Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[ala]

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.

Idiosyncracies in languages have nothing to do with the point I'm driving at. All languages have idiosyncracies, but the discussion here is on the writing system, hence that list you posted is irrelevant.

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。

The main issue here is in word spacing and morphemes. Chinese does not have word spacing. And because of characters, each Chinese morpheme is TOO obvious in words. It becomes a hindrance. The distinction between what is part of a single word expressing a specific idea and what modifies a word is muddy for most Chinese. It presents little problem for casual use, literature, poetry, but becomes an issue in new and innovative scientific journals, dense social sciences, philosophy, and law. It becomes an issue where precision is needed in an unfamiliar environment and context, and where ideas need to experience a certain degree of abstraction and creativity. We can't always translate words using our single morpheme-based Chinese characters from ideas created by others. Or maybe that is actually the plan?

An initial solution can be heavier emphasis on 正词 in general education (some attempts have already been made), and to place less emphasis on dissecting a word into separate morphemes. The latter will be quite unfeasible with Chinese characters, and how characters are taught today. Essentially, educational policy should emphasize in teaching words (and characters through words), and not individual characters. The precision problem may be solved by this tactic. But the creativity issue will still remain, because the characters still restrict the abstraction of compound-character words by being too concrete and descriptive.

[bathrobe]

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 .

I think the point that Beijingslacker is making is that dmoser's examples are quite selective and do not properly represent the total picture for either English or Chinese.

It is interesting that a number of dmoser's examples relate to body parts or functions (e.g., 'knee', 'sneeze'), which for some reason are among the more difficult characters even though they represent everyday words. It is interesting to speculate why this would be so.

[dmoser]

It is interesting that a number of dmoser's examples relate to body parts or functions (e.g., 'knee', 'sneeze'), which for some reason are among the more difficult characters even though they represent everyday words. It is interesting to speculate why this would be so.

Yes, actually I was deliberately choosing everyday, high-frequency words for comparison, precisely because I wanted to demonstrate that this is not just a rare problem involving certain unusual, pesky, high-falutin’ words that Mr. Average Joe or Zhang San Li Si would never bother with.

But this post brings up a good point that should also be dealt with. It is true that high-frequency words—in any language—tend to be the most irregular in morphology and orthography. The most common verbs in English are the ones with the weird conjugations (like eat-ate-eaten, do-did-done, fly-flew-flown, etc.), whereas the low-frequency or less basic ones just tack on “-ed” (contemplate-contemplated, graduate-graduated, etc.). (Steven Pinker has a great book on this subject called "Words and Rules", by the way, which is highly accessible and well-written.) And also with spelling and orthography. The most basic English words tend to retain archaic spelling rules, and the oldest or commonest Chinese characters often do not adhere to the radical-phonetic 表意/表音 principle. (Note that even this fact doesn’t exactly get Chinese characters “off the hook.” Surely one wouldn’t say “Oh, this problem isn’t so bad, since it only involves—*the commonest words in the language*!!” One has to wonder what a writing system is for, after all.)

So yes, in a way the commonest characters in Chinese can be the hardest to remember, because their structure tends to be more arbitrary. (Although the body parts are fairly regular, all having the “flesh” radical 月(肉) and usually some reasonable phonetic, like 胳膊.) So Chinese people do forget characters like ti 嚔 as in “sneeze”, because, other than the mouth radical, what on earth could help one to remember the rest of the character? All those fascinating marks have nothing to do with either the sound or meaning of “sneeze”. So to me, forgetting the character is completely understandable and forgivable. Only some rare person with a photographic memory could easily retain such skills.

But common English words are also the most irregular, like “knee”, with the unusual “kn” coding for “n”, “eye”, and “woman”, whose vowels hardly corresponding to anything in the sound. The question one has to ask is, why don’t highly literate English speakers have difficulty writing words like these? I think the answer is, even weak phoneticity is better than none at all. “Knee”, “eye” and “woman” may not have exemplary sound-to-spelling rules, but their phonetic content seems to be enough for native speakers to retrieve the word form. In Chinese the connection between sound and writing is SO much weaker that it is very often of no use at all. There are phonetic hints in words like “knee” 膝(盖), and “elbow” (胳膊)肘 and “key” 钥匙, but literate Chinese still sometimes have trouble retrieving these. And even totally regular words like boji 簸箕 “dustpan”, can leave even the most educated Chinese bookworm stumped. Again, this writing system is harder for them, too.

Yesterday at a restaurant in Beijing, a college-educated Chinese friend of mine stumbled over the characters for bocai 菠菜 “spinach” and zi 紫 “purple”. I was amazed, since these would seem to be among the easiest characters. He was probably just a bit lazy; if he had thought for a few more seconds he would have retrieved them. He laughed “I hardly write characters anymore, so they're fading from my memory.” And I replied “I hardly write English by hand anymore, either, so why aren't the commonest English words fading from *my* memory?” But the point is, even the phonetics of these characters, 波 in 菠 and 此in 紫 weren't all that much help to him.

I don’t want to bore everyone to death with examples, but I guess I want to emphasize that my conclusions are not based on rarified academic theories, but really arose bottom-up from witnessing countless incidents of forgetting in everyday life that really seemed to have no parallel in the West.

And I just want to reiterate the point that the process of forgetting how to write characters is qualitatively different from the process of forgetting the correct spelling of a word. See earlier posts on this (if you have the patience to wade through all this verbiage).

[bathrobe]

The main issue here is in word spacing and morphemes. Chinese does not have word spacing. And because of characters, each Chinese morpheme is TOO obvious in words. It becomes a hindrance. The distinction between what is part of a single word expressing a specific idea and what modifies a word is muddy for most Chinese. It presents little problem for casual use, literature, poetry, but becomes an issue in new and innovative scientific journals, dense social sciences, philosophy, and law. It becomes an issue where precision is needed in an unfamiliar environment and context, and where ideas need to experience a certain degree of abstraction and creativity.

I personally like the idea that words should be better spelled out in Chinese writing. Chinese generally view their language in terms of 'characters/morphemes', which, for better or for worse, has a distorting effect on linguistic perceptions.

On the other hand, I wonder if you could clarify exactly how you see the current system as a 'hindrance'. To what extent is the distinction between 'integral components of words' and 'elements modifying words' crucial in scientific journals, social sciences, philosophy, and law? How does it become an issue in regard to 'precision', 'abstraction', and 'creativity'? A few examples would help a lot in clarifying the thrust of your argument.

[39degN]

The main issue here is in word spacing and morphemes. Chinese does not have word spacing. And because of characters, each Chinese morpheme is TOO obvious in words. It becomes a hindrance. The distinction between what is part of a single word expressing a specific idea and what modifies a word is muddy for most Chinese. It presents little problem for casual use, literature, poetry, but becomes an issue in new and innovative scientific journals, dense social sciences, philosophy, and law. It becomes an issue where precision is needed in an unfamiliar environment and context, and where ideas need to experience a certain degree of abstraction and creativity.

sure, the precondition is, to a foreingn medium chinese learner. i have never heard anybody finished his junior high school is unable to distinguish this.

meanwhile, i dont think ppl with this basic skill disorder have the ability to discuss scientific journals, philosophy.

[39degN]

So yes, in a way the commonest characters in Chinese can be the hardest to remember, because their structure tends to be more arbitrary. (Although the body parts are fairly regular, all having the “flesh” radical 月(肉) and usually some reasonable phonetic, like 胳膊.) So Chinese people do forget characters like ti 嚔 as in “sneeze”, because, other than the mouth radical, what on earth could help one to remember the rest of the character? All those fascinating marks have nothing to do with either the sound or meaning of “sneeze”. So to me, forgetting the character is completely understandable and forgivable. Only some rare person with a photographic memory could easily retain such skills.

I don't know how you got such conclusion that 嚏 is a common character, only because that's a common action? Just ask how many Chinese have written 嚏 over three times in his whole life, except while they learning it in school.

In Chinese the connection between sound and writing is SO much weaker that it is very often of no use at all. There are phonetic hints in words like “knee” 膝(盖), and “elbow” (胳膊)肘 and “key” 钥匙, but literate Chinese still sometimes have trouble retrieving these. And even totally regular words like boji 簸箕 “dustpan”, can leave even the most educated Chinese bookworm stumped. Again, this writing system is harder for them, too.

Precondition as above, most of them have never written簸箕 over 1 time in their whole life.

Yesterday at a restaurant in Beijing, a college-educated Chinese friend of mine stumbled over the characters for bocai 菠菜 “spinach” and zi 紫 “purple”. I was amazed, since these would seem to be among the easiest characters. He was probably just a bit lazy; if he had thought for a few more seconds he would have retrieved them. He laughed “I hardly write characters anymore, so they're fading from my memory.” And I replied “I hardly write English by hand anymore, either, so why aren't the commonest English words fading from *my* memory?” But the point is, even the phonetics of these characters, 波 in 菠 and 此in 紫 weren't all that much help to him.

I start to worry about your friend's health, meanwhile believe me or not, a few of science or English majors didn't seriously learn Chinese writing. In addition, it's not because Chinese is harder to learn.

You hardly writing English by hand anymore doesn't mean you hardly typing it on computer.

I don't want to bore everyone to death with examples, but I guess I want to emphasize that my conclusions are not based on rarified academic theories, but really arose bottom-up from witnessing countless incidents of forgetting in everyday life that really seemed to have no parallel in the West.

Certainly some western friends of mine have also forgotten spelling of some voc, I have no reason to doubt their IQ or english is harder.

你的长篇累牍的论证跟中国人学英语时的"英语干嘛有这么多时态啊,看我们中文没有时态不也没把过去现在将来的事说得很清楚了嘛?"并由此得出结论"英语应该把时态也去掉,按汉语的模式,同样可以表达清楚"没有任何本质的区别.

同时必须承认,英语是一种拼音化做的最差的语言,因为它拼写基本是不规范的, 我们是不是也要得出结论,英语到了必须改革的时候了,因为如果拼写规范化,三个月就可以做到学会整个拼写系统. 你接受吗?

[bathrobe]

39degN said:

没有任何本质的区别

Somewhat disagree.

Perhaps we have a fundamental philosophical disagreement here, but the 'writing system' should conceptually be distinguished from the 'language'. English has tense, whether you are literate or illiterate. Chinese characters are the way the language happens to be written, and it is possible to be able to speak Chinese without being able to write it.

I don't know how you got such conclusion that 嚏 is a common character, only because that's a common action? Just ask how many Chinese have written 嚏 over three times in his whole life, except while they learning it in school.

No doubt this is true, but 'da penti' is certainly a common expression in speech. I wonder why it's so uncommon in writing? Is it something in Chinese culture that inhibits people from writing about sneezes (maybe it's not regarded as a normal sort of thing to write about), or is it because they can't remember the character so they don't bother? Just curious.

dmoser wrote:

a college-educated Chinese friend of mine stumbled over the characters for bocai 菠菜 “spinach” and zi 紫 “purple”

I agree that this is rather peculiar. I don't know many people who have this severe a problem.

[39degN]

Chinese characters are the way the language happens to be written, and it is possible to be able to speak Chinese without being able to write it.

dont you think english speaking ppl have the same situation?

by the way, how do you think the english spelling?

when i started to learn Russian in junior high, i found that i can master the whole writing system within 1 month, but what does that mean?

i can read every article, but i still dont understand what is it talking about.

[39degN]

No doubt this is true, but 'da penti' is certainly a common expression in speech. I wonder why it's so uncommon in writing? Is it something in Chinese culture that inhibits people from writing about sneezes (maybe it's not regarded as a normal sort of thing to write about), or is it because they can't remember the character so they don't bother? Just curious.

打喷嚏确实常见, 但是你知道为什么不常用吗? 因为人们不会一见面就寒暄:

"唉,今天又打了十六个喷嚏!"

"你今天打喷嚏了没有?"

"大家好, 在今天的节目开始之前,我先打两个喷嚏!"

[39degN]

No doubt this is true, but 'da penti' is certainly a common expression in speech. I wonder why it's so uncommon in writing? Is it something in Chinese culture that inhibits people from writing about sneezes (maybe it's not regarded as a normal sort of thing to write about), or is it because they can't remember the character so they don't bother? Just curious.

打喷嚏确实常见, 但是你知道为什么不常用吗? 因为人们不会一见面就寒暄:

"唉,今天又打了十六个喷嚏!"

"你今天打喷嚏了没有?"

"大家好, 在今天的节目开始之前,我先打两个喷嚏!"

[bathrobe]

39degN wrote:

when i started to learn Russian in junior high, i found that i can master the whole writing system within 1 month, but what does that mean?

i can read every article, but i still dont understand what is it talking about.

Yes, but all you have to do is learn the meaning of the words; you don't have to learn the meaning and a new character to write them!

Yes, once you have learnt Chinese characters they allow you to infer with a degree of accuracy what the meaning of a new word may be, but Chinese is not unique in that respect. For instance, you can tell from German Fernsehgeraet that you are dealing with a piece of equipment that allows you to 'see far', which is just as good as 电视 ('see electronically').

Vietnamese is an even better example: it is quite possible to guess what the meaning of a word is from its Chinese roots without knowing the Chinese character.

So your observation actually backs up dmoser's thesis.

[39degN]

Yes, but all you have to do is learn the meaning of the words; you don't have to learn the meaning and a new character to write them!

yes, but dont you think that without every character's unique characteristic, the meaning of every single word even more hard to master? i mean with pin yin, theay all seems alike to each other.

P.S. i have to leave right now for something, lets disscus it in the night.

[bathrobe]

but dont you think that without every character's unique characteristic, the meaning of every single word even more hard to master? i mean with pin yin, theay all seems alike to each other.

For me, yes, but I'm addicted to characters. I quite understand what you are talking about. How could 'da4' mean 'large' without the character 大 to show what it actually means?

Unfortunately, Vietnamese has already proved that it is quite possible to write 'Chinese words' without using 'Chinese characters'. We are not talking about some pie-in-the-sky theory here, we are talking about a language whose vocab is largely composed of Chinese words that has successfully done away with Chinese characters.

The main argument against this is that Vietnamese has a lot more distinctive sounds than Mandarin, so it is not such a problem. True, but this is not a decisive factor; if you write in words the problem is much reduced.

打喷嚏确实常见, 但是你知道为什么不常用吗? 因为人们不会一见面就寒暄:

"唉,今天又打了十六个喷嚏!"

"你今天打喷嚏了没有?"

"大家好, 在今天的节目开始之前,我先打两个喷嚏!"

OK, I get the point, but once or twice in a lifetime is really quite ridiculous!

[dmoser]

I don't know how you got such conclusion that 嚏 is a common character, only because that's a common action? Just ask how many Chinese have written 嚏 over three times in his whole life, except while they learning it in school.

Argg! Some people seem to be missing the whole point here.

Do you think "sneeze" is a commonly written word in English? Of course not! I don't think I've written it more than once in several years. But I could go 25 years without writing it at all and STILL be able to write it down if need be because English is fundamentally a PHONETIC system. There is a LINK between the sounds and the orthography. They REINFORCE one another. I can even GUESS with a high degree of accuracy at the spelling of a totally unfamiliar word because there are a finite set of RULES for getting from sound to symbol. My Beijing third graders can make good guesses about "sneeze" without ever encountering the word. They CANNOT guess how to write 嚏, not in a million years. And if they learn it once, and then don't write it again for three years, they are VERY likely to forget it, because humans are not computers, for god's sake.

而且,我们讨论的是文字的问题;文字是记录语言的一种符号, 就是一种工具.

If the tool doesn't allow me to easily write down ANYTHING I can say, then what good is it? English is NOT as user-friendly as Spanish, right?

And it's because the sound-to-spelling correspondence is more flawed, right? Then why can't we just agree that Chinese writing is less user-friendly than English, and just go on from there?

The blatant fact staring us (or me, anyway) in the face is that the smartest Chinese speakers I know DO forget all the time how to write characters for words like "sneeze" and "key" and "dustpan", and smart English speakers DO NOT forget. How do you explain this? It's not rocket science. Chinese and Westerners are equally smart, equally resourceful, equally gifted with memory. The reason for the difference is that the basic, fundamental organizing principle of the Chinese writing system makes is harder, HARDER to retrieve the symbols that stand for the sounds of the language. That's my only point. Sheesh.

In my experience, MOST of my Chinese friends and relatives cheerfully admit that the Chinese system is the mother of all hard scripts, and that they often simply draw a complete blank when trying to write a character. I almost don't see the point of arguing with that.

And it also seems pointless to keep bringing up the old "Well, don't English speakers spell words wrong sometimes?" It's not the same, folks.

Chinese people are not just writing the equivalent of "sneez" or something, they are very often simply STUMPED.

And also, pointing out this problem with Chinese characters (and a host of others) does not automatically mean that I advocating dumping them into the 簸箕 (dustpan) of history. I LOVE Chinese characters, for heaven's sake. I love my wife, too, but I think I can admit she has one or two flaws in her "character" (sorry), without dumping her.

Let's move on and focus on more productive questions.

[beirne]

dmoser says:

And also, pointing out this problem with Chinese characters (and a host of others) does not automatically mean that I advocating dumping them into the 簸箕 (dustpan) of history. I LOVE Chinese characters, for heaven's sake. I love my wife, too, but I think I can admit she has one or two flaws in her "character" (sorry), without dumping her.

Let's move on and focus on more productive questions.

I agree with your points about the characters, but just to clarify the discussion, is the only point you want to make that the characters are harder than an alphabetic system?

[dmoser]

I agree with your points about the characters, but just to clarify the discussion, is the only point you want to make that the characters are harder than an alphabetic system?

Dear Beirne,

It's not the only point I would like to make, but it seems impossible to even get people to agree on THIS one. It would be nice to at least get a consensus on this basic point so we can move onto point B.

But once we agree on the relative difficulty and cumbersome nature of the Chinese system, there are zillions of questions to ask:

How serious is this difference? Can we just live with it, or is it going to hurt Chinese culture and literacy into the 21st century?

Should the Chinese education system be revised to improve the situation with the characters?

Should the use of pinyin be increased or gradually expanded in scope? Should certain materials be published in both pinyin and character form?

We all know pinyin has its flaws. Should it be improved?

Should the number of characters be reduced to a more manageable level?

(As they did with Japanese Kanji)

Should the characters be increasingly used phonetically, like a large syllabary? (Like Japanese kana)

Should character simplification be continued?

Can the characters be changed somewhat to make their phonetic components simpler and more reliable? (Somewhat akin to English spelling reform, which hasn't caught on, either.)

Can technology be better exploited to increase the efficiency of Chinese word processing and to allow users to more easily retrieve characters?

Should the gap between writing and speech be narrowed in Chinese to allow for greater use of pinyin? Is it narrowing anyway, no matter what we do?

Is writing by hand going to become obsolete soon (with the advent of voice-activated technology etc.), making all these problems simply irrelevent someday?

Is everyone in the world going to gradually quit reading and writing anyway, and just watch MTV their whole lives? In which case we can forget about all these silly issues and just enjoy a hedonistic, illiterate lifestyle? (I'm only half kidding.)

Obviously I'm NOT necessarily advocating any of this. I just think the questions should be asked.

[39degN]

Do you think "sneeze" is a commonly written word in English? Of course not! I don't think I've written it more than once in several years. But I could go 25 years without writing it at all and STILL be able to write it down if need be because English is fundamentally a PHONETIC system. There is a LINK between the sounds and the orthography. They REINFORCE one another. I can even GUESS with a high degree of accuracy at the spelling of a totally unfamiliar word because there are a finite set of RULES for getting from sound to symbol.

I have never said sneeze is a commonly written word in English, I just pointed out that your point of "So yes, in a way the commonest characters in Chinese can be the hardest to remember, because their structure tends to be more arbitrary." Is not true and citing 嚏 is not convincing. It's YOU said that it's commonest word, not me, it neither has deal with English here.

My Beijing third graders can make good guesses about "sneeze" without ever encountering the word. They CANNOT guess how to write 嚏, not in a million years. And if they learn it once, and then don't write it again for three years, they are VERY likely to forget it, because humans are not computers, for god's sake.

Don't you think there should have been the possibility that your third grader's English(writing) is better than Chinese? Seems they are computers on English according to your former post, for god's sake.

Then let them try examples below posted by Beijing slacker, in addition add' Wednesday' and so on (you know it better).

Pls think about

--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.

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.

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

而且,我们讨论的是文字的问题;文字是记录语言的一种符号, 就是一种工具.

If the tool doesn't allow me to easily write down ANYTHING I can say, then what good is it? English is NOT as user-friendly as Spanish, right?

And it's because the sound-to-spelling correspondence is more flawed, right? Then why can't we just agree that Chinese writing is less user-friendly than English, and just go on from there?

I have never been refuting this, but Chinese writing system is less user friendly than English has not been proven yet, seems your job is trying to make us being convinced, shouldn't be forcing us to believe it. And if my memory serves me correctly, your former point is"Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese." But seems you fed so much other stuff here.

Meanwhile mind you that for us character is not only a tool, it means so much. It's not the whole story, meanwhile we think "one-off" thinking sucks. It'll destroy not only Chinese culture, but all the world culture.

The blatant fact staring us (or me, anyway) in the face is that the smartest Chinese speakers I know DO forget all the time how to write characters for words like "sneeze" and "key" and "dustpan", and smart English speakers DO NOT forget. How do you explain this?

Are you sure, with some examl like above quoted from Beijing slacker's words? And how about those many others?

In my experience, MOST of my Chinese friends and relatives cheerfully admit that the Chinese system is the mother of all hard scripts, and that they often simply draw a complete blank when trying to write a character. I almost don't see the point of arguing with that.

That's because they are in different way of thinking, there are so many Chinese proud of Chinese is the hardest one language in the world, tho obviously it's not true.

And also, pointing out this problem with Chinese characters (and a host of others) does not automatically mean that I advocating dumping them into the 簸箕 (dustpan) of history. I LOVE Chinese characters, for heaven's sake. I love my wife, too, but I think I can admit she has one or two flaws in her "character" (sorry), without dumping her.

No matter you love it or not, incorrect point couldn't be accepted, unless you proved that it's true.

It's not the only point I would like to make, but it seems impossible to even get people to agree on THIS one. It would be nice to at least get a consensus on this basic point so we can move onto point B.

We have never been stopping you make any new point here, neither objecting you being thinking, but just pointing out your misunderstanding of thinking. Ppl disagreeing is simply because of your reasoning not convincing.

P.S. i dont wanna continue this agu either, but i cant help to have obsessive compulsive disorder to correct bias.

[bathrobe]

I have never been refuting this, but Chinese writing system is less user friendly than English has not been proven yet, seems your job is trying to make us being convinced, shouldn't be forcing us to believe it.

Frankly, I think he has proved it within his own terms of reference. Learning characters is harder than learning a phonetic script. As you've admitted yourself, you could learn to read Russian in a month, which is definitely not the case with Chinese. How much more 'objective' does dmoser have to get?

This does not deny the other advantages of Chinese characters, which have been pointed out time and time again. But to maintain that learning several thousand characters is objectively no more difficult than learning a decent alphabet and spelling system, and no more difficult to forget, is quite simply nonsense.

The problem is, as you say, 'seems you fed so much other stuff here', but that is not dmoser's problem, it's the problem of the thread, where everybody has gone off on his own agenda. One of the most pernicious agendas is:

Meanwhile mind you that for us character is not only a tool, it means so much. It's not the whole story, meanwhile we think "one-off" thinking sucks. It'll destroy not only Chinese culture, but all the world culture.

In other words, you are not willing to give dmoser an inch because you fear your world will be destroyed. This siege mentality will not lead to any new insights; all you are doing is fighting a block-by-block battle with the determination that nothing, not even the most obvious point, can be conceded. But as you can see from his earlier posting, the destruction of world culture is not dmoser's intention.

The attitude that 'everything is fine with the Chinese script; we don't even want to think about possible weak points' is almost reactionary. Not even Chinese in the past have taken such an attitude. If you look closely, you will notice that modern Chinese dictionaries are very different from their predecessors. For instance, unlike the Kangxi Dictionary, modern dictionaries (1) list character compounds or words, not simply individual characters, and (2) arrange characters in alphabetical order, not by radical. These have both taken place under the influence of the West, because Chinese scholars accepted that it offered certain advantages over the traditional approach. If Chinese scholars had taken the attitude that not a single point could be conceded, we would still be using the Kangxi dictionary.

[39degN]

Frankly, I think he has proved it within his own terms of reference. Learning characters is harder than learning a phonetic script. As you've admitted yourself, you could learn to read Russian in a month, which is definitely not the case with Chinese. How much more 'objective' does dmoser have to get?

Ok, I regreted that I was not sober that time to tell such a stupid maybe-fact.

And sure learning a "whole writing system"will be much harder than learning the "basic regulation of a system", don't change the main point. thus, for example, learning pinyin and its regulation is much easier than learning basic characters to be able to write articles, (note that it's not learning pinyin to be able to write articales...)

I think dmoser's point is "the writing system constituted by characters is harder than the system constituted by alphabetic script"(hope I didn't misunderstand his point), but is that mastering a basic regulation of a system = mastering the whole system?

A writing system is constituted not only by the phonetic and script thing, but also importantly the meanings, mastered complete the pronunciation and script and meaning we called mastered a writing system. Only got the script and pronunciation just finished the half of mission, a phonetic script system will certainly make the other half even more harder. And the regular the system is, the harder to learn. As every vocabulary has less unique characteristics than character. pls judge things from multiple-point perspective, not one point perspective. (sorry if the language is kinda messy)

The problem is, as you say, 'seems you fed so much other stuff here', but that is not dmoser's problem, it's the problem of the thread, where everybody has gone off on his own agenda. One of the most pernicious agendas is:

Meanwhile mind you that for us character is not only a tool, it means so much. It's not the whole story, meanwhile we think "one-off" thinking sucks. It'll destroy not only Chinese culture, but all the world culture.

OK, i m sorry, this para is bullshit. ignore it.

The attitude that 'everything is fine with the Chinese script; we don't even want to think about possible weak points' is almost reactionary. Not even Chinese in the past have taken such an intransigent attitude. If you look closely, you will notice that modern Chinese dictionaries are very different from their predecessors. For instance, unlike the Kangxi Dictionary, modern dictionaries (1) list character compounds or words, not simply individual characters, and (2) arrange characters in alphabetical order, not by radical. These have both taken place under the influence of the West, because Chinese scholars accepted that it offered certain advantages over the traditional approach. If Chinese scholars had taken the attitude that not a single point could be conceded, we would still be using the Kangxi dictionary.

The attitude thought rebutting a point talking about possible weak is because of ppl considered everything is fine is certainly reactionary.

[beirne]

39degN says:

I think dmoser's point is "the writing system constituted by characters is harder than the system constituted by alphabetic script"(hope I didn't misunderstand his point), but is that mastering a basic regulation of a system = mastering the whole system?

A writing system is constituted not only by the phonetic and script thing, but also importantly the meanings, mastered complete the pronunciation and script and meaning we called mastered a writing system. Only got the script and pronunciation just finished the half of mission, a phonetic script system will certainly make the other half even more harder. And the regular the system is, the harder to learn. As every vocabulary has less unique characteristics than character. pls judge things from multiple-point perspective, not one point perspective. (sorry if the language is kinda messy)

39 is correct that there are different aspects to literacy. I'm not sure that on balance, though, this favors the use of characters. Here are the requirements for literacy that I see, listing which medium is easier for each task.

Learn to read for pronunciation: Alphabet. English has lots of funny rules, but Pinyin is pretty easy to learn, as are other languages like Spanish and Italian. Even French is pretty easy to learn once you know which letters to ignore.

Learn to write: Alphabet. You learn the rules for pronunciation and you are most of the way there.

Be able to write unfamiliar words: Alphabet. You can make closer guesses with an alphabet, and you are not hindered by words containing unfamiliar characters.

Be able to write infrequently used words: Alphabet. Since spelling tends to follow pronunciation rules, the rules will keep you from having to remember the spelling as a series of stokes.

Be able to get meaning out of letters/characters that you know: Unsure. I would guess an alphabet because less symbol discrimination is needed, but the meaning inherent in the characters might help.

When reading, be able to get meaning out of words you know in speech but not in written form: Alphabet. Since one already knows the word in spoken language, seeing it written down in an alphabet lets the reader base their understanding on the sound of the word. There are two cases here regarding Chinese. The reader may know the sounds of the characters and infer the word. In this case the ease of understanding is the same as with an alphabet. If the characters are unfamiliar, however, the reader will have to guess based on radicals, significs, context, etc. This will be harder than reading the word rendered in phonetics. Because of the issue of unfamiliar characters I rate the alphabet better in this situation.

Be able to get meaning out of words you don't know: Unsure. If you don't know the characters for the word, you are forced to guess the meaning based on components and context. This situation is not significantly better than seeing strange words in an alphabet and may well be worse. If you do know the characters but not the word, the characters provide important semantic hints to help guess the meaning of the word. In alphabetic languages, though, many words are formed from parts of other words, so there are often clues even there. Admittedly in Chinese, however, because of the small number of distinct syllables it would be harder to get the clues out of Pinyin than it would be with the alphabets of other languages.

According to my tally, an alphabet is easier in 5 of the 7 requirements listed. Understanding unknown words, the second item where I was unsure, should not be a major problem for a literate reader. Readers do come across unfamiliar words, but not frequently enough for this to be a major factor in the comparison. If the reader has a small vocabulary, they probably also know fewer characters so they are more likely to be stuck. Regarding the reading of familiar words, I would be curious to know if anyone has done reading speed comparisons between Chinese and alphabetic languages. Not to know if someone can read 1,000 wpm, but to know what the average reading speed is.