Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[pazu]

Ala, how about a pinyin-cum-radical version?

[ala]

For Shanghainese at least, I don't think it's necessary to incorporate any feature of the radicals into the romanization, since there are very few homophones. Even in cases where homophones exist, the word order, and the German-style noun capitalization would disambiguate them. For the very rare homophone that remains somewhat ambiguous, specific stylistic changes could be made then. The advantage of Shanghainese is that it has a simple tonal system that does not require much marking (marking tones is a huge problem in Mandarin romanization btw), as result vernacular speech has also developed with this limited tonal constrast (the characters to buy mai3 and to sell mai4 are pronounced exactly the same in Shanghainese, but there is no ambiguity in saying buy or sell in Shanghainese). Second, the word spacing on the list of Shanghainese words is not made arbitrarily, but is for the most part based on the sandhi phrases in Shanghainese. A few of these words are rather long but are still spoken in a single breath and are perceived as single words by Shanghainese speakers, although quite strange to the English speaker (not to the German speaker though).

[ala]

See the very bottom of pg. 16 in this discussion for a list of vocabulary in Shanghainese romanization.

Simple Shanghainese sentences:

Zaenich, wo né aera äch tzach jou äch tsesach Dizici mathaerach.

Yesterday, I sold our old color television.

(né = object preposition, aera äch = our, jou äch = old, mathaerach = sold)

Ínwe, zan äch Tzoumach, aera to Dichisanti-ri marach tzach shín äch, sézach-roch íntsun äch Dizici.

Because, last weekend, we went to the electronics store and bought a new, thirty-six inch television.

(Tzoumach = weekend, to = [went] to, ri = in, marach = bought, tzach = a, shín äch = new, sézach-roch íntsun äch = thirty-six inch)

É, cíntzo Yadou, non thach wo iddo chi tóutou Sánti nanun (nana)?

Hey, tonight, how about you and I go shopping together?

(thach = and, …nanun? (..nana?) = how about, iddo = together, chi = go)

[roddy]

Could I remind everyone its possible to start new topics as well as continue old ones. Makes it easier for newcomers to find the info they are looking for, and God help anyone who comes in and tries to read all the way through this monster.

I'm not going to close it, but please ask yourself if your comments and info might be a better at the start of a new discussion rather than the tail end of a long, old one.

Roddy

[bathrobe]

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.

Sunyata, I find the statement 'I don't see why it should be the foreigners' business to even discuss it' hard to uphold. It would mean that no person (including yourself) would be able to make any kind of judgement about anything that pertains to or happens in another country. According to that kind of mentality, this Forum shouldn't even exist.

The point that Mr Moser was making at the very start of this thread is that 'native Chinese speakers are simply not able to write their native language with the same ease as users of alphabetic scripts, a problem which is directly attributable to the lack of any regular sound-to-symbol organizing principle in the Chinese script.' Mr Moser backed up his point with examples. You are free to disagree with him -- many people have -- but he has made a legitimate point and he has a legitimate personal interest in the writing system.

Mr Moser has also made it clear in a number of postings that he recognises the beauty and usefulness of Chinese characters. I don't believe he specifically advocated the replacement of characters with pinyin.

[sunyata]

Bathrobe:

I am not against discussing issues pertaining to other cultures, I just don't like reading opinions with an imperialistic tone. I agree, dmoser has shared interesting insights into Chinese language. He has brought to everyone's attention certain difficult aspects of the language that even native speakers may have problems with, but does that necessarily prove that the language needs to be reformed and simplified? I don't think it does.

I am not sure what dmoser's solutions may be, but his point seems to be that an alphabetic writing system is superior to a character writing system, because it is easier to master and use in eveyday life. While this may be so, I still don't see how that directly implies that Chinese must be further reformed. English is not the easiest language to learn either and has a lot of useless spelling and grammar rules. Why not worry about that first?

[BeijingSlacker]

Skimmed through a couple of pages and my eyes started to hurt.

Anyways, a couple of quick points to make:

--嚏 is NOT a simple character in term of the number of strokes. It does NOT make sense to say its a simple character in Chinese because it is simple in English (just " sneeze"). The degree of complexity of certain words can not be directly transferred from one language to another. For example, English words like "memorandum" "metropolitan" are just 备忘录 and 城市 in Chinese, which are all the simplest Chinese characters.

Even for simple English words, people still misspell them. On the show Street Smart, I once saw an American adult spelling "offend" as "affend".

The "sneeze" example shows that your Chinese is still at lower level because you still think in English and do word-to-word translation/comparision, which simply does not work. For instance, I can find many examples where one Chinese character needs a whole English sentence to explain, but I can not use this to draw the conclusion that Chinese is a more efficient language.

-- Also, I happen to read that ala fella's post, where he said Chinese required some kind of reform. One example he used is the distinction between ci and zi. I have to tell you that it took me 2 minutes to figure out what he meant by "The muddy distinction between ci and zi in Mandarin" because to me ci and zi are as different as ti and pi, bi and di. They are two totally different sounds. Obviously, his Mardarin is not so good, actually....... pretty bad if he even has problems with ci/zi. What he said is actually quite funny. Its like a mideast brother complaining about the pronunciation of light/right and demanding that some kind of reform be done about the /r/ and /l/ sounds in English.

So my suggestion to you is that next time you discuss Mardarin with any foreigners or Chinese learners, before you make any comments about Mandarin, please please do make it clear to them that you are not a native Mandarin speaker and you have serious problems with Mandarin too.

You know what. I think I will start a thread on this.

[ala]

-- Also, I happen to read that ala fella's post, where he said Chinese required some kind of reform. One example he used is the distinction between ci and zi. I have to tell you that it took me 2 minutes to figure out what he meant by "The muddy distinction between ci and zi in Mandarin" because to me ci and zi are as different as ti and pi, bi and di. They are two totally different sounds. Obviously, his Mardarin is not so good, actually....... pretty bad if he even has problems with ci/zi. What he said is actually quite funny. Its like a mideast brother complaining about the pronunciation of light/right and demanding that some kind of reform be done about the /r/ and /l/ sounds in English.

I believe you severely misunderstood what I meant by ci 词 and zi 字 distinction. 我的意思是中国人的正词概念不规则，用词的精确度比较低。 I was not referring to their pronunciation.

[BeijingSlacker]

I apologize for the misunderstanding. I still don't understand why Zheng Ci is an advantage English has over Chinese.

Can you explain it a bit?

I believe wording is not an easy thing in all languages, and English definitely has many vague grammar (i.e. compared to French) and words that can lead to misunderstanding.

For example, you can take a look at this:

English is a stupid language.

There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.

English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend, that you comb through annals of history but not a single annal? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preacher praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?

Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? Park on driveways and drive on parkways?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another.

Transport: we drive on the parkway and park in the driveway; cargo comes by air and shipments by road.

[高可文]

--嚏 is NOT a simple character in term of the number of strokes. It does NOT make sense to say its a simple character in Chinese because it is simple in English (just " sneeze"). The degree of complexity of certain words can not be directly transferred from one language to another. For example, English words like "memorandum" "metropolitan" are just 备忘录 and 城市 in Chinese, which are all the simplest Chinese characters.

This an excellent point.

[mncuso]

For example, English words like "memorandum" "metropolitan" are just 备忘录 and 城市 in Chinese, which are all the simplest Chinese characters.

I entirely agree that the use of particular examples as anecodotal evidence proves little, but I would have to suggest that these are not the best examples. In English, "metropolis" is a word used relatively infrequently carrying a connotation of a very large city. The typical translation of "城市" would, it seems to me, be simply "city".

Similary, "memorandum" implies a relatively official document, while the vernacular usage would probably shorten it in most cases to "memo", also a very simple word.

Chinese characters are beautiful, and obviously have immense cultural importance, but I don't think it best to defend them on grounds of simplicity, even anecdotally.

[sunyata]

Nice article, BeijingSlacker! That was exactly my point. You start finding faults with Chinese, as if your native tongue is much better. Of course it may be easier for you to master it as a native speaker, but for those who have to learn English as a second language, it is just as difficult as learning Chinese characters may be for you.

[ala]

metropolis = 大都市

[bathrobe]

Going back to sm_sung's tongue-twister, I must say that I was only partly able to make sense of the pinyin. When I saw the character version it was as though the room was suddenly flooded with light.

But, there are a couple of 'buts':

* A tongue-twister or riddle is specifically designed to test a language to the limits on things like words with similar pronunciations. They are by their nature artificial and designed to trick or confuse. In cases like this, Chinese characters, which distinguish among different morphemes with the same pronunciation, come out on top.

If you read the article on Dungan, I think you will find it specifically pointed out that an alphabetic writing system expects users to find ways to avoid ambiguity caused by homophones. Tongue-twisters go out of their way to do the opposite!

* When I saw the word 'banyan' it didn't click at all (not in my active or passive vocab), but when I saw the characters, I knew instantly what it meant. That proves that I'm addicted to characters, for better or for worse! (I should explain that I originally came to Chinese from Japanese and as a result I still rely on Chinese characters to 'understand' Chinese -- my reading comprehension is better than my listening comprehension). If you have already acquired a good knowledge of characters it certainly goes a long way to understanding the language as it is set up now. The abolitionists might say, of course, that this entire reliance on characters to understand the language is putting the cart before the horse -- if my Chinese was really any good I shouldn't have any trouble understanding a word like banyan!

I think that Mr Moser's references to a 'trade-off' are very important. Any change that you might propose to the writing system are going to have far-reaching consequences; I don't think anyone pretends any differently.

Let me take a simple example from English.

English uses apostrophes to indicate a possessive, e.g., my friend's house (= the house of my friend). For the plural, the apostrophe goes outside the s, i.e., my friends' house (= the house of my friends).

People who love the English language will proudly point out how very useful this is in showing whether the house belongs to one friend or several friends.

Unfortunately, the pronunciation of the two expressions is exactly the same, so in speech people have to go out of their way to make clear (if it is important) whether the house belongs to one friend or several friends.

Now, these apostrophes, useful as they are, tend to be misused or even omitted by careless writers. Whereupon we might say, 'Let's abolish the possessive apostrophe altogether; why use a written device as a crutch for something that isn't expressed in pronunciation!'. That is where you will get two camps:

1. We can't abolish the apostrophe because it is so useful; look how it indicates in an economical and simple way whether the noun is a singular or plural. If you abolish it, it will be a great loss to the English language!

2. The apostrophe simply adds an extra burden. Leave it out and everything will be simpler. No one distinguishes between the singular and plural in their pronunciation. If you really need to distinguish, there are other ways of doing it (e.g., saying 'of the friend/friends).

As you can see, the abolitionists are not simply advocating a change in the writing system; they are suggesting that the language itself will have to adjust to accommodate the change.

Magnify this a hundred thousand times, and you get the arguments we are seeing in this thread, which has been discussing not simply the change of a single feature, but the wholesale replacement of a writing system.

[beirne]

Ok, part of the thread is degenerating into attacking English. This is missing the point of the post that started the discussion 300+ messages ago. As you will note when you read the topic, dmoser states that the Chinese character system is objectively harder, even for the Chinese. BeijingSlacker's posting is entertaining, but does not refute the idea that the character system is harder than a phonetic system would be. Sunyata then follows up saying:

Nice article, BeijingSlacker! That was exactly my point. You start finding faults with Chinese, as if your native tongue is much better. Of course it may be easier for you to master it as a native speaker, but for those who have to learn English as a second language, it is just as difficult as learning Chinese characters may be for you.

Sunyata admits that using words like eggplant and hamburger are not a big deal for native speakers but are a problem for foreign learners. David Moser's point was not that the Chinese characters are just hard for him or other learners (like me). His point was that the characters are even harder for for native Chinese than a phonetic system of writing. Now this point has been debated in useful ways in this thread, with tradeoffs discussed as well as discussion of the actual difficulty in learning the characters.

Bringing up quirks in spoken English can be saved for when someone whines about the tones, useage of le, measure words, or some other difficult feature for the student of Chinese. Just like the misleading words BeijingSlacker listed, the opaqueness of many words, and other aspects of spoken English, these are just the kind of things one has to put up with when learning another language. Natives learn Chinese as easily as natives learn English, and you just have to put up with the differences when learning the other language.

So the topic is whether the characters are harder than a phonetic system for the Chinese themselves, and if they are harder are there are other benefits that make the system worthwhile.

I generally agree with David's academic points, but to be fair I will list some reasons why the character system won't go away any time soon. They are not new points, but I wanted to list them in one place to clear my head.

*It would be too expensive and impractival to change the writing system.

*The characters are an integral part of Chinese culture.

*The characters form their own language. The various forms of spoken Chinese are just spoken manifestations of the true Chinese language formed by the characters.

*Much literature would be lost because it is incomprehensible in pinyin.

[BeijingSlacker]

I entirely agree that the use of particular examples as anecodotal evidence proves little, but I would have to suggest that these are not the best examples. In English, "metropolis" is a word used relatively infrequently carrying a connotation of a very large city. The typical translation of "城市" would, it seems to me, be simply "city".

well, I know the translation I gave is not accurate. I stayed up all night and wasn't really alert at that time. 大都市，which may be a better translation, is still the simplest word to Chinese natives. No one, who can write, would write it wrong. but I have seen English natives mispell metropolitan. I can give you more examples to show what an invalid reasoning it is to say a Chinese character is simple in Chinese because the character's English translation is simple in English.

For example: encyclopaedia/encyclopedia = 百科全书

Firstly, all the 4 characters in 百科全书 are very simple.

Secondly, the combination of these four characters is very intuitive.

I am pretty confident that any Chinese speakers who can write would not make mistakes in writing this word. I would imagine many more English speakers would misspell encyclopaedia/encyclopedia.

A couple of more examples: 一月，二月，三月，四月...... 十一月,十二月 vs January, February, March, April.........November, December.

I am too lazy to list more examples, and I think my point is made.

Chinese characters are beautiful, and obviously have immense cultural importance, but I don't think it best to defend them on grounds of simplicity, even anecdotally.

In my post, I was just disproving his particular reasoning regarding to the simplicity of the language. I wasn't trying to evaluate Chinese language as a whole.

[BeijingSlacker]

Ok, part of the thread is degenerating into attacking English.

I wasn't trying to ATTACK English. The difficulty of a language is relative measurement. It only makes sense when you compare one language to other languages. All languages have pros and cons. It is valid to show Chinese is not that difficult by finding the pitfalls in English.

As you will note when you read the topic, dmoser states that the Chinese character system is objectively harder, even for the Chinese.

The problem is that he is NOT able to judge the difficulty of a phonetic system in an OBJECTIVE way, which means he is NOT able to compare the two systems in an OBJECTIVE way. Therefore, he is NOT at the position to conclude that Chinese character system is OBJECTIVELY harder than a phonetic system . (Neither am I.)

[BeijingSlacker]

Bringing up quirks in spoken English can be saved for when someone whines about the tones, useage of le, measure words, or some other difficult feature for the student of Chinese.

Guess quite a few people misunderstood my reason of quoting that list. I was responding to a statement Ala made, which was written in Chinese. I pasted it below.

ala wrote:

我的意思是中国人的正词概念不规则，用词的精确度比较低。

I generally agree with David's academic points, but to be fair I will list some reasons why the character system won't go away any time soon. They are not new points, but I wanted to list them in one place to clear my head.

*It would be too expensive and impractival to change the writing system.

*The characters are an integral part of Chinese culture.

*The characters form their own language. The various forms of spoken Chinese are just spoken manifestations of the true Chinese language formed by the characters.

*Much literature would be lost because it is incomprehensible in pinyin.

I dont have any academic background in linguistics, but I believe you missed at least one point:

The Chinese characters are pictographic. It carrys more visual content. Its excellent to be used in literature and poetry, where human feelings are expressed by written words. For example, 火 vs fire. The English word fire only carrys the meaning, whereas the Chinese character 火 carrys the visual effect as well as the meaning. In a word, there is possibly more to a Chinese character than to its English counterpart.

[beirne]

BeijingSlacker said:

The Chinese characters are pictographic. It carrys more visual content. Its excellent to be used in literature and poetry, where human feelings are expressed by written words. For example, 火 vs fire. The English word fire only carrys the meaning, whereas the Chinese character 火 carrys the visual effect as well as the meaning. In a word, there is possibly more to a Chinese character than to its English counterpart.

I hate to say this, but in general Chinese characters are not pictographic. Most are based on phonetic similarities at the time the character was created. Having said that, I do agree that the characters have been used in literature and poetry in interesting ways, including pictographic, that are impossible with an alphabet, so that is another point to add to the list.

[beirne]

BeijingSlacker said:

The problem is that he is NOT able to judge the difficulty of a phonetic system in an OBJECTIVE way, which means he is NOT able to compare the two systems in an OBJECTIVE way. Therefore, he is NOT at the position to conclude that Chinese character system is OBJECTIVELY harder than a phonetic system . (Neither am I.)

Then who is?