinese and this is their follow-up and answer to what it is that makes Chinese potentially unsuitable as a lingua franca.
If what you got from the article is "they're too lazy to learn Chinese and think English has no faults" then you didn't really even try to comprehend the article.
I actually totally missed that one-liner at the top, which unless you follow this guy, would make it seem like he was promoting a pro-English view. So any of my comments regarding English I withdraw.
I still think his view about Chinese characters is _wrong_, especially when he uses the extremes of Chinese problems as arguments against Chinese completely.
> says it should just be converted to English (pinyin)
Hold up - you've made a slightly false equivalence there: that the Latin alphabet == English. English is frustrating for a few reasons - some of the issues I see first hand every day are
* many irregular verb conjugations
* inconsistent\confusing\unintuitive grammar
* irregular spelling\pronunciation.
However Pinyin is just a different representation of the sounds involved in Chinese using the latin alphabet - _not_ a translation into some English-like form. Furthermore it appears to be very regular.
I'm not sure where you're from or what your language experience is, but one article I personally found pretty enlightening on this subject was at http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
. It's written by an American PHd student of Chinese language, it's a thoroughly entertaining read but the standout quote from me is around halfway down when he starts talking about Chinese people he'd met struggling to write a simple character. I'm going to copy-paste a big-ish chunk because it perfectly represents what the author of the linked post is trying to say:
"I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??"
You're right, I should not equate English with pinyin. I think however, pinyin as the solution is more indicative of how Western focused (especially with the proliferation of English) the entire world is. Or at least specifically with this author's viewpoint.
I have learned pinyin, and basically it is the easiest way to input onto a US-English keyboard (as he says), but you essentially lose all underlying meaning of the character's history if you're learning Chinese based off pinyin. Essentially the same as removing all meaning of what a prefix, suffix and root of a word is in English. For example: "Imperialism": I am sure you can tell me that the suffix is ("-ism") and what it's meaning is ("belief in"/advocacy) and you can probably tell me the origins/meanings of "Imperial" (empire) and so if you put those two words together an English speaking person would understand "Imperialism" as advocacy of an empire. But what is "Imperialism" in English if it is spelled "diguozhuyi"? That is what you lose when you switch to a pure romanization. And writing this post to you know makes me realize what I hate so much about the article. He throws away any meaning Chinese characters have for the sake of simplicity for his self benefit.
Taiwan has an alphabet like equivalent called "zhuyin" or bopomofo after the first 4 characters. The author never mentions this because I'm guessing he just asked some colleague in China rather than look into it. Zhuyin has pros and cons, the 2 biggest cons I see are 1: It wasn't invented in mainland China and 2: even the Taiwanese view it as sort of thing a child uses (adults use full Chinese characters). But technically it has about 38 characters, although you could fit it into a qwerty style keyboard based on the assumption that there are only 21/22 characters that can begin a word and 17 that can follow (oversimplification) so it is doable.
沒錯。After reading the fine article kindly submitted here and all the previous comments, I think I should draw on my education and life experience to comment too. I have been studying the Chinese language since 1975, my undergraduate major subject in university was Chinese language, and have I lived after university graduation in the Chinese-speaking world for two three-year stints (mid-1980s and spanning the turn of the last century). I have worked for many years as a Chinese-English translator of written texts and as a Chinese-English interpreter for official visitors to the United States. Besides learning Mandarin well enough to work as an interpreter, I have also studied other Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka. My university studies acquainted me not only with Modern Standard Chinese but also with Literary Chinese.
The blog post kindly submitted here is by a linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, who specializes in the English language and who co-edited the most definitive grammar of the English language.[1] Pullum is not a specialist in Chinese language but he cites the numerous writings of Victor Mair,[2] who does have deep professional knowledge of the Chinese language. Simply put, the author's comments are linguistically and sociologically correct. My nieces and nephews who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world were faced with a considerably more difficult task in learning to read and write than was strictly necessary, solely because of clinging to the tradition of writing Chinese in the traditional characters rather than the alphabetical writing systems that are used EVERYWHERE in the Chinese-speaking world for initial reading instruction.
The late Y.R. Chao, an eminent Chinese linguist, made the simple point about alphabetical writing of Chinese: if one claims that alphabetical writing cannot be understood, that is equivalent to claiming that Chinese people cannot speak to one another over the telephone. But in fact Chinese people can speak to one another over the telephone just fine--I have seen it done, and I have been party of many international voice-only conversations in Chinese. See a whole book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by the late John DeFrancis,[3] a linguist who specialized in the study of the Chinese writing system, for more details.
It's an interesting article by a competent and well-known author, but that baity title is guaranteed to produce a flamewar, so (in accordance with the HN guidelines) we replaced it with more neutral language from the article. If someone suggests a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
It's true that there are many tens of thousands of characters, but relatively few are actually used. To me it's very similar to there being a million someodd words in English. And nobody writes that biang character. It's notorious for being huge and weird. I could easily find some comparable ridiculous English word that we don't actually use.
I spend a few hours a day practicing writing characters, and yes, it is difficult and time-consuming. But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.
No, they can't just write pinyin instead of characters. Well, they could, but it would be profoundly annoying. It'd be like looking at a TV much too close, or looking at assembler instead of Ruby.
Yes, it was a terrible mistake to "simplify" the characters. It did not simplify the process of learning the characters in any meaningful sense, and split the user base. But I find it very hard to understand why anyone would say it is necessary to know both simplified and traditional characters. In my experience, it's just not true.
At the end of the day, we more or less choose to keep these anchors around our necks because they're fun and interesting playgrounds. I don't really need Mandarin for anything, but I still learn it, just because it's interesting, and because when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.