Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[pazu]

nnt: then I would suggest that the observation is rather ridiculous.

[Ian_Lee]

characters are indeed cognitively harder to process, and do result in many social, educational, and information-processing inconveniences;

But so far no proof has been given to substantiate such hypothesis.

If characters are cognitively harder to process and will result in educational inconvenience, then why is there no much difference in the literacy rate between Japan, HK, Taiwan with other western countries?

Why does the literacy rate in PRC stay at the same level with other alphabetic-based developing countries like South Africa and Brazil?

Without character, there will definitely be social inconvenience. During my trip to my hometwon merely 250 miles away, there are 5 dialects which are totally unintelligble to me. Even after 50 years of Putonghua education, there are still many rural folks who can barely speak it. If all the dialects are romanized as Lu Xun suggested, probably I would be like traveling thru Tanzania and Ethipoia to my hometown!

For processing information, please remember that the keyboard was first developed based on the alphabetic system. And of course it is tilted towards the convenience of that system. But it should be human being who gear technology towards their use rather than human being to make fundamental change for the sake of technology.

[Ian_Lee]

Moreover, it is hardly "East vs West" mentality when we discuss characters.

About at least half of the world that are alphabetic-based are non-western countries.

Most Arabic and Moslem countries are using alphabets. Arab and Bahasa Indonesian are alphabetic-based. Just the combined population of Arab countries and Indonesia probably exceeds that of Western Europe.

Most of the languages in India like Hindi and Bengali are also alphabetic-based.

Characters are actually just used in Japan, Mainland China, HK, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and Korea (to some degree).

I don't see how this issue is related to "East vs West".

If characters really pose as a hindrance to education, then why would the above countries/regions fare much better economically than most developing countries which are alphabetic-based?

[ala]

Characters are actually just used in Japan' date=' Mainland China, HK, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and Korea (to some degree).

I don't see how this issue is related to "East vs West".

If characters really pose as a hindrance to education, then why would the above countries/regions fare much better economically than most developing countries which are alphabetic-based?[/quote']

Because they are more willing to copy from Western Europe. Certainly Japan's Nobel prices in the sciences and humanities are scarce relative to its wealth and population size. Either it's society that is stunting creativity or the characters themselves. I would think society has a larger role, but the writing system does form a very fundamental layer of culture, and probably influences social behavior. On a mundane level, just being forced to memorize characters in grade school might affect creativity. Even worse is the possibility that the characters inherently lower *analytical* abstract thinking by emphasizing too much on the individual morphemes of a single word, losing sight of the whole idea and concept.

[Ian_Lee]

Ala:

But almost all the countries in the developing world are copying Western Europe. Lost of countries in Latin America have high percentage of descendants from Spain and Italy.

But in average East Asia fares better than Latin America.

Of course, there are a lot of other variables that led to such different results. But if some posters hypothesize that character learning poses hindrance to education (which is unsubstantiated) and lower educational quality leads to bad economic performance (which has been proven), then character learning seems to yield a contradictory result.

Maybe Latin America is too far away. But neighboring countries to the above group which use alphabetic script like Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mongolia,........etc all fare worse economically.

Such phenomenon tells a lot about character learning. Maybe if Vietnam re-adopts partial character script like Korea or Japan does, probably it may have amazing positive effect to its economy!

Regarding memory vs analysis in the school system, that is another topic. But even in studying English, the schools within the above group also emphasize on memory.

[dmoser]

If characters are cognitively harder to process and will result in educational inconvenience, then why is there no much difference in the literacy rate between Japan, HK, Taiwan with other western countries?

Why does the literacy rate in PRC stay at the same level with other alphabetic-based developing countries like South Africa and Brazil?

The literacy rate stays at the same rate in PRC etc. because the kids spend several more years than their alphabetic counterparts learning the script. The literacy comes at a cost of time. As has been said repeatedly in this thread.

Also, if anything is clear at all about this, it is that the concept of "literacy" must be re-examined in the light of Chinese. In English, because of the sound-writing reinforcement loop, being able to read more or less entails being able to write. In Chinese, this is not so simple. Lots of people with the ability to read magazines and novels do not have enough mastery of the characters to write an ordinary letter. One of the fuwuyuan in my building is just this type of person. She is "literate" by the usual definition, but does not have the easy ability to write what she can say, which is afforded more easily by alphabetic scripts. "Literacy" tends to be defined in China as "the ability to recognize x number of characters", with the issue of "writing" a bit more blurry.

Also, as for "information processing inconveniences", I was speaking of

the relative inconvenience of the characters in ordering and cataloguing.

Most serious non-fiction books in the U.S. have an index; most serious non-fiction books in the PRC do not have an index. An index is an invaluable information processing aid. Why do you think Chinese books don't have them?

[smithsgj]

For the same reason that no-one in Taiwan has a city map in their car. There are city maps, and they have gazetteers at the back, but no-one really knows how to use them to look up the name of a street. It's actually done by stroke count of the whole character rather than of the radical and remaining components separately (as with dictionaries).

Sometimes placenames are organized geographically: north-south rather than a-z. Not much use if you don't know where the place is.

It's not clear how to look up a journey in the all-China rail guide, or the Taipei bus guide. There are all sorts of different orders and conventions apart from dictionary order; you have to be familiar with such publications to be able to use them.

Just knowing how to do dictionary lookup is not sufficient. But then again, most Chinese people don't appear to be comfortable with dictionary lookup anyway!

To be literate, I think you need to have mastered not only reading and writing, but also get your head round the indexing and classification systems. Anyone who can read English can look things up in any English reference publication, but this is not true for Chinese.

For literacy in Chinese, we have to adopt a modified definition: can read, but possibly can't write a simple letter (according to dmoser) and probably can't use standard reference materials without great effort.

[pazu]

Dmoser, again, this is not something new, this was indeed what I've said in my previous post that a major drawback of Chinese characters was the lack of way and inefficiency to "database" it. To check that up, I think an easier way is to use Pinyin (in mainland China) to categorize the items, and most Chinese know the pronunciation of a character already, but it's difficult to define an "item" to be databased because of the lack of space to distinguish words and characters, this is a problem for the computer designing, not the problem of human brains. I think it's the same for Vietnamese indeed (because wo rd a re writ ten se pa ra te ly in Viet Nam ese).

The reason why in English that there are indexes at the back of many books (some are indeed quite unncessary too, I've seen some casual novels with an index too, looking more "professional" and I wonder,,, why?...) because they're easy to make (not only because they're easy to check), basically I just press a button in most DTP software, then that's it.

Using Pinyin, while you can check the index, you can't read the book.

Hmmm... it's obvious enough what to balance.

[pazu]

The literacy rate stays at the same rate in PRC etc. because the kids spend several more years than their alphabetic counterparts learning the script. The literacy comes at a cost of time. As has been said repeatedly in this thread.

In English, because of the sound-writing reinforcement loop, being able to read more or less entails being able to write.

As said repeatedly in this thread too, this is a loop again, 種瓜得瓜, 種豆得豆。

So what do you think of the relatively higher literacy rate in Hong Kong and Taiwan?

What do you think about the relatively low literacy rate in other countries using alphabets? And yet I still have to remind you, we're talking about the cognitive process of a native speaker (who learn as a kid rather than an adult).

Again and again, it's obvious that it's difficult to learn the character as an adult, I don't think it's the same for kids.

And yet again, look at Taiwan, Hong Kong.

And look at the young educated in mainland China.

I think most illiterates receive almost no or very little education ... and somehow you want to compare them with their "counterparts" in the richer West who spend US$150 for a pair of Nike shoes?

[sm_sung]

For the same reason that no-one in Taiwan has a city map in their car. There are city maps, and they have gazetteers at the back, but no-one really knows how to use them to look up the name of a street. It's actually done by stroke count of the whole character rather than of the radical and remaining components separately (as with dictionaries).

I think an easier way is to use Pinyin (in mainland China) to categorize the items, and most Chinese know the pronunciation of a character already

Yes, I would agree that it is indeed more difficult to look up characters. However, I think the problem smithsgj mentioned is aggravated by the way things are done in Taiwan. All the dictionaries I use often are arranged according to the pinyin pronunciation of the characters. This is indeed easier than radical and stroke count methods. Besides that, I think because Chinese words in general are more “transparent” there is less often a need (but sometimes still a need) for a person to refer to dictionaries. Context and “morpheme analysis” often give meanings away.

Why does the literacy rate in PRC stay at the same level with other alphabetic-based developing countries like South Africa and Brazil?

So what do you think of the relatively higher literacy rate in Hong Kong and Taiwan?

I think most illiterates receive almost no or very little education ... and somehow you want to compare them with their "counterparts" in the richer West who spend US$150 for a pair of Nike shoes?

Let’s hypothesize that economic (e.g. education funding) and political (government policies) do not affect literacy rates. If this hypothesis were true, we can only conclude that the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong are significantly smarter than the people of China!

Well actually, average IQs in Taiwan and HK are a little higher than those in China but I would think this has more to do with education than any inherent genetic inferiority because the three communities do intermingle and share the same gene pool. In fact, according to the http://www.sq.4mg.com/corrupt.htm the average IQ in China is higher than the average IQ in the US!

It seems rather clear to me that comparisons between HK, Taiwan and the US are fairer than comparisons between China and the US. Does anyone disagree with me?

[pazu]

Just a bit off-topic.

The new edition of the Chinese dictionary published by the Commercial Press (商務印書館) has an Cangjie index at the back to help you find the character.

I'd been thinking why no people did that earlier, and once I even attempted to do a page for myself (not difficult, but kind of time-consuming).

eg.

你個死仔包 will be indexed as:

死 mnp

仔 ond

你 onf

個 owjr

包 pru

But this is not useful for many people, who know nothing about Cangjie...

[ala]

Besides that, I think because Chinese words in general are more “transparent” there is less often a need (but sometimes still a need) for a person to refer to dictionaries. Context and “morpheme analysis” often give meanings away.

This might instead be a curse in disguise. It's actually my biggest concern regarding characters. The morphemes are too obvious and concrete in nature, they overwhelm the idea expressed in the ci. This cripples the abstraction of terms and ideas.

[Taibei]

There's really too much here for me to respond to adequately. Actually, most of the points I would make have already been made by dmoser, ala, and others in this thread. It's just that they don't seem to register and we seem to have become stuck in a loop, as dmoser pointed out. So I'll limit myself to a few observations.

I think nnt's "Devil's advocate" post brings up an important point.

I think dmoser has forgotten the main reason for defending Chinese characters: because they are harder, even for Chinese!!!

A lot of the support for characters -- especially in Japan, where there are other orthographic traditions -- is based on snob appeal. "The Emperor's New Clothes," anyone?

I would argue that definitions of literacy -- especially in societies where Chinese characters are the dominant othography -- are inadequate and inconsistent. See, for example, J. Marshall Unger's writings on the subject, which point out Japan's inflated claims of literacy. (A segment is available here: "Kanji and Literacy."

Also, I would argue that the burden of proof is not on advocates of romanization but on those who claim that somehow Japanese and the Chinese languages are somehow so different from all the others in the world that Chinese characters suit them better than alphabetic systems. Remember Occam's razor?

[pazu]

So far some people here have been just ignoring the fact that there's a higher literacy rate in Hong Kong and Taiwan than many alphabetized society, and continue to use their learning experience as a non-native to emphasize the difficulty.

Still, no answer at all? Or is it again an "inflated" one?

[pazu]

I've once heard that some claimed that it was a big mistake for the Japanese to adopt Chinese as their writing form, while I agree it hurt their pride sometimes, Chinese suits their language quite well (again, somebody is going to echo saying that "yes, you see, they think they're unique!").

Chinese suits Japanese well because Chinese characters aren't an accurate representation of sound. Japanese has very few phonemes when compare to other languages (in a book it claimed that Japanese is one of the two languages in the world that has the least number of phonemes, I forgot the other one though). To compensate this lack of sounds, Japanese has to use longer words to avoid confusion, even in their spoken form. Writing down this language using alphabets only, would be inevitably longer than you want.

Compare:

1. 私は海外旅行へ行きたかったけど、航空券高い！残念だけど、家の近くの温泉に行って、ゆっくり過ごします。

2. わたしはかいがいりょこうへゆきたかったけど、こうくうけんたかい！ざんねんだけど、いえのちかくのおんせんにいって、ゆっくりすごします。

Chinese characters (Kanji) miraculously served as a "condenser" of the written form of the language because they can assign several sounds (usually one to three, sometimes 5, so 5 Full Space (全形字位)). And no matter what they think, their intentions to keep Chinese characters are obvious enough, otherwise where can they get more paper to play with origami? (They print more newspapers than any other countries in the world ... per capita at least!)

[ala]

To compensate this lack of sounds, Japanese has to use longer words to avoid confusion, even in their spoken form. Writing down this language using alphabets only, would be inevitably longer than you want.

A full kana script, however, could be much smaller than they are printed now (currently they match the size of Chinese characters). Second, the time it takes to write Chinese characters legibly balances out any space advantage they may have. Third, the lack of phenomes in the Japanese language may very well be due to having only a syllabary. If an alphabetic system were introduced, phenomes might very well increase due to foreign loan words. Hangul although alphabetic, functions as a syllabary also, and is under the same restrictions as Japanese kana.

The main reason for not abandoning kanji in Japan is the pervasive belief that homophones would be impossible to deal with. Actually, Japanese didn't have many homophones before the Meiji, it was only after the translation of Western ideas and terms using Chinese word formation principles and onyomi readings that led to the current perceived predicament. I don't know for sure if homophones are an issue, since when speaking Japanese I do not find it to be much of a problem. If someone read to me any novel written in the past two centuries in English, I would have almost no trouble understanding fully. Contemporary Japanese literature seems to be the same as well. The other reason for not abandoning kanji is cultural, the Japanese have a general attachment to it. Some of my Japanese friends have made fun of Koreans for their low level of character proficiency (nnt's comments apply here). And so long as Japan does not abandon the characters, China certainly will not either.

[Ian_Lee]

Now some fellow posters even want to give their own definition for "literacy".

I don't know what UNDP's definiton of "literacy" is. But may I remind those character-haters that all these countries/regions that use characters are thw world's front-running producers of sophisticated products and services (Mainland China is fast catching up too).

If Japanese designers/workers are semi-illiterate, how can they produce techonologically advanced hybrid cars like Toyota Prius?

If HK service workers are semi-illiterate, how can its airport be rated the Best Airport in the World four years on a row?

If Taiwan designers/workers are semi-illiterate, how can the world's major computer components be designed there?

Okay.....They cannot write a letter in Chinese characters properly (In fact, I hardly see any High School Graduate cannot write a letter) per some fellow posters' personal encounter, maybe our posters should advise those MNCs to switch their headquarter/production bases to neighboring alphabetic countries like Philippines or Indonesia!

[Ian_Lee]

I would argue that the burden of proof is not on advocates of romanization but on those who claim that somehow Japanese and the Chinese languages are somehow so different from all the others in the world that Chinese characters suit them better than alphabetic systems.

Such statement is highly arrogant and Euro-centric:

(!) A lot of the world's alphabetic languages are not based on Romanization. In making such statement, the writer has set up the norm for the alphabetic system -- must be base on romanization.

(2) In making such statement, the writer implies that character-users must adapt to romanization. Why not the other way?

(3) Why do those pro-character posters need to show the burden of proof? They don't advocate romanization and why should they cite proof?

[pazu]

Third, the lack of phenomes in the Japanese language may very well be due to having only a syllabary.

Again, another loop.

[sm_sung]

Taibei wrote:

A lot of the support for characters -- especially in Japan, where there are other orthographic traditions -- is based on snob appeal.

And you know this for a fact because? ...Oh my god, we’ve got a mind-reader among us!!! Might I venture to propose that anyone who makes statements about how others *THINK* also provide some sort of evidence?

Also, I would argue that the burden of proof is not on advocates of romanization but on those who claim that somehow Japanese and the Chinese languages are somehow so different from all the others in the world that Chinese characters suit them better than alphabetic systems.

What if I said this? :

Also, I would argue that the burden of proof is not on advocates of Chinese characters but on those who claim that somehow Japanese and the Chinese languages are somehow so similar to all the others in the world that alphabetic systems suit them better than Chinese characters.

The writing systems of both languages incorporate Chinese characters and so far, native speakers seem to be reasonably happy with them. If change is to be brought about to the current state of affairs, it is the character-abolitionists who will have to “enlighten” the rest on the benefits of alphabetization. After all, how can we be sure that alphabets will be a BETTER system than characters? I’m emphasizing the word better because even if an alphabetic system were equally good no changes should be made. Why move a mountain when there’s no need to? That would be so 愚公移山。

Ala wrote:

This might instead be a curse in disguise. It's actually my biggest concern regarding characters. The morphemes are too obvious and concrete in nature, they overwhelm the idea expressed in the ci. This cripples the abstraction of terms and ideas.

When abstraction and accuracy are necessary, for example in scientific works, Chinese does have fixed terms with fixed meanings. However, I do agree than non-technical ci in Chinese might occasionally be a little vague. But hey, accuracy isn’t as important in non-technical literature right? Besides the freedom of coining new expressions allows for elegant word play, which, as Pazu pointed out, makes the written language come to live.

Some of my Japanese friends have made fun of Koreans for their low level of character proficiency (nnt's comments apply here). And so long as Japan does not abandon the characters, China certainly will not either.

If China stops using characters, your Japanese friends will be making fun of Chinese for not being able to use Chinese characters!!! The thought itself will send any CCP official reeling in horror!

BTW:

Writing down this language using alphabets only, would be inevitably longer than you want.

I’m hardly an expert at Japanese but I suspect a full-kana Japanese script will be even longer than what Pazu pointed out because spacing will have to be introduced (think Korean Hangul).

Smaller prints, ala? Will they be as legible?(Note: I'm just wondering, not trying to imply that they won't be)