Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[dmoser]

Do you think that pinyin should and will be implemented as the status quo writing system or do you think the present writing system should remain?

I don't think pinyin is likely to be implemented in any of our lifetimes. And I like the characters for many (non-practical) reasons, so I'm not necessarily in favor of abandoning them. But there are an infinite number of possible interim measures and compromises that should be considered, which is why the issue needs to be discussed carefully, rationally, scientifically and non-chauvinistically.

But here is a very important point that many people lose sight of because we are so used to it. Chinese written culture is already completely dependent on pinyin for its existence. Pinyin permeates the culture, and in some sense the characters exist parasitically on the phonetic pinyin system.

Pinyin is used for dictionaries, indexes, catalogues, etc., any situation where the characters need to be arranged in an orderly fashion for quick retrieval. The old bushou methods etc. just don't work.

Pinyin is used by the vast majority for character entry in computers and cell phones, etc.

Pinyin is used on maps, roadsigns, etc. due to the problem of non-universal literacy.

Pinyin is learned by schoolchildren as a way of "bootstrapping" them into the character set, and as an aid in learning the correct pronunciation of putonghua. This represents quite an added burden on school children.

Pinyin is used when one cannot remember how to write a character.

Pinyin is the Chinese language's interface with the rest of the planet, necessary for all faxes, TOEFL applications, diplomatic correspondence, etc. etc. etc., and as such, must be mastered and maintained as a second system of writing by all literate Chinese.

Like it or not, pinyin is already an intrinsic part of the Chinese writing system. Long ago the PRC government recognized the need for such a system, and for implementing it on the widest scale possible. This policy was quite correct, and essential to the national interest.

Nations the use other scripts, such as Arabic, Hindi or Hebrew, also need to master the roman alphabet in order to communicate with the rest of the world. But only in China do the people need the alphabet just to learn and process their own script within their own borders. This should be a hint as to the basic problem with the Chinese system.

[sm_sung]

well-educated Pinyinist are not supposed to be able to read poem, as discussed above

Really? Wouldn't this be very undesirable?

[sm_sung]

Pinyin is learned by schoolchildren as a way of "bootstrapping" them into the character set, and as an aid in learning the correct pronunciation of putonghua. This represents quite an added burden on school children.

Pinyin is very easy to learn to use as a system for representing sounds(not as an actual writing system). So is it really such a big burden?

[39degN]

Pinyin is the Chinese language's interface with the rest of the planet, necessary for all faxes, TOEFL applications, diplomatic correspondence, etc. etc. etc., and as such, must be mastered and maintained as a second system of writing by all literate Chinese.

Nations the use other scripts, such as Arabic, Hindi or Hebrew, also need to master the roman alphabet in order to communicate with the rest of the world. But only in China do the people need the alphabet just to learn and process their own script within their own borders. This should be a hint as to the basic problem with the Chinese system.

So, according to this logic, we should've used english as our language, change our names to be english name. for the sake of convenient communicating with the rest of the world.

I think the best solution for this is not chinese transfering its writing system into pinyin, because there are so many people around the world not able to recognize pinyin, just like I have never been able to read japanese names in english, the solution should be, to create a new pinyin system, by UN or some other international organizations, and every country around the world has to learn the system to spell their names in international communications. and then we would have a common standard. otherwise, every country has its own system, with different pronunciation regulations, the difficulties are still there.

[39degN]

But here is a very important point that many people lose sight of because we are so used to it. Chinese written culture is already completely dependent on pinyin for its existence. Pinyin permeates the culture, and in some sense the characters exist parasitically on the phonetic pinyin system.

pls solve the problems in the poem posted by pazu first.

Pinyin is used for dictionaries, indexes, catalogues, etc., any situation where the characters need to be arranged in an orderly fashion for quick retrieval. The old bushou methods etc. just don't work.

Pinyin is used by the vast majority for character entry in computers and cell phones, etc.

Pinyin is used on maps, roadsigns, etc. due to the problem of non-universal literacy.

Pinyin is learned by schoolchildren as a way of "bootstrapping" them into the character set, and as an aid in learning the correct pronunciation of putonghua. This represents quite an added burden on school children.

Pinyin is used when one cannot remember how to write a character. Pinyin is used for dictionaries, indexes, catalogues, etc., any situation where the characters need to be arranged in an orderly fashion for quick retrieval. The old bushou methods etc. just don't work.

Pinyin is used by the vast majority for character entry in computers and cell phones, etc.

Pinyin is used on maps, roadsigns, etc. due to the problem of non-universal literacy.

Pinyin is learned by schoolchildren as a way of "bootstrapping" them into the character set, and as an aid in learning the correct pronunciation of putonghua. This represents quite an added burden on school children.

Pinyin is used when one cannot remember how to write a character.

yes, and meanwhile pinyin has bugs right now, so we call pinyin a tool, not a writing system.

[39degN]

Chinese got along fine without the 他/她/它 distinction for thousands of years; these are recent additions to the character set. (When my American friends find out that there is no he/she distinction in speech, just one morpheme, "ta", they are amazed, and say things like "Surely there must be constant confusion and misunderstanding in Chinese speech because of this." Are they right?)

You mean we can back to future?

In ancient we had no他/她/它 doesn't mean we have no distinction of this. Otherwise, what's 彼女? or even we had no distingction, should we have deleted it right now?

There is nothing objectively ugly about pinyin. I think it could be improved, myself, but as a system it is merely a representation of the sounds of Chinese. As far as regularity goes, it is more beautiful than English, which is very much a chaotic mongrel of a writing system.

Let me tell you why pinyin is ugly:

Basically a writing system's beauty based on multiplicity style of every word's spelling, i.e. every word's spelling is unique, not so much similar spelling there in one paragraph. But pinyin is totally different.

1.Chinese generally have a lots of two syllable vocabularies there, it will caused almost every vocabulary's in the same length.

2.other than English and other western languages, almost every character in Chinese beginning with consonant, except some 啊,哦,噢.

(sure dont mention 鹅...here, that's why i said almost)

3.every character's word-building is similar. i.e. a 声母 with a same-like 韵母, it will make a paragraph of Chinese has a lots of words with almost same looking.(and not good-looking)

see the poem posted by sm-sung, you can get it:

zuobian lai le yi ge banyan e gou de tongxue，

youbian lai le yi ge banyan er ge de tongxue。

banyan e gou de tongxue dai zhe liang zhi da er，

banyan er ge de tongxue dai zhe liang zhi da e。

e gou kanjian er ge de da e，jue de du er hen e。

e gou e qi lai jiu yao yao er ge de da e，

er ge qi qi lai ye yao yao e gou de da er，

jieguo e gou mei yao dao er ge de da e ban kou，

faner shi er ge yao le e gou de da er yi kou。

[shibo77]

I don't think I will ever be able to understand that poem even if I had the best Pinyin comprehension skills. Also I would think even with some new improvements to Pinyin (maybe we can call it Dmoser Pinyin?), it would greatly slow down reading speed. This is because it would change (at least for the first generation of all-Pinyin users) reading from a seeing/associating process into a seeing/pronouncing/associating process. The second generation might be able to associate speech and writing directly, but the nature of Chinese would still hinder them from achieving the same results as would English. In short, I think each language embodies the essence of their culture. Each culture developped differently on different parts of the world in different environments. Language directly influences how a culture thinks and how a culture thinks influenced how the language was formed. In western Europe, human's effort to write down their experiences resulted in the alphabetic Latin script. On the other side of Eurasia, human's effort resulted in the logographic Chinese script. Both scripts existed to write down their speech (western European's and Chinese's) for almost 2 thousand years. The Latin script have survived wars and reforms, and yet remains much the same. The Chinese script have survived revolts and invasions, and yet remains much the same. Both spread to a wide variety of tongues. The Latin script to write down the speeches of a German or an Italian or an English. The Chinese script to write down the speeches of a Beijingner, a Dongbei farmer, a Cantonese speaker, a Wu speaker...

This means that both scripts are proven scripts. They are both best suited for their original languages. The language of the Romans and the language of the Chinese. Why should either of the two change scripts simply because one civilisation's script is strong in the global scene? In my opinion, Chinese wouldn't change scripts for a long time. As you will find out, Chinese are very patriotic and think of one's culture as a very important aspect. It wouldn't be like Turkish or Mongolian, changing script/style/culture to suit the temporary domineering culture. A language lost is a way of thinking lost.

-Shibo

[sm_sung]

I don't think I will ever be able to understand that *text* even if I had the best Pinyin comprehension skills.

Well, it's been 5 days since I posted the *text* and so far no one has claimed that he/she could understand it. So, I'll take it that no one could.

The following is the actual *text*, written in characters:

左边来了一个扮演恶狗的同学，

右边来了一个扮演二哥的同学。

扮演恶狗的同学戴着两只大耳，

扮演二哥的同学带着两只大鹅。

恶狗看见二哥的大鹅，觉得肚儿很俄。

恶狗俄起来就要咬二哥的大鹅，

二哥气起来也要咬恶狗的大耳，

结果恶狗没咬到二哥的大鹅半口，

反而是二哥咬了恶狗的大耳一口。

I'm sure there're many out there who can understand the *text* now(shibo that includes you ). As you can see, the characters and words in this *text* are rather easy, any 5/6 grader should know them all. So why couldn't anyone comprehend it? I would say it's because pinyin is, at the very least, too ambiguous for these sort of *textual* purposes. Objections anyone?

Edit: Changed poem to *text*, don't know what to call it.

[skylee]

er ... that is not a "poem" ...

[sm_sung]

Oops, sorry what is it called then? I couldn't think of a proper word for it!

[skylee]

A tongue twister 繞口令 perhaps?

Take a look at this thread. The following is copied from 林彪's post -

Would you be able to make sense out of something like this?

<<shī shì shí shī shì>>

shí shì shī shì shī shì，shì shī，shì shí shí shī。shì shí

shí shì shì shì shī。shí shí，shì shí shī shì shì。shì shí，

shì shī shì shì shì。shì shì shí shī，shì shĭ shì，shĭ shì

shí shī shì shì。shì shí shì shí shī shī，shì shí shì。shí

shì shī，shì shì shì。 shì shĭ shì shí shí shī shī。shí shí，

shĭ shí shí shī shī，shí shì shí shí shī shī。shì shì shì shì.

If you read the story in characters, you instantly know what it means without reading it aloud. But if it is in pinyin, you wouldn't be sure what it means even if you read it aloud. This is quite interesting.

But perhaps this is just the case for those of us who learnt characters before pinyin. For those who learnt pinyin first it might be the other way around.

[wushijiao]

This debate reminds me a bit of the book, "The Long March: An Account of Modern China" by Simone de Beauvoir. She wrote this book while coming to China in the 1950's, with a very idealistic 'communism and the victims of imperialism shall triumph over capitalists monopolists" feeling.

Anyway, there was about 20 pages talking about how pinyin would defeat characters, a symbol of imperial China's control over the masses. Almost every intellectual she talked to agreed with this revelutionary fact: characters were part of the reason China was weak- a docile illiterate group of masses saying "Yes massa" to the whims of the autocratic elite. Characters were to China what factories were to Germany in the mid 1800's.

But the point is: the time to change to pinyin was then- when literacy was at 20% and there was enthusiastic support for radical change! But there's no point in changing now. Why?

1) Most Chinese people are literate now. People who aren't literate suffer because of a lack of resources, not the problems of characters.

2) Characters are the best system for a monosyllabic language.

3) Characters are cool, with an inherent literary and historical richness that just isn't found in an alphabet.

Besides, had China switched to pinyin in the 1950's, most Western critics would have said, "How Orwellian! Reform a language "newspeak"-style to the point where all contacts with its ancient past are gone. Then mold the masses and manipulate them via language in any way the government wants".

Also, many if not most Chinese people pronounce characters in a way that doesn't 100% match pinyin.

[高可文]

In my Chinese class small skits are one of the ways we practice speech. Some of my classmates aren't too conversant in characters and usually write things up in pinyin. I never have any trouble pronouncing the skits when we do, the trouble is that I have no idea what they mean.

[高可文]

In my Chinese class small skits are one of the ways we practice speech. Some of my classmates aren't too conversant in characters and usually write things up in pinyin. I never have any trouble pronouncing the skits when we do, the trouble is that I have no idea what they mean.

[ala]

2) Characters are the best system for a monosyllabic language.

Vernacular Chinese are not monosyllabic languages.

[dmoser]

1) Most Chinese people are literate now. People who aren't literate suffer because of a lack of resources, not the problems of characters.

2) Characters are the best system for a monosyllabic language.

3) Characters are cool, with an inherent literary and historical richness that just isn't found in an alphabet.

Also, many if not most Chinese people pronounce characters in a way that doesn't 100% match pinyin.

This post makes some sense.

Point (1) is true. The time to have switched over was during the May 4th movement. Too late now. (Although the point of my original post -- now lost in the discourse -- is that the characters are harder precisely for quite literate people, in comparison to alphabetic scripts. "Literacy" obviously can be achieved with the characters, but it's a slightly different kind of literacy than alphabetic literacy. I.e., the active component is harder to master and maintain.)

Point (2) isn't linguistically valid. (For one thing, Chinese is not a monosyllabic language; rather it is a language where the large majority of the *morphemes* are monosyllabic. There is a big difference.) But it's true that if pinyin were adopted, Chinese wriitten language couldn't "get away" with so many terse forms of expression based on monosyllabic morphemes, as it does now. The language would indeed have to adapt slightly Your point would be more accurately expressed as: "Chinese characters enabled the creation of a kind of written style that exploits the *visually* transparent morphemes represented by symbols, and that style is now firmly established; and in this sense the written language, in a tight loop, now depends on the very characters that helped create the written style." But note: Most Chinese current texts are quite comprehensible when read outloud, and Chinese people in conversation do not speak terse gibberish to each other, so obviously pinyin would work fine for almost any discourse produced after 1949.

Point (3) is absolutely right on! I couldn't agree more. In the end, this may be the only real reason for keeping the characters.

The final point about Chinese people's pronunciation not matching pinyin makes no sense, however. The speech of a Texan, an Brit, an Indian, a New Yorker or an Australian do not match the dictionary pronunciation of English spelling, either. None of the speakers of any alphabetic script have uniform accents. This is simply a non-issue. In fact, if pinyin were adopted, Chinese accents would no doubt *converge* to the putonghua standard faster than they are now, since everyone would be nudged by the spelling into making their pronunciation more uniform.

[39degN]

In fact, if pinyin were adopted, Chinese accents would no doubt *converge* to the putonghua standard faster than they are now, since everyone would be nudged by the spelling into making their pronunciation more uniform.

1/indian started to speak english since 1757, they still speak indian-english right now.

2/destroying dialects is not the goal of chinese government.

[wushijiao]

Thanks dmoser. Yet my point #2 "Characters are the best system for a monosyllabic language" was ripped off from 林语堂， a man who knew a bit about Chinese.

As far as my point that most Chinese people don't pronounce pinyin 100% correctly, I think it makes a difference and can't easily be compared to English. A Texan, a New Yorker and a East Ender might all pronounce words differently, but then again, it's all the same language.

In China the line between language and dialect is very blurry. I would say Wu, Hakka, and Yue are all seperate languages from Mandarian. But then again, it all depends on how you define "language" and "dialect". As I like to say, a language is a dialect with a navy and an army. You might argue that China was only able to keep central control over such a vast about of territory, with various languages only through the use of characters. If so, had pinyin replaced characters non-northern dialect speakers might have produced a violent backlash. (But I have no evidence to support that). They'd at least be resentful, I think.

Either way, replacing characters with pinyin would have at least required a huge educational campaign on scale with nothing ever seen. Not only the childern in the country would have needed to be educated in pinyin, but all the adults (who read newspapers, memos, menus, tech books...etc) would have had to attend classes to relearn pinyin from characters. And during the 50's China had other worries: attack from the Yanks, providing food to all its people, employing people, rebuilding the war damaged stuff, and so on.

[ala]

张志公（1984）：“汉字有功劳，有它特有的长处，并且凝聚着强烈的民族感情，所以许多人不肯改革。另一方面，到了清朝后期，中华民族危在旦夕，有很多知识分子，想通过科学来挽救祖国的命运。他们感到，我们国家之所以落后，……汉字难是很重要的原因。从这种感情出发，他们急于要改革汉字。这两种感情，一种要爱护汉字，一种要改革汉字，看上去是矛盾的，对立的，其实都是一个出发点：爱祖国。两种感情都是可爱的，都是可尊敬的，这正是从两种不同的角度来看同一个问题，所看到的不同的方面实际上是统一的。所以在客观地探讨汉字的问题时，就要全面地、深入地、科学地加以考察，汉字到底有哪些有利因素，有哪些不利因素，不抱个人偏见，不带任何感情，这样才能实事求是。”

苏培成（1994）：“对汉字的前途，现在还不能做出结论，有待今后继续深入研究。近几年围绕汉字开展的学术讨论，加深了我们对汉字的认识，促进了汉字的研究。”

===

张志公 1984 《加紧对汉字进行多方面深入的研究》（1984年12月上海市心理学会和华东师范大学心理学系联合举办的“汉字心理学讨论会”上的讲话摘要。《评价》，3-11页。

尹斌庸、苏培成选编 1994 《科学地评价汉语汉字》，北京：华语教学出版社。

[sunyata]

dmoser wrote:

I'm sure if you were to stop and think about it, you would realize the world is more complicated than your comment warrants.

My wife is Chinese, and we have a 7-year-old daughter. We are currently wondering whether to educate her here in China or in the U.S. Whether or not she can learn and maintain the characters while going back and forth between the two countries is a real issue. Surely as a parent I have some vested interest in this issue, despite being a foreigner. And what about my daughter? Is she foreign or Chinese? What about children of Chinese immigrants in the U.S.? Should they be encouraged to learn Chinese characters? What about the increasing number of foreign kids being raised in China? Does race matter in any of this? The world is vastly more interconnected and complicated now. This kind of "Great Wall" thinking doesn't make much sense any more.

Well, Mr. Moser, I apologize for my backward "Great Wall thinking" and an overly simplified conception of the world, as my post warrants. I imagine, you have long ago ascended to a higher plane of existence, from which you can now look down at the world below with a superior understanding. I am also happy for you in your family endeavors and your personal interest in the development of Chinese language.

I believe I have the perfect solution for you, although after reading 15 pages of your posts, I am still quite uncertain of what your precise point of view on the issue is (probably due to my "Great Wall thinking" and numerous other shortcomings). However, in case you are a proponent of pinyin and want to see that as the official "writing system" of China, why not experiment with it right at home? You can teach your daughter pinyin only and see what happens. As for your other questions, they are not related to this topic and beyond my limited abilities to answer. Nonetheless, my "Great Wall thinking" tells me that replacing characters with pinyin would not work very smoothly in China. Even if it were forced to work, it would do more harm than good. If you and your wife think otherwise, you should prove your sincerity by applying your theory to practice and using your daughter as a test subject.

Good luck now!