Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[ala]

Besides the immediate practical concerns, there's a another problem with characters that should be addressed.

Wenyanwen was not only detached from the vernacular, it was difficult to read as well without being extremely well educated and versed in classical texts. The bulk of content and ideas were expressed in Wenyanwen EXTERNALLY (via allusions) rather than within the text. A system such as this inevitably dwells into the past, and is less objective and productive.

Modern Chinese writing that would be "difficult to read" in pinyin is writing that incorporates elements of Wenyanwen and its baggage of extreme visual and allusionary brevity. One has to wonder whether such incorporations actually serve to improve the quality of writing, perhaps instead they serve to limit the originality of thoughts and ideas.

Second, regarding the characters serving directly as morphemes and thus allowing for the Chinese to be clearly aware of the etymology of words, one has to wonder whether that is a good thing or not. In a previous thread, I argued that 小说 translates to novel directly. But some people felt that 小 was a modifier of 说. Such imprecision in the language may not be a good thing at all. Other examples include: 投资 (to invest or to put in capital?)、计算机 (machine that computes or computer?)、精神病 (psychosis, psychological disorder, neurosis, folie, delirium, psychoneurosis, or mental disorder?). Although the English word computer derives from the verb to compute, the English term is far more capable of abstraction than the three in-your-face characters of 计算机. This muddling of zi and ci (and the lack of spacing as result) gives me great unsatisfaction in using Chinese to write anything highly technical (such as in pathological medicine) AND abstract (such as in the social sciences).

Note: I'm not saying that characters are completly ill-suited for the modern world, as they clearly have their unique advantages (within certain contexts such as poetry and again in brevity). But in my opinion, it also has severe crippling effects on the language and on social and economic productivity.

[pazu]

nnt: I'm not talking about typo mistakes, I'm talking the confusion that would make using pinyin.

If you write 週末七國分爭, immediately you'll see the typo mistake because they're obvious, very obvious. However in the example given in my previous post, because it's quite difficult to guess "qing1lei4" as "clear tear", so some people may mistakenly try to think it as a typo mistake of "qing2lei4". So - + = - .

And about the text by Yu Dafu, there's another post talking it in the other board in this forum, search "sinking" and you'll know it. The original text (in the link) was Simplified Chinese characters, I use a program called "Convertz" to change them into Traditional Chinese characters. I used NJSTAR Word Processor to change them into Pinyin (with little but quick modification). And there're 215 Chinese characters in the text (again, counted by NJSTAR WP), so it'll take me two to three minutes to finish the text. I can always impress my friends by my fast typing speed. ;)

For such a short prose if Dmoser's friend got only 90% of the meaning, it's not the problem of the language itself, it's the problem of the script then. Adding precisions in Pinyin is only okay for law documents, but I'm talking about literature, modern literature, not Tang poems.

Compare:

微微昕雨, 刷洗了昨天的屈鬱。

wei2 wei2 xin1 yu3, shua1 xi3 le zuo2 tian1 de qu1 yu4。

日出時候下的一場微微細雨, 洗刷了昨天的屈鬱。

ri4 chu1 shi2 hou4 xia4 de yi1 chang2 wei2 wei2 xi4 yu3, xi3 shua1 le

zuo2 tian1 de qu1 yu4。

They have exactly the same meaning, but can you see the difference? The difference is, the latter one is soooooo dull.

Beirne: I seriously doubt if people can understand all the words in Wenlin by their sounds only. No matter how precise your pronunciation is. By using the 200,000 phrases or vocabularies only in the Wenlin (I don't know how many are there indeed~), you limit yourself from being creative. Not a problem for Da Shan (大山), but it's a serious problem for Chinese.

an incommensurability with the rest of the alphabetic globe

It's an echo of those "scholars" who suggested China to use Esperanto (and probably English now, if they are still alive) as the Common Language!

The fact is that the way Yu Dafu wrote that passage is not easily comprehensible to Chinese speakers when read outloud, regardless of whether it is written in pinyin or characters. (You chose a weak example, actually. Why not just quote some Zhuangzi?)

I quoted Yu's prose because it's modern, it's beautiful and it's easily to be understood by most Chinese who knows Chinese characters, but pinyin render it more difficult to be understood.

You don't have to be sarcastic about why I didn't quote Zhuangzi. I didn't quote Zhuangzi because I wasn't trying to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of pinyin in classics (because it's of NO DOUBT). Dmoser, don't you see that what I wanted to say in my previous post, I emphasized that I didn't try to "yong4dian3" , I was just to show that Pinyin is not enough even for modern literatural needs for Chinese.

[Quest]

it also has severe crippling effects on the language and on social and economic productivity.

Ok AGAIN, look at HongKong, Taiwan, Japan, AND China in 20-30 years (even if something bad happens to the Chinese economy, it will never be caused by the use of Characters). That speaks for itself. I do not see characters as any hindrance to the development of science either. The fact that China lagged behind in technology was because of the system. i.e. a disarranged Monarchy, not the characters. As to computing advantages, just join a real time Chinese chatroom, they type just as fast as anyone else in the world using alphabetic languages. Some people type Chinese faster on their cellphones than you type English on a computer keyboard. There is absolutely no problem representing Chinese characters on computers either. The difficulties we had with BIG5 and GB, and their incompatibility with the ASCII characters was by design, not because there's any inate defect in the characters. Afterall, the Chinese internet is booming. Actually I would count the advance in computers a "pro" argument for keeping the characters.

crippling effects? come on.

dmoser admitted that abandoning characters would inevitably lead to the loss of part of the Chinese written language. To me, that is enough a reason to keep the Characters. With little efficiency gain and large disruption potential, there is just no compelling reason for a change.

Lastly, people who are "for" the abolishment of characters are EXAGGERATING the cons and belittling the pros of the characters. China and Chinese societies around the world are functioning very well with the characters. I do not think changing to pinyin would make them do any better. but the confusion and disruption that a change would bring will certainly have "crippling effects" on the economic productivity and the language itself, and people seem to be speaking so lightly of that disruption, and moreover the fact that phonetic scripts are hardly compatible with the numerous dialects spoken around China, it's nearly impossible to devise a viable phonetic script without destroying the dialects. If characters were abandonned, Ala, your fear of the disappearance of the Shanghai dialect will be MORE likely to become reality.

[beirne]

I seriously doubt if people can understand all the words in Wenlin by their sounds only. No matter how precise your pronunciation is. By using the 200,000 phrases or vocabularies only in the Wenlin (I don't know how many are there indeed~), you limit yourself from being creative. Not a problem for Da Shan (大山), but it's a serious problem for Chinese.

Pazu: Neither of us defined "understand", so I should clarify things . By "understand", I mean to know the meaning of a word that is already familiar with when it is used in contextual speech. I hope I'm not wrong about there not being words that people can't use in speech.

BTW, instead of Wenlin I should have referred to the English-Chinese Word-Ocean, which has 520,000 entries. That gives a little more room for creativity.

Regarding literacy rates, there are a lot of variables affecting them, including the economy. I would not base a comparison on being traditional or simplified.

[sm_sung]

I found Yu Dafu's prose much easier to read when written in characters compared to pinyin.

Dmoser wrote:

Mao's little red book to Wang Shuo's novels, are perfectly comprehensible when read outloud.

Would it be possible for me to understand the works(rewritten in pinyin) if I DIDN'T vocalize either aurally or in my head as I read them? I don't think so.

Also, English speed-readers don't actually vocalize the passage as they read it, they just scan the lines on the page and make intelligent guesses, which are usually adequate for daily use. I'm sure the same applies for Chinese. Good readers won't actually study every single character and analyse its shape thoroughly, they just look at it long enough to be sure of its meaning and then move on to the next character.

With pinyin however, each word would have to be observed in greater detail as pinyin is a strictly phonetic transcription of Chinese with absolutely no differentiation between homonyms. More effort would be needed to tell apart the homonyms and assign meanings to them.

Furthermore, what about tone sandhi*? Should I write 美女 (beautiful woman) as mei3nu3, according to how each character is pronounced in isolation, or should I write it as mei2nu3, according to how the characters are actually pronounced when they appear together? If I use the first method, I am not representing the actual pronunciation of the phrase (in fact it’s actually misleading), thus making it more difficult to read aloud. If I write it down as mei2nu3, it would be easy to read aloud accurately but harder to understand when read. (Unless of course you vocalise every single syllable)

*Tones changing in certain word constructions.

[sm_sung]

Regarding literacy rates, there are a lot of variables affecting them, including the economy. I would not base a comparison on being traditional or simplified

That's exactly the point here. Saying China's literacy rate is low doesn't actually prove that characters are impossibly difficult for the average Chinese, it only says that the average Chinese didn't learn them very well.

[pazu]

Regarding literacy rates, there are a lot of variables affecting them, including the economy. I would not base a comparison on being traditional or simplified.

But many people base it on pinyin, and this is also something I can't agree much.

people type Chinese faster on their cellphones than you type English on a computer keyboard.

Quest, while I think the idea of replacing Hanzi with Pinyin is absolutely ridiculous, I do agree that Chinese characters are of some computer disadvantage. I can type Chinese much faster than English (oh yes, why?), but many of my friends in Hong Kong didn't know how to type in Chinese indeed, or they have to LEARN, not just to learn the finger position, but also the way to decode a character into keyboard strokes. Pinyin is a help, but for most HKers who know nothing about pinyin, a faster way to learn to input Chinese is to buy a handwriting board (e.g. Penpower). And the design of Pinyin isn't perfect for typing Classics though modification may help a bit, 紫光拼音輸入法 and 菩薩拼音 (for typing Buddhist scripts).

Some other major drawbacks of the Chinese written system to computer is the database management, I'm not an expert in this field but I found it hard to sort the Chinese characters. Sometimes it can be quite a pain to find "香港特別行政區" in the "country list". Yesterday I wanted to change the Vietnamese font in my IE, while in English Windows XP it can be easily done by scrolling down to the "V", but in Chinese Windows, no way.

Nevertheless, remember, there's a Cantonese saying, you'll never cut your toes to prevent them from eating by worms / 斬腳趾避沙蟲. I don't see why we should change the script.

[pazu]

mei3nu3, according to how each character is pronounced in isolation, or should I write it as mei2nu3

Well thought, Sm Sung!

Strange that none of us ever raised this point here.

But I think a minor modification may solve this problem by adding another symbol to the pinyin to indicate the change.

e.g. Wŏ ài nĭ. 我愛你~

Wô nĭ haí yŏu bié de huà shuō ma? 我你還有別的話說嗎?

Wŏ is changed to Wô, the sign indicated that it should be pronounced as wó but the original form is wŏ.

Note: I'm just trying to answer Sm Sung's post, I'm not saying this little modication can solve the confusion.

[beirne]

That's exactly the point here. Saying China's literacy rate is low doesn't actually prove that characters are impossibly difficult for the average Chinese, it only says that the average Chinese didn't learn them very well.

David's point way back at the start of the discussion, though, is that the Chinese character system is difficult even for the well-educated, which he discovered through his interaction with graduate students and other educated Chinese. So while the topic of overall literacy rates may come up it is a different point than the one that started the discussion.

Furthermore, what about tone sandhi*? Should I write 美女 (beautiful woman) as mei3nu3, according to how each character is pronounced in isolation, or should I write it as mei2nu3, according to how the characters are actually pronounced when they appear together? If I use the first method, I am not representing the actual pronunciation of the phrase (in fact it’s actually misleading), thus making it more difficult to read aloud. If I write it down as mei2nu3, it would be easy to read aloud accurately but harder to understand when read. (Unless of course you vocalise every single syllable)

To be fair this isn't the only pronunciation issue. I was watching the movie Quitting (Zuotian) last night. Lots of their speech was slurred and consonants were left out. I don't think I heard the ng in Hong Sheng the entire movie. To some degree alphabetic Chinese is like written English in that the written form may be an approximation of the spoken form, although pinyin is overall still closer than English writing is to speech. All I can say is that a fairly good phonetic system still works well.

With pinyin however, each word would have to be observed in greater detail as pinyin is a strictly phonetic transcription of Chinese with absolutely no differentiation between homonyms. More effort would be needed to tell apart the homonyms and assign meanings to them.

How would this differ from spoken Chinese?

[ala]

Ok AGAIN' date=' look at HongKong, Taiwan, Japan, AND China in 20-30 years (even if something bad happens to the Chinese economy, it will never be caused by the use of Characters). That speaks for itself. I do not see characters as any hindrance to the development of science either. The fact that China lagged behind in technology was because of the system. i.e. a disarranged Monarchy, not the characters.

crippling effects? come on.

[/quote']

I disagree. Since the Western enlightenment (and language reforms such as spacing), the bulk of scientific, technological, and social advancement (that original breathtaking idea) comes from the West. Chinese characters, however, is excellent in translating new Western words and concepts (as witnessed by the Japanese kanji compounds like 社会、電話、哲学、現代、後現代、当代、民族、国際、生物学、資本主義、抽象、etc). But a system good for translating will always lag behind the source. When I talked about the character's cost to social and economic productivity, I was talking about its inherent vagueness (due to its overemphasis on individual morphemes and not the whole WORD that expresses the new IDEA) and inability to differentiate ci and zi clearly. This weakness plays a negative role in analytical processes by limiting the precision of terms AND the abstraction of ideas. Ideas that already exist, have a term involving one or several characters in standardized combinations; ideas that don't exist are going to have a harder time appearing under a writing system involving Chinese characters. It's excellent for translating existing ideas, but poor in creating. I wasn't talking about the mundane impracticality of inputting characters (which I do think IS A PROBLEM also and not as simple and solved as you might think).

If characters were abandonned, Ala, your fear of the disappearance of the Shanghai dialect will be MORE likely to become reality.

Explain this to me.

[Quest]

ok how about I quit.

[sm_sung]

In reply to beirne:

How would this differ from spoken Chinese?

I don’t think you realized my point. I was talking about reading efficiency. Most people read much faster than they listen. In reading, one adjusts his speed to suit his knowledge and abilities. In spoken language, the speaker sets the pace - people speak slower than necessary to ensure others understand them. Because of this, when listening to someone speaking in Chinese there is time to figure out what he (or she) is saying based only on the sounds of the language. However, when reading in Chinese (written in pinyin), one's reading speed would be greatly hampered by the fact that he would have to interpret the meanings of the words himself instead of having them clearly shown to him in the form of characters. It's possible but less efficient.

Furthermore, as I said earlier, spoken language gives more clues to meaning than written language. Maybe I should elaborate more on this. When we listen to someone speak we have the following to help us :

(1) the tone of his voice (angry, sad, depressed or happy), we see his facial expressions(smiling, neutral, uncertain, sad),

(2) his body language( is his pointing at something, how he stands etc),

(3) situational clues (are we at a restaurant, a bar, a formal occasion, a birthday party)

(4) knowledge of the speaker (we talk to people we are familiar with very often, but we seldom are familiar with the writers of articles, books, etc thus we are familiar with their linguistic style as well as vocabulary)

(5) simpler vocabulary ( for example you wouldn’t normally use words like 之，何处，or 何人 in speech)

English, in a way is also slightly ideographic. Look at the following words: son and sun. They are pronounced in exactly the same way, yet the meanings are clear. “son” means male child and “sun” means the star in the centre of our solar system. When I read compound words, the ability to tell apart homonyms is even more important. Don’t the following words look very odd: sonbeam, son-bath, sonbed, sonburst, sonburn, sondress (sunbeam, sun-bath, sunbed, sunburst, sunburn, sundress). Notice how much easier it is to recognize the words when they are spelled properly? If this creates a small problem with English, don’t you think it would create a much larger problem in Chinese?

Ala wrote:

But a system good for translating will always lag behind the source.

The alternative to translating is adopting the foreign language. One might argue that all scientists should use the English language as so much scientific material is written in English. Is this going to happen? Of course not. If Chinese scientists abandoned the use of the language and decided to write all literature in English, what would become of Chinese? High learning and erudition would come in the form of being able to use English - Chinese would be reduced to being a language for the unlearned! Don’t believe me? Well, think about Japan. Kanji have been traditionally regarded as the mark of high scholarship and intelligence. There’s nothing native about kanji. The reason kanji were revered was that they came from a culture which was more advanced than Japanese in the past.

[blob]

This muddling of zi and ci (and the lack of spacing as result) gives me great unsatisfaction in using Chinese to write anything highly technical (such as in pathological medicine) AND abstract (such as in the social sciences).

Regarding this, I wonder why wasn't spaces introduced into the writting systems between words? That would make sense and make written chinese easier and less ambiguous?

[pazu]

Regarding this, I wonder why wasn't spaces introduced into the writting systems between words? That would make sense and make written chinese easier and less ambiguous?

In my personal experience, adding space will make the document easier for 1. foreigners who are studying Chinese ; 2. highly technical documents (like biological essay) with many unfamiliar words ; 3. database management.

For most Chinese writings however, newspaper, literature, even classics, punctuation marks are enough already to clear any ambiguity. Spaces aren't economic in time and money (more printing cost), database management shouldn't override the original purpose of the Chinese language and some further advancement in the technology may help it a bit. Chinese don't think a need to add space because it works well so far. Chinese thinks punctuation marks needed to be implemented because it's necessary.

But a system good for translating will always lag behind the source. When I talked about the character's cost to social and economic productivity, I was talking about its inherent vagueness (due to its overemphasis on individual morphemes and not the whole WORD that expresses the new IDEA) and inability to differentiate ci and zi clearly.

This is not the Chinese that I know, dianhua is a word that I treated as "ci", the "overemphasis on individual morphemes" is an exaggeration. If you have to take time to learn "telephone", I can't see why you can't learn "dianhua" as a word rather than two individual characters. Ala, I agree with you that sometimes Chinese is difficult to be used for many highly technical documents, but I find some of your statements are an exaggeration without the insight that Chinese characters has been used without much problems for many Chinese. Forgetting how to write "pillow" is funny, but it doesn't mean that "pinyin" is the solution. Pinyin is easy to learn for foreigners, but a foreigner treats Chinese as a foreign tongue only. When I learnt French I wondered why didn't they abandon the whole genders of nouns as in English, the noun gender causes little problem for French speakers too indeed, but if they're comfortable with them, then what's the point to change?

Again, some may argue that you spend lesser time to study the gender than the Chinese characters, but what I see is that Chinese version of Harry Potter can be read without much problems for the kids in China, just as their counterparts in the West; it's not uncommon to hear that many Chinese kids finished reading the Four Great Classics during their early age. And there is something about my uncle in Hong Kong, he's the eldest uncle and he hasn't yet finished his primary school education, somehow he was a big fan of Jinyong (Lous Cha) Wuxia novels. Jinyong's novels didn't use much complex Chinese characters, but they're still held with much literatural respect. When people suggested that Chinese characters are difficult to learn, I found most of them are foreigners. Here, only Ala is the only Chinese who seems to find it a waste of youth to learn this characters. Indeed in my personal experience I find learning to write is something quite easy, the only time that I remembered that I repeated and repeated to write two Chinese characters on paper was when I was 7, I learnt to write my name in Chinese and found it fascinating to write two other new characters representing me (I used another name in the summer when I was 6 ;).

While it's true that you have to repeat writing the characters that you failed to write them right in a dictation (at least in the HK education system...), it's the same for English.

[ala]

However, when reading in Chinese (written in pinyin), one's reading speed would be greatly hampered by the fact that he would have to interpret the meanings of the words himself instead of having them clearly shown to him in the form of characters. It's possible but less efficient.

This is debatable. You have to "interpret" and do hooked-on-phonics because you are not used to the initial change in system. But as time goes by, the speed at which you read will greatly improve (at a much faster pace than learning 3000-4000 characters). Second, pinyin is not a valid option for an alphabetized script. Pinyin was never designed to replace Chinese. There are many more functional systems in the works (in Chinese linguistics departments) that serve to reduce the ambiguities where possible.

And as you have clearly noticed, I'm in favor of Chinese characters remaining despite its drawbacks. However, I do feel that spacing reform is needed, or at least more awareness in zi and ci differentiation in classes. This will facilitate greatly in computer input and precision of vocabulary. I'm also in favor of Romanization for certain dialects to preserve their sound systems, grammar, and vocabulary before the day they become Mandarin with an accent. Perhaps the success of one dialect will influence people to think more about alphabetization. There are currently several Romanization systems being worked out for Shanghainese, a couple of them with the intent of being a script rather than phonetic auxillary. (Shanghainese is easier to Romanize as only one tone needs to be labeled, and there is extensive lexical tone sandhi, so word partition is rather straightforward and natural, and aspect particles come immediately after verbs and can be considered as inflection. Unfortunately Shanghainese is very limited in speakers: 16 million, and the tone systems in other Wu dialects are somewhat more complex, although sandhi makes them all sound quite similar.)

[Ian_Lee]

Many fellow foreign posters periodically put up the hypothesis that the character writing is a hindrance to literacy. Is that true? I tried to look up the answer by checking on the UNDP website about human development. They have a table on literacy rate on countries worldwide:

http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/indicator/indic_2_1_1.html

Here are the literacy rates of some countries:

Japan – 99%

(learn their own alphabet in addition to 1,945 characters)

Hong Kong – 93.5%

(learn both English and Chinese – traditional script)

China – 85.8%

(learn simplified script)

Korea – 97.9%

(learn their own alphabet with a lot of Chinese loan words)

Vietnam – 92.7%

(learn Latinized script with a lot of Chinese loan words)

Indonesia – 87.3%

(Bahasa -- Alphabetic script)

India – 58%

(English/Hindi/Bengali/dozen languages – Alphabetic script)

Brazil – 87.8%

(Portuguese – Alphabetic script)

South Africa – 85.6%

(Afrikaans – Alphabetic script)

And from this website I found out Taiwan’s – 95.8% (traditional script):

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2003/12/02/2003078035

It seems that the literacy rate is more closely related to the level of development rather than if it is character or alphabet based.

The literacy rates of Hong Kong and Taiwan are comparable to the developed countries even though they learn Chinese in the hardest way – the traditional script.

On the other hand, China’s is comparable to South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia that are all huge multi-ethnic countries which languages are alphabet-based. But India which is also alphabet-based lags far behind.

The only exception is Vietnam which is a developing country with a high literacy rate. Its language is based on an alphabet script.

[pazu]

Indeed I think 93.5% for Hong Kong is surprisingly low with a reference to the economy (well... open to debate), when compared to Singapore and Korea.

Maybe it has something to do with the Hanzi, but indeed I would rather think it's a problem of the education system. It's hard to imagine that after 9 years of compulsory education any young people can be grouped as "illiterate". I do want to know what the 6.5% people are.

In my family history the only illiterate was my grandma who migrated from Chaozhou to Hong Kong and she was deprived of any kind of education because of the war (and because she was a daughter). And it's understandable why she couldn't learn to write when she was older, because Hanzi should be something you learnt when you were young (with a lot of youth to be wasted~~ ;)

And in my lifetime so far I haven't yet met any young illiterate in Hong Kong. Hanzi is definitely difficult to pick up when you're older, but for the young it's another story.

[Ian_Lee]

Pazu:

My mom is the type who can read newspaper but who cannot write (except signature in some legal documents).

I guess she belongs to the 6.5%.

[Ian_Lee]

(Characters) an incommensurability with the rest of the alphabetic globe

But is there an uniform alphabet used in this global village?

Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, Arabic,......etc are all alphabetic.

I don't find Chinese more inferior in communicating with the people whom use a Latinized script than the Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Thai or Arabs after comparable years of study on the same Latinized script.

[ala]

Japanese do not have 99% literacy, maybe reading literacy or maybe in writing kana.

"Sato Hideo, head of the Research Section for Historical Documents, National Institute for Educational Research in the Japanese Ministry of Education, has estimated that public school graduates, who now receive nine years of compulsory schooling, retain a recognition knowledge of the 1,945 kanji but soon forget how to write all but 500 or so" (DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy).