Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[beirne]

Characters, in only having vague phoenetic implications, are flexible enough to allow for these variations, just as english spelling is necessarily unphoenetic, since "standard english" does not exist.

Wouldn't people just learn the phonetic rules for their local pronunciation? I don't see why this problem should rule out the idea of a standard phonetic spelling. A phonetic writing system will still be easier to work with than a character-based system, even if local pronunciations differ some.

English is not quite unphonetic. It isn't the best example of a phonetic language, but you can get pretty far with the rules of phonics.

[dmoser]

I've had a few requests from students at U of M for two articles of mine,

"What Characters Can't Do", and "The Invisible Writing on the Wall: The Chinese Character Predicament". Unfortunately, neither of these are on any website, but I'd be happy to send them to any interested parties.

My address is:

dmoser@netchina.com.cn

Comments/criticisms welcome.

David

[dmoser]

The article about Chinese characters is now posted at:

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/chinadn/en/

under Sept. 11.

In addition, there is the following article on the website:

CHINESE INCREASINGLY CANNOT WRITE WITHOUT THE COMPUTER

BEIJING: With the increased use of computers, an overwhelming majority of Chinese people are forgetting how to write without a keyboard, emphasising the need that the Chinese language needed more protection, an on-line survey has revealed.

In a survey, conducted by the Beijing-based China Youth Daily and Chinese news portal Sina.com, 80 per cent of the 432 people surveyed checked "We urgently need to strengthen the protection of the Chinese language." Survey takers who think "it's unnecessary" and those who don't care each constitute just 10 per cent of the total.

Chinese have to rely on western alphabet-based keyboards to input pictographic Chinese characters, which makes them forget the exact strokes and strikes of each word when writing on paper.

According to the survey, 67 per cent occasionally forget how to write certain Chinese characters, 12 per cent frequently encounter the problem, and only 21 per cent have no such difficulties.

With the rapid popularisation of computers, the survey says that only 47 per cent of people use pens to write everyday, about 20 per cent write with pen often but not daily, while about 30 per cent said they "generally type on the computer and rarely write with a pen."

The paper said that young people today rely more on typing on computers than writing on paper, and the popularity of foreign languages among young people is another cause for their detachment from their mother language.

As a result, many even speak Chinese mixed with foreign words, which causes the outcry of language pundits for the safeguard of the Chinese language.

"The advance of foreign languages in China is indeed the best proof that our country is walking toward the world, but we should not therefore ignore our mother tongue," the newspaper quoted a university graduate as saying.

Interestingly, although nearly 80 per cent of the people surveyed could forget how to write certain characters, when asked "Compared with your parents' generation, what do you think of your Chinese?," 52 per cent answered "better," 25 per cent said "more or less the same," and only 23 per cent said "worse," the report said.

David

[atitarev]

...

[nnt]: The advantage of using Latinized Vietnamese is beyond any doubt' date=' but the fact that reading Latinized Vietnamese can be quite slow is an obvious drawback of using Latinized Vietnamese (especially when they are written syllable by syllable). This may be subjective, but I've really asked my Vietnamese friends and family (Hoa Kieu, of Chinese origin) who could read Chinese and Vietnamese both fluently, but all of them agreed that reading Vietnamese can be much slower than Chinese, or even English. Nnt, do you agree?

...[/quote']

I was just reading this out of curiosity but this comment made me laugh...

My Vietnamese colleague has a Chinese wife - they both struggle to read in Chinese characters, (they both know Cantonese Chinese) and complain that they can't read subtitles in Chinese characters, it's too fast for them. They have no trouble reading in Vietnamese or English, which they do pretty fast.

It's a matter of habit, of course. If you spend about half of your life using the characters, a quarter of it learning to use them, you may say they are very efficient. Characters are pretty and they are part of the Chinese ancient culture but there's nothing efficient about them.

I don't mean to open the Pandora's box again by refreshing this old thread and you don't have to answer if you have a different opinion.

Sorry for a bad comparison but what is easier to explain in words or draw in pictures?

No offence, please. I respect the Chinese culture and working on learning the characters.

[geek_frappa]

CHINESE INCREASINGLY CANNOT WRITE WITHOUT THE COMPUTER

ok, that's sad... how can you write a love letter to your true love or write 'idiot' on your friend's forehead while he is sleeping? are the joys of life leaving us? for what it is worth, in America we are having the same problem with penmanship. people don't write as neatly as they used to...

.... be honest, who else, like me, read all previous 5000 pages before posting here...?

[lichuan]

Hi, all nice people here, my first post in this forum.

I think something helps clearing up. I am not a student of linguistic, please

do not laugh at me.

It goes follows:

Every concept conveys an amount of information.

One way is to measure in bit, and take the Log of the reversed of its probability

of occurrence, something like:

Information(a concept) = log(1 / Probability the concept occurs)

So the less frequent a concept comes up, the more information it brings.

"Earthquake in New York" definitely is more informative that "earthquake

in Japan".

In a coding schema, we have an alphabet. In the language case it can be

Japanese or Roman letters, sounds or Chinese strokes. A codeword of a concept

consisting letters in the alphabet.

Alphabets differ in information amount their letters bear. For example,

if a sound in Guangdonghua can take more possible forms that in Putonghua,

it is more informative. A codeword of more informative letters is shorter

for coding the same concept.

And intuitively the more information a concept has, the longer its codeword

is.

Now we come to the nice topic.

I hypotheses, all human are same, so their concept usages, so the information

distribution on concepts are same. We have then the codeword length distribution

roughly the same for all languages.

For example, the concept "I" is so frequently used by all human being, as

an manifestation of our egoism, it brings less information, so in all languages

it should be coded short.

Two cases are, if in a language

1. codewords are overly long, and averagely bring more information than

needed. The language is too precise and expensive.

2. codewords are too short, and averagely bring less information than needed.

The language is ambiguous.

I just say the codeword length of written Chinese is as proper as in English,

and as all developed language, no less precise, no more redundancy.

To illustrate the Pinyin case, let us image, what did a man in Tang dynasty

do, when he wanted to express a concept "the bad monkey with eight head

in the neighbor mountain":

1. He invented an unique written word, when he saw it, he knew the meaning.

2. He said in several breaths "the bad monkey with eights head in the neighbor

mountain", when other heard it, they knew the meaning.

He did correct in choosing a properly long codeword with respect to the

information amount of letters in each alphabet.

Each Chinese stroke is so complex, that he need a combination of few ones

to express something.

But he have few choices of how to articulate, features of a sound maybe

the absolute or relative frequency and amplitude. However they are still

few. He has to say "the bad monkey with eights head in the neighbor mountain"

, that is a much longer codeword for the ferocious creature when he try

to make understand.

He could of course assign a sound to the invented written word. But it is

simply too short and too less informative.

The Pinyin case do exactly this:

Throw the written word away, replaced with a codeword with mandarin sounds

of the same length of the written one. The lost of information brings ambiguity.

As for literacy rate, obviously it is much easier to teach someone to learn

something relevant (by Pinyin a one-one mapping), than to introduce of a

irrelevant schema.

And the hypothesis, that all coding scheme are same in the amount of effort

of advocating, I think it is no different to say "If something exists, exists

for a reason".

[fenlan]

It's true that some Americans or Brits or whatever can't spell well, but educated native speakers do all known how to spell "accelerate". There is no parallel between the poorly educated being unable to spell well in the West, and the highly educated being unable to recall a character in China. Chinese people - however highly educated - frequently come across characters they do not know, and frequently forget how to write characters they do know. I wonder if in the computer age, this problem will be accentuated?

[nipponman]

I wonder if maybe you're right fenlan. Maybe people don't write by hand much any more. That might be why educated people don't recall some of the easy characters so well. Maybe they have not written (by hand) in so long that their minds have only become accustomed to reading, and have let the writing part of their mind slowly diminish. If you don't use it, you lose it.

nipponman

[KTallguy]

Wow, I actually READ all of that !

I've studied Japanese for almost 4 and 1/2 years, and have just started studying Chinese ... 2 weeks ago. I'm learning Taiwanese style (bopomofo), which I find much easier than pinyin simply because of the fact that it's NOT roman characters.

I think it's very difficult and annoying to read Japanese when it's all kana, or in the roman alphabet. Why? Because my reading speed (provided I know all the characters) is much faster with the Chinese characters providing meaning.

When I learn new words in Japanese, I usually like to ask what the characters for the word are. Even if I can't remember them perfectly afterwards, it contributes to being able to read them, and helps me understand the word, and remember the character for a longer period of time. Am I an isolated case? I don't know.

I think that using all pinyin, even for writing, would take away from the essence of the Chinese language itself. Now, I know that's not a compelling argument per se, but it's not a stretch of the imagination to assume that taking away these characters to make the language simpler and easier to use would strip the language of a lot of it's culture and history.

I appreciate the comments by dmoser. The great thing about this topic is that it encouraged so much dialogue. But even if people have trouble remembering characters once in a while, I am assuming they are still contributing members of society, and educated adults?

It's completely obvious that memorizing Chinese characters a more difficult path to achieving (and subsequently, gradually losing) literacy. However, is it going to cause the downfall of Chinese society? Doubtful.

I pray that your daughter grows up speaking and writing multiple languages, as when you are that young it's such a great time to absorb information. I wish my father had taught me Turkish when I was young, or that when I lived in Germany as a youth, I had gone to a German school so I could be trilingual now.

The mind is a wonderful instrument. It can do so many amazing things, especially when it's young and maleable. Chinese kids learning character after character, it might seem like a waste. But hell, at the very least, their minds are getting a thorough workout.

Honestly though, if you want another writing system, China could invent something similar to bopomofo, but somehow incorporate accents. But using roman characters just seems like the easy way out... IMO.

[trevelyan]

Of curose, teh ralely ineetsnrtig tinhg aobut the Egsinlh lagugnae is taht msot ntaive seapkres hvae no dicfitufly uerndstnaidng samrbceld txet, as lnog as the fsirt and lsat lttrees rmiean uhagnnced.

It is a bit mroe dfcifuelt if wdros are msepsiled, or yuo oyln hvae teh ftrsi ltrete udencaghn.

ndrstndng txt wth mssng vwls s yt mr dffclt, bt stll nt mpssbl.

I've seen ESL learners read such mangled prose with minimal difficulty. The same thing does not hold in Chinese, although its interesting to think of what a comparable transformation might be. And while this comparison may not speak to the comparative difficulty of learning the two languages, it certainly speaks to the fault-tolerance of our cognitive processes involved in using them.

[KTallguy]

In a sense, we do treat each individual word as a 'character'... don't we.

That's what enables us to speed read.

Sometimes you run across characters that can only be explained with a sentance in English.

How often do you come across English words that have to be explained with many characters in Chinese?

[kudra]

The same thing does not hold in Chinese, although its interesting to think of what a comparable transformation might be

I vote for scrambling some strokes here and there. Of course you would need a completely new font type. I propose the name of the new font as some variation of hazni-etnorpy, with denoting the degree of scrambling.

Unfortunately I've just used up all that too much free time I had on my hands.

[Ferno]

Okay, I have read the entire thread.

A persitant (and the most significant imo) argument against Chinese using a phonetic script is it's lack of practicality; that it is difficult to read. Too many syllables mean too many things, and its hard to skim through and pick up meaning quickly.

From this I come to 2 conclusions:

1. This argument is not correct, people are just not accoustomed to reading things in pinyin or whatnot.

-->Logically, if spoken language can be understood then a direct transcription of this spoken language (far, far more direct than English's irregular spelling for example) should hold no difference.

2. This argument is valid. Characters are necessary because the spoken language is handcapped while characters have full, unique meaning.

-->If this is the case then it is the fault of the characters themselves. To borrow a bit from a chapter on Pinyin.info, it is like a heroin being necessary and well-designed for an addict. Well, of course it is necessary now that he is addicted.

----->This would be the result of a complete seperation of the written and spoken language. People could invent characters and assign them non-unique pronounciations while using the ineffective system of tone/pitch instead of more actual sounds. Even if this caused ambiguity over time, who cares as long as the the unique Characters are there? Let the peasants babble to each other, the elite can always communicate in their mysterious, complicated script of high-status.

--------->Therefore, characters are too ingrained to be removed from the spoken language which they helped destroy. The morpheme-building-block system is there to stay, also. If that's the case, then the foreign langauge of English will ironically make even more inroads.

I don't have enough experience with Chinese to lean towards either conclusion yet.

[gato]

---->This would be the result of a complete seperation of the written and spoken language. People could invent characters and assign them non-unique pronounciations while using the ineffective system of tone/pitch instead of more actual sounds. Even if this caused ambiguity over time, who cares as long as the the unique Characters are there? Let the peasants babble to each other, the elite can always communicate in their mysterious, complicated script of high-status.

I don't think it was intentional, but rather that because in pre-modern China, people from different regions couldn't understand each others' dialect/topolects, the written word was a much more effective way to communicate with each other, thus the separation between the written and the oral. At the same time, there was not much an effort to develop a literature based on the oral language. Most classical Chinese literature (meaning pre-1900) is based on the written language, with its very different grammar and vocabulary. As a consequence, the vocabulary of the oral language is relatively undeveloped compared to the written. Thus, Chinese people who are educated are almost ashamed to write the way they speak, because the spoken langauge seem so unsophisticated and spare.

Advocates for a pure vernacular written language during the May 4th Movement of the 1920s wanted to abandon the classical written language and its vocabulary completely, but most educated people have resisted and still continue to use a great deal of vocabulary from the classical langauge when writing even though few of these words are part of anyone's oral vocabulary. Moreover, most Chinese, even the educated, still use a non-Mandarin dialect when speaking most of the time. For them, there is no way around the separation between the written and the spoken.

Most formal Chinese writing today, what you would see in more serious newspapers and magazines, is a mix of the vernacular (written Mandarin) and classical Chinese (Wenyan wen). Since Wenyan Wen was a language designed for writing, it has many more homophones and would be very difficult to read if written in pinyin. The written vernacular language is still in its first century of development and cannot yet be a complete replacement. Maybe in another 200 years, things will be different. The vernacular will expand its vocabulary by developing more new words as well as incorporating words from classical written Chinese (as more people become educated and start to use words from classical Chinese in everyday conversation).

[Guest realmayo]

this was a long thread.

In the UK, "The Spelling Society" wants to re-write the dictionaries to make learning to read easier ... they appear to prefer "frend" to "friend" etc.

Bell argued that the spelling system was a huge financial burden on schools and was to blame for poor literacy results compared with the rest of Europe. In Finland, where words are more likelyto be pronounced as they look, children learn to read fluently within three months, she said.

Chris Davis, spokesman for the National Primary Headteachers' Association, said the spelling system had a major impact on children's literacy progress: 'It definitely slows English children down. In international comparisons, languages that are phonetically uniform always come top.'

from the gardian: http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2284503,00.html

[imron]

this was a long thread.

The longest on the forums so far Although I can understand that spelling words phonetically would probably make them easier to learn (especially for those learning it as a foreign language), it shaw duz look horabul.

[Guest realmayo]

yep. though: they're not simply saying change spelling to a purely phonetic system; rather, remove the most confusing parts of spelling. Imagine if a law was passed to enforce this...!

[dsrguru]

The problem with making English spelling phonetic is that there are so many different dialects of English in which certain sounds and words are pronounced so differently. For example, In most parts of England and Australia, non-intervocalic R's are silent. In most parts of America and I think Canada, non-intervocalic R's are pronounced. In Massachusetts they are pronounced, though, and in Bristol they are not. In Scotland, R's are trilled. Should farm be spelled farm or fam? Hopefully you get the point. And that's just one letter of the alphabet. Some other consonants can vary in pronunciation depending upon region, and vowels certainly do. Languages with more phonetic systems of orthography than English tend to have a single promoted dialect. For example, the Korean spoken in Seoul is considered standard, as is the Japanese spoken in Tokyo. Although in the latter case, the main difference in Japanese dialects is pitch accent, which isn't actually reflected in the spellings of words. Spanish pronunciation varies by region, but almost all the major dialects (maybe with the exception of Cuban), to my knowledge, have pronunciation that is consistent with their spelling. So English is in the unique position of having to remain non-phonetic. I don't think that's really a problem, though, because English speaking countries have high literacy rates in general.

[Lu]

almost all the major dialects (...) to my knowledge, have pronunciation that is consistent with their spelling

Surely you mean 'have spelling that is consistent with their pronounciation?

And then, my knowledge of Spanish is very limited, but I seem to recall that words are sometimes spoken in different ways and still spelt the same. A Panamanian friend once helped me write a piece of Spanish homework, dictating me a word with a b. So I wrote b..., and he said 'No, the other b', meaning v.

Coming from a country that reformed its spelling twice within ten years, I say: just keep your hands off it. What you get from spelling reform, no matter how well-thought-out, is not better spelling but a lot of confusion.

[dsrguru]

No, that's exactly why I said pronunciation that is consistent with spelling. When you read text in Spanish, you know the exact pronunciation. The same isn't true with writing in part for the reason you just gave. And yes, spelling reform can get messy. Especially for a language like English where there are no single agreed pronunciations for given words--most are pronounced differently depending upon your country and even region within the country.