Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[Guest Yau]

ala

What are the facts? None of the facts you listed addressed dmoser's anecdote. Like a slippery snake avoiding the point

My main concern over all arguments are the proof. While your arguments fail to convince others, you can prove them, and show their outcomes.

The fact is what dmoser mentioned earlier: we can't prove it, no matter they are pro or con sides. If character is like what's argued here, how does it reflect on the world we live? If it hinders learning, show me the comparisons. (see the questions in the previous post) .

An empirical evidence is never shown in this long struggling discussion, and the lingustic debate has been made only in an ivory tower.

However, I can't see any attempts to take their arguments back to the real world, what i see is the effort on loaning a traditional chinese iliberal swear word to reproach others for stubbornness. While this emtional reaction can be better cured by a tranquillizer, it's not contributing.

[beirne]

1. About the illiteracy' date=' it isn't the case in hongkong and taiwan.

[/quote']

Are you saying that people in Hong Kong and Taiwan don't have the problems remembering how to write common words like David has mentioned? Also, several people in the discussion have said that there are words representing common things that they can't write without a dictionary and they don't care. Is this line of thinking non-existent in Hong Kong and Taiwan?

BTW, I don't actually know the answers to these questions so I'm bringing them up here for discussion.

2. For science development, what about Arabic world that uses alphabet systems and what about taiwanese achievement?

There are more issues affecting literacy than the writing system. During the middle ages the Arabs led the world in science and math. This is no longer the case for a variety of reasons unrelated to the writing system.

3. there's too many reports that kids in hongkong and taiwan do better than their western counterparts in writing, solving maths and science problem. (the latest report can be seen in report conducted by british gov't. http://www.worldclassarena.org/v5/default.htm)

I couldn't find the report. I'm sure it is there but I'm just not ambitious enough to hunt for it. My point, though, is that the characters make literacy more difficult than a phonetic writing system, not impossible.

4. And yes, Chinese is difficult to learn, but i can't see it's more difficult than any other language. Don't forget most of us here have a long struggling experience with english and most chinese won't say english is especially easier.

The point, though, is that the character system is more difficult for the Chinese themselves, not for those who learn the language later in life. Also, English is not the standard for phonetic languages. A better comparison would be to use Spanish or Italian, or Pinyin for that matter.

It directly leads us to a question: if disadvantages mentioned previously were all valid, how could we explain these facts?

I have two possible answers to the situation. One is that learning the characters builds discipline, and this discipline spills over to other areas of learning. I believe this would favor your argument. The other is that there is already so much discipline in Chinese culture that students plow through learning the characters and learn other areas as well. This would tend to favor the point I have been making. I'm bringing this up as another question that I can't answer myself.

i think dmoser's frustration is caused by your arguements that ignore all these facts. You may be capble of making a theory on linguistc comparison, but we tend to believe what we see every day.

Are you saying that learning the characters isn't harder than learning a phonetic writing system?

Today Chinese is precautious about any reform on their traditional values. They did it too far and too much. Any effort on preserving it, though sometimes stupid and naive, is appreciated.

Understood.

[Guest Yau]

In fact, I have no intention to do any favour to either pro or con side, but i insist that they should show the effects.

Only the result can speak, not theorical analysis.

An italian painter tried to deliever his belief on good or bad government. he didn't reiteratedon his assertation, but he painted a large and great fresco in siena, to illustrate the details of the effect. Because of the bad government, people didn't dare not walk on the road, they were tightly roped.

Then, by his approach, i ask that: how does the disadvantage of character, if valid, affect the ordinary people?

Frankly, we just take the arguments from a time capsule, and these arguement once efficiently convinced chinese 100 years ago, but it just cannot repeat its success again today.

What has been changed? I believe it's the effect that changed. While we easily imputed chinese povety and failure to a writing system in the old days, chinese obviously see it differently.

Are you saying that people in Hong Kong and Taiwan don't have the problems remembering how to write common words like David has mentioned? Also, several people in the discussion have said that there are words representing common things that they can't write without a dictionary and they don't care. Is this line of thinking non-existent in Hong Kong and Taiwan?

It's not true. Disrememberance of a character is occasionally happened to me. Though I can easily adopt a homophone to replace it, I often tried to look up a dictionary because I want to make sure my writing is perfect.

However, does this problem never exist in the phonetic language? For english, obviously not, especially its phonetic is relatively weak to their european counterparts. For french, some sound, like the ending -s and -e is eaten, and i often have to check up dictionary too. Conjugation and gender are efficient to make the workload even heavier.

Are you saying that learning the characters isn't harder than learning a phonetic writing system?

Apparently, learning alphabets is easier. But if you want to do more than singing the song ABCDEFG...HIJKLMNOP, the learning is difficult. In fact, when i was a student, i never complained about learning characters, as many people here discussed before, but i complained all the time about the subtle difference in english tense, unnecessarily conjugation, usage of articles, and part of speech.

The assimilation (or liasion in Francais) in phonetic language makes the verbal communication even difficult. In BBC, "middle east" is sometimes pronounced as "Mid-least", "It attempt" becomes " Itatemp", "is that your" is "Itzacher". I always feel frustrated in listening to it.

I think the problem with French is just more wierd, not less, to non-native people. "Tu habites ou?" my professor asked me, then i grabbed hard from my memory, but i don't know what 'Abit' is.

[ala]

Edit: Terms & Conditions re copying and pasting large chunks of text.

Roddy

[smithsgj]

> 不必浪費時間在上麵

上麵. Classic.

[smithsgj]

Well, this topic has had a fair run for its money now. But I couldn't resist telling you about my wife's (Chinese native speaker) attempt to write a recipe for her big sister. She got stuck on the following, which I looked up for her in a mainland dictionary, the only one in the house.

Much easier for me, a non-native speaker, to look up Chinese words in a dictionary than it is for a native speaker, of course!

Anyway these were the words she got stuck on:

罐頭的罐 (tin or can)

辣椒的椒 (pepper)

蘑菇的菇 (mushroom)

馬鈴薯 (potato) she gave up on altogether and wrote in English (a lot of words are usually written in English in Taiwan -- eg "key")

no wonder the Chinese call them "earth beans" instead.

[amperel]

yes. we get it. please stop the insanity!

[ala]

I asked 10 self-claimed literate Chinese between 25-40 yrs old from the hospital I work at whether they could write "sneeze" (喷嚏): not a single one could write 嚏, two wasn't very sure about the 喷.

[woodcutter]

I'm sure they could all read the characters though. Ever tried an experiment trying to read English which is all spelled extremely oddly? It hardly makes a difference at all - we recognize a word as a whole character, more or less. Sneeze is a toughie in Chinese, "rhythym" will acheive the same result in an American hospital, I guess.

[dmoser]

Sneeze is a toughie in Chinese, "rhythym" will acheive the same result in an American hospital, I guess

Not true. American-speaking doctors will not balk at "rhythm" the way Chinese speakers breakdown at "sneeze". My guess is most doctors -- usually highly literate and intelligent -- will have no trouble with the word, and even those who might misspell it are not going to draw a blank the way Chinese speakers do with "sneeze". It's a different problem. Where the American doctors will fail is if you ask them to correctly write an ampersand (&) or a treble clef sign, or the sign for the British pound, etc. These tasks are more similar to writing "ti" as in sneeze. And these are hard tasks because there is no heuristic one can use to remember the graph. It's just arbitrary shapes.

By the way, just today two of my Chinese colleagues couldn't write the Chinese for "bench/stool", 凳子, and 撑 as in 吃饱撑了, which is a very high-frequency word in speech. Of course, I couldn't write these words, either, and I've been studying Chinese for 15 years. And if native Chinese can't remember common characters, what hope do I have?

[Guest Yau]

And if native Chinese can't remember common characters, what hope do I have?

haha. funny dead loop.

Yes, there's a difficult character in chinese, but can anybody be kind enough to show how these difficult words lead to a paralysis in communication.

In fact, it's about 2 simple questions:

1. Did any chinese here ever fail to write what you want in a CHAT ROOM, because you forget a character?

2. More we should know: what do you do when you forget the character (and without dictionary)?

Enjoy the never-ending debate.

[ala]

2. More we should know: what do you do when you forget the character (and without dictionary)?

You don't write it; you avoid writing it; you try to rephrase the sentence. All of this is against the fluidity of recording one's thought. Very few people will actually use pinyin or write a 错别字 when they are stumped on a character; especially if the writing is used for something non-personal. You don't find this to be even theoretically problematic?

[Guest Yau]

別字 is highly common in casual chat rooms. If i'm chatting with a cantonese, i'll say 噴痴 (cantonese: chi) to replace 噴嚔(cantonese: chi). Not because I don't know how to write the so-called difficult character, but because i find it easier to input.

In fact, i've never experienced any difficulties in expressing ANY characters in a chat room. There's always a easy-picking subsititute. To me , 別字 is my most favour.

Are you confusing a casual chat with examinations?

[beirne]

In fact, it's about 2 simple questions:

1. Did any chinese here ever fail to write what you want in a CHAT ROOM, because you forget a character?

Isn't the chat room situation cheating? When talking in a chat room you are using software that brings up a set of characters that correspond to the input method of choice. The point of the discussion is writing characters with a pen or pencil from memory. I'm hoping that the answer to the issue isn't that everyone will just use a computer to write Chinese.

[ala]

In fact' date=' i've never experienced any difficulties in expressing ANY characters in a chat room. There's always a easy-picking subsititute. To me , 別字 is my most favour.

Are you confusing a casual chat with examinations?[/quote']

How is it that we are talking about chatrooms?

[Guest Yau]

How is it that we are talking about chatrooms?

In a chat room, you will feel relaxed to adopt any creative way to solve the disremembrance of any character. In an exam, either in english or chinese, the only way to avoid misspelling or 錯別字 is to rephrase what you want to express.

[Guest Yau]

Isn't the chat room situation cheating? When talking in a chat room you are using software that brings up a set of characters that correspond to the input method of choice. The point of the discussion is writing characters with a pen or pencil from memory. I'm hoping that the answer to the issue isn't that everyone will just use a computer to write Chinese.

Good point. In my case, i've never taken an advantage of "relevant words" (相關詞) in the chinese input method. (i learnt chinese input in early 90s, and there was no such thing in DOS environment). That's why i sometimes intend to input a 別字 to replace the one with many strokes.

Here are my random thoughts (sorry for the unsystematic)

1. In the very beginning, one suggested that we can "listen" to modern fiction without problems, so romanization of character is possible. By this logic, 別字 should be able to solve the problem of disrembrance of any characters (either in hand writing or computer input). And it imposes less damage on the "intuition" than pinyin.

Then what's the point of "Sneeze"?

2. 別字 isn't encouraged, and so are misspellings. That's why i assume that we talk about the casual writing environment for making a fair comparison. (refer to the very early example of an english speaking kid who learnt to express herself in misspelling )

2. 噴嚔 (sneeze) is difficult, but any ordiniary 10-year-old students should be able to write the characters of 超義務 (Supererogation ), 美學 (Aesthetics) and even 至善 (Summum Bonum) . I don't think ordinary english kids can do the same with the spelling.

Could we make a conclusion that english is better at sneezing, but chinese is keen on philosophy? Surely not. Then again, can the example of "sneeze" draw any convincing conclusion?

[dmoser]

噴嚔 (sneeze) is difficult, but any ordiniary 10-year-old students should be able to write the characters of 超義務 (Supererogation ), 認識論 (Epistemology), 美學 (Aesthetics) and even 至善 (Summum Bonum) . I don't think ordinary english kids can do the same with the spelling.

There's some confusion here, on many levels.

A word like "epistemology" or "summum bonum" is not particularly hard to spell. If such words were high-frequency items, kids would learn them fine. You're confusing "hard to understand conceptually" with "hard to write". The Chinese versions happen to be composed of relatively common MORPHEMES, which makes them easier to remember for Chinese kids. But the characters for the morphemes are still HARDER for the kids to learn, because there is no phonetic principle to help them. On hearing "summum bonum", an English speaking kid could make a good guess about how to write it (they might come up with "summim bonim" or some such, but they could come close). The Chinese kid, however, if given orally the compound 至善 would most likely say "Huh?", not being sure of which morphemes were intended. They would have no idea if they were hearing 智扇, or 制膳 or what exactly. Once the correct morphemes were pointed out to them, they could write the word with no problem (or little problem), but then the English speaking kid is at no particular disadvantage, since they would write out the character according to its sound, rather than its semantic morphemes (which are pretty much incomprehensible to either the Chinese or English kid, anyway).

To put it another way: English spellers seldom if ever forget spelling rules. Chinese speakers often forget which arbitrary squiggles represent particular morphemes. The tasks are different. And the latter task is more subject to forgetting.

What you're getting at here is something discussed earlier, namely the semantic transparency of Chinese words. This is partly due to the one-syllable one-morpheme quality of Chinese. You're conveniently overlooking the fact that the characters for each of those morphemes are difficult to learn, memorize and reproduce reliably. And THAT is the problem I'm talking about. What's relatively easy about the above Chinese examples is that the words are relatively semantically transparent, in comparison with the English equivalents. But this merely makes the meaning more obvious and easier to grasp upon first hearing. This is indeed a nice thing about Chinese, but it doesn't mean the graphs are easier to write than their English counterparts. This is largely a quality of Chinese WORDS, not of the Chinese writing system.

[Guest Yau]

If such words were high-frequency items, kids would learn them fine

A word like "epistemology" or "summum bonum" is not particularly hard to spell. If such words were high-frequency items, kids would learn them fine. You're confusing "hard to understand conceptually" with "hard to write".

It's quite misleading. You're favourably skip the example of Aesthetics. The inaccruacy of phonetics that lied in english spelling, as discussed earlier in another thread, not only leads to misspelling, but it can also change the intuitivity and total meaning. Consider medal/ meddle/ mettle , morning/mourning and muscle/mussel. And all these makes a roadblock to the claim that phonetic language (here,english) is easier to learn.

More importantly, the example about epistemology or summum bonum is not just about spelling. It's about how much time a kid needs to spend on learning these items. In english, kids have to remember the apparently illogical combination of various sounds EVERYTIME they learn new vocab. Then they not only have to memorize the spelling and sounds, but also overcome the problem of passive vocab.

However, this task is easier for their chinese counterparts. E.g 至、善 are very simple words taught in kindergarden. (Yes, when you say 至善, they may say "Huh?" and that's all. ) That's why the ever long list of so-called difficult english vocab often surprised me because if it's translated in chinese, the meaning is obvious and simple.

If your basic argument is that learning A is easier than 阿 ( B / 比; C / 司), then i believe that too. However, your further suggestion on the kids' ability to express was unconvincing because you didn't take into account of difficult vocabs. It theoretically makes english easier to express "sneeze", but not something more than daily life.

[beirne]

It's quite misleading. You're favourably skip the example of Aesthetics. The inaccruacy of phonetics that lied in english spelling, as discussed earlier in another thread, not only leads to misspelling, but it can also change the intuitivity and total meaning. Consider medal/ meddle/ mettle , morning/mourning and muscle/mussel. And all these makes a roadblock to the claim that phonetic language (here,english) is easier to learn.

It is agreed that English spelling isn't as purely phonetic as it should be. The number of words with the same pronunciation but different spelling is much lower in English than in Chinese, and it is even lower in proper phoneticically spelled languages like Spanish.

I would not wish to spend too much time comparing English and Chinese writing, though. While I believe that writing English is still easier than writing Chinese, the point should be that learning to write Chinese characters is harder than writing a good phonetic language, like Spanish or Italian. I remember reading a book by Mario Pei, an Italian-American linguist, where he compared learning to read in Italy and then later in America. He said learning to read in Italy was not a big deal. They learned the alphabet and how it fits with words and then they just used it. English took some serious work. That is why English should not be the phonetic comparison for this discussion.