Characters vs. Alphabetic Writing

Language Learning Chinese
1

I’m just a junior level linguist for now, but that thread about Taiwanese, Chinese, characters and how they all word together got me thinking. Are characters a good thing? I was about to jump into that conversation and say no, but I thought I better take a step back and think some more.

At first reading and writing in Chinese seems cool and mysterious. With the amount of study I’ve had now I’m starting to see that the “history” and “depth” of characters is (almost) complete nonesense. Some sort of romanized form of Chinese should be able to express everything that the charactered version would. I feel that what I am now in fact doing, is learning an alphabet that consists of 6,000+ characters!

Instead of focusing too much on the cons of characters (which I have no problem finding myself), what are some of the (linguistic) pros? Is one really able to express oneself more clearly with the use of characters as opposed to some other romanized language? Do characters have the power to express things that would otherwise be impossible to do in a romanized language? Do the pros of one way heavily outweight the pros of the other?

I’m looking at this from a totally linguistic point of view. If you look at what would be lost culturally, I think that clouds things up (culture is important, but I’m just thinking language right now).

If this is better placed at the end of another topic, mods feel free to. This is a topic that I have yet to research.

2

Once you have the necessary skills, characters are easier to read than pinyin. Of course it takes more effort to learn, but it’s effort saved in the long run. Like learning to touch type rather than hiot away with two fingers.

The reason a ‘character’ system works well for Chinese languages, but wouldn’t work so well for English, is the number of homophones - words that are pronounced the same, but have different meanings. The less syllables there are in a language, the more homophomes there are going to have to be. There are over 8000 syllables in English, but only about 1300 in Chinese. Now if you take away the pronounciation difference of the tones, the number of distinct syllables in Mandarin drops to about 400. That’s about the 20th of what you have in English.

Furthermore, a great deal of homophones in English are differentiated by having different spellings. Therefore you can easily see the difference in meaning between the words ‘see’ and ‘sea’ without having to look at the context. As pinyin is supposed to provide a 1 to 1 mapping of sounds and notation, this is not possible. The number of English words that have the same sound, and are spelt the same way, but have different meanings, is actually very small. In Mandarin, it’s huge.

But the tones are pronounced differently, it’s not a problem in spoken Mandarin, so why should it be a problem in written language? Well the reason is the way we read. Even if tones are indicated, this information is difficult to take in by reading. It means that you actually have to pronounce the word in your head to get the meaning. Have you ever tried reading like that? It’s slow. When we read, we don’t look at every letter, we see the overall shapes of the words, our mind subconciously fills in the gaps.

What this comes down to is that because of the large number of homonyms, pinyin just doesn’t provide enough information about a word to make quick reading possible. So instead we have a system where meaning is provided in the character, and where we have such a large numebr of characters.

Now the major criticism of this argument that I’ve heard, is that it’s wrong to concentrate on the syllable. The more significant unit is the ‘word’. Most words in Mandarin, the argument goes, are in fact 2 syllable or more words. However, if you look at the way words are used, rather than hwo you find them in a dictionary, the number of 1-syllable words is much much greater. This is because we use the simple little one syllable words much more than the others. Furthermore, I believe that because of the way we read (not looking carefully at all the letters in the word), although there are few homophones among 2-syllable words, the ‘letter-content’ of these words is still much closer than in other languages. This makes it much harder to read quickly yet accurately by seeing the ‘general shapes’ of the words (which is how most people read).

Personally, my mandarin skills are pretty low. I can only read 1-2000 charcters and I always forget them, because I rarely use them. Still I know pinyin pretty well, but I find it easier to read something in characters than in pinyin.

Brian

3

I’ll just contribute a few random thoughts here.

Thai and Vietnamese are both tonal languages that are written alphabetically.

The Koreans used to use Chinese characters, but they then invented their own alphabet. Their alphabet is considered the world’s most logical and is a source of cultural pride. (The Vietnamese made the switch from characters to the Roman alphabet, although maybe that was only because the French insisted).

Japan is stuck somewhere in the middle. It uses several alphabetical systems (katakana, hiragana and romaji) and kanji (or Chinese characters). Perhaps this is a sort of compromise the Chinese could come to if they ever decide to head down the alphabet path.

Also if Chinese does adopt an alphabetic writing system it doesn’t necessarily have to adopt the Roman alphabet. It could use zhuyin fuhao (bo po mo fo) or invent a new system (ala the Korean example).

The first forms of writing adopted where ideographs and pictographs, but once the alphabet was invented it caught on almost everywhere except East Asia. Jared’s Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel has a chapter on this topic.

Good point, but what about all the words in English that have multiple meanings? Just look up “set” or “get” in the dictionary and you will see what I mean. And what about phrasal verbs?

Just a few NT$'s worth…

4

Speaking purely from a literary perspective, in my opinion eliminating characters would seriously damage the language. Classical literature would be completely incomprehensible without characters, and the effective expression in modern literature would be seriously degraded. Just one small example, in both classical and modern literature, because of the “visual” nature of the written language, authors use a lot of “visual puns” … something that cannot be done in a language that uses an alphabet. This skill/art/characteristic would be lost without characters. An example from my specific field of research … male homosexuality in classical literature: the character

5

If it was about making a distinction between all the different words (character combanations) that sounded the same but had different meanings. Couldn’t there just be alternate spelling of those words that would distinguish them (or something to that effect)? It sounds like it would be more complex then characters, but in the end it wouldn’t. Plus all the same meanings would be retained.

6

My two cents pasted from the other thread–Reading is a phonetic process. Try to read words–Chinese or otherwise–without sounding them out in your head and you’ll quickly realize this is true. The phonetic clues contained in Chinese characters are far, far inferior to those in any form of phonetic writing. Thus it is an inferior medium for reading. Written Chinese in fact is a phonetic language too–the idea that meaning leaps out of characters into your head is a myth.

7

I like Miltown’s idea about alternate spellings for the homonyms. Although I’m not sure it’s really a problem. I mean, it’s not a problem for spoken Chinese, why would it be for written? Except, as has already been mentioned, Chinese written without characters might have to have a component to convey the tones. I really like the concept of written Korean, and have often thought that Chinese could adopt some such system, maybe just use zhuyin fuaho. Except Korean isn’t a tonal language, is it? So a couple options seem to be 1) zhuyin fuhao including tone markings, and 2) pinyin with alternate spellings for homonyms, with or without tone markings. I mean, if it were possible to come up with enough alternate spellings to distinguish homonyms, it doesn’t seem out of the question that people could have the tones memorized and not need them explicitly indicated, just as we do now with characters.

If anyone really cared enough, they could pick a few of the most plausible options and then test them. Native speakers are probably already too set in their ways, but we could take groups of beginning Chinese learners and asign them to one of these methods and then test for comprehension, speed, etc.

I’m not sure I agree with following reasoning:

I don’t think a native or fluent speaker of a language relies on “sounding out the words” in their head to get the meaning of the text. It may be the case that you have a feeling of the sound of the word going through your head as you read, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you rely on that sound in your head to understand the word. What I’m trying to say is, you don’t have to sound out every word you see, once you already know the word, even if you happen to hear the words in you head as you read. You also have the same experience when just thinking in general. But thought is not language (see Chomsky, or Pinker). So in this sense pinyin and characters should be the same: when reading either one you tend to hear the words running through your head, but that’s because you already know the word and how to pronounce it, not because you’ve just sounded it out. Anyway, I could be wrong, and again, I think these things could be tested.

8

I have a feeling someone might step in and say that this has been done and proven effective. If not, I thik it should be. Another flaw (for lack of a better word) I see in the whole Chinese language learning process is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of new techneques for teaching this language for non-native learners. There seems to be a lot of different things that could be added or adjusted (or eliminated) from the way Chinese is taught that would make it a lot easier, even in it’s characted form. I’ve read things about CSL (Chinese as a secong language), but I’ve never seen it in practice (maybe it’s a mainland term).
There should be no problem romanizing this language (in terms of linguistics). It would make a world of difference for natives and non-natives a like.

I agree and will add a few more things to what you already said. I’m sure there must be deaf people that can read Chinese (where there is no connection with sound). I also have a friend that told me reading things outloud (or outloud in your head) is a slower way to read. He said speed readers do not do this. I never really looked into it further, but try it and you’ll instantly see a difference.

I’m sure this is true, but it takes years of study and reading to get to that level (where someone can really just sit back and enjoy those little intricacies). Also, with the birth of romanization there would be a slew of new play on words and tricks that I’m sure would be equally as funny and interesting. It’s not like characters would just up and die one day. There would be a long period when they would get taught side-by-side. That way more people could be literate, if they wanted to step up to characters one day it would probably be an even easier task then tackling them with no knowledge of how a Chinese book flows. It’s not like Chinese doesn’t have 2 different forms of written language (traditional and simplified) now. How would adding a well put together romanized version to the mix take away from anything?

This is without getting into the details of how much easier Chinese would be to use in a technological sense.

9

To counter the concern raised in this thread …

I don’t think anyone is proposing “eliminating” characters, perhaps “retiring them from everyday use” is a better way to say it. The Chinese writing system is a tremendous achievement of human learning, and testimony of the enduring greatness of Chinese civilization. But consider the fact that Chinese characters as we know them today haven’t changed much in 1000 years. This makes this writing system a historical relic, and it should be treated as such. Metaphorically speaking, it should be placed under glass and kept in a museum, or if you like it, it should be hung in a closet, and taken out to be worn only on special occasions.

Just as hand-copied illuminated scripts of the Middle Ages weren’t burned when the printing press was introduced, just as horse carriages continue to exist 100 years after the invention of the automobile, just as Mainland Chinese are free to study traditional characters in addition to the simplified ones, the priceless treasure that is the Chinese writing system should not be discarded. In fact it deserves to be treated as a world cultural heritage, like Stonehenge or the Egyptian hieroglyphics, with continuous academic research devoted to its study.

Culture and tradition enriches our lives, but it’s important that it is based on choice. I should have the choice to study classical music, to follow age-old religious practices, to learn Latin, if I want to. If culture restricts progress, it will damage its people.

Language is more than a facet of culture. It is a currency of every day life, the means by which we communicate, gain our education, learn about the world around us. Langage has an obligation to be up-to-date and practical, to be a vehicle for change rather than cultural baggage.

I think what most reasonable proponents of a phonetic Chinese alphabet are proposing is an ALTERNATIVE to ideographs, rather than a REPLACEMENT. Chinese students should be proud of the writing system of their forefathers, and should have the choice to study it, and use it when appropriate (for example in calligraphy).

:arrow_right: :arrow_right:

Now for the harder question of what the practical alternative should be, I will just add some thoughts to the suggestions already voiced …

I of course use romanization as a learning tool, but I realize its limitations:

  • Romanization by nature is specific to one target language, meaning that it has to employ phonetic conventions familiar to the native speakers of a specific language. Taking PINYIN as an example, the “zh” and “ch” conventions may be easier for English-speakers to identify and sound out, but may look strange and lead to the wrong association for a Pole or Frenchman. As a consequence, there are dozens if not 100’s of romanizations of Chinese in use today, typically at least 2 for each language (a popular and an academic). There’s no
  • Most romanizations separate tones into diacritical marks, or ignore them completely.
  • Romanizations are Euro-centric, so there will always be cultural resistance to it, and may even be seen as a threat.

For these reasons, I don’t think that a single romanization system can ever be adopted by the Chinese. Heck, even us foreigners cannot agree on one.

Chinese characters do in fact carry visual information, just not that much. Specifically, the radicals can be quite useful in categorizing a character (by shape, by function…) that we don’t immediately recognise.

The phonetic aspect of Chinese characters, on the other hand, is a horribly flawed technique:

  • It’s not consistent … not all characters have a phoentic element.
  • It’s not resilient to changes in the language over time. Therefore, some phonetic elements merely tell us how the word was pronounced 100’s of years ago.
  • It doesn’t propagate between dialects. A phonetic element may be accurate in Mandarin but offer no help in Cantonese.

I do respect Korean script immensely, and furthermore I think that it could be a palatable model for a Chinese phonetic script ( if they can ever accept a contribution from an “inferior” culture ) because

  • Korean script is phonetic
  • It is NOT based on Latin script
  • It is built up from phonetic symbols some of which are similar in structure to Bopomofo
  • To an extend it preserves the aesthetic 3-dimensional quality of Chinese characters

So there you have it, my suggestion for a Chinese phonetic alphabet … horizontal left to right, based on the Korean model, but incorporating tonal information and - maybe - radicals to distinguish homonyms. :shock: :shock:

10

Mangalica: perhaps you need to read Cranky Laowai’s page again. He shows clearly that Pinyin is not aimed at speakers of any particular language. It is a self-contained scheme for phonemic transcription. How could it be otherwise? It needs to represent the sounds of Mandarin Chinese; not those of any other language. There is no distinction between light ‘x’ and dark ‘sh’ (sorry - forgot the technical term; it’s something fricatives isn’t it?) in any language using the Roman alphabet, for example.

Pinyin is a system that has to be learned. If you read Spanish, would you try to pronounce the words using English sounds? Or would you expect teachers of Spanish to come up with a myriad of systems soley aimed at learners of Spanish from various countries and languages?
Pinyin is actually pretty easy to learn. If you already know Zhuyinfuhao, it will take you probably an afternoon to get it down 95%.

One of your criticisms of the functional phonetic aspect of Chinese characters is that;
“It doesn’t propagate between dialects. A phonetic element may be accurate in Mandarin but offer no help in Cantonese.”
While of course you’re right, an all-phonetic system such as you recommend for common usage would completely eliminate the connection between Mandarin and Cantonese writing. Maybe that’s fine with you, but perhaps you shouldn’t contradict your own argument.

I’m rather on the fence about this. As Daltongang pointed out in the other thread - and it’s rather hazily coming back to me - John DeFrancis did indeed regret that the mainland Chinese government didn’t take the opportunity to wholeheartedly adopt Pinyin for everyday usage in the 1950s. Yet, if I remember rightly, even DeFrancis conceded that it was unlikely that this change could or would be made now, and that it seemed that Chinese characters were here to stay for the foreseeable future. It’s no longer about an ideal system; it’s about working with what is practically achievable now.

11

I disagree entirely. Reading is mostly a visual process. The phonetic element is very small unless we are learning the language or get stuck. I DID SOME RESEARCH INTO THIS FOR A REPORT I HAD TO WRITE ON THE USE OF ‘ALL CAPS’ - THAT IS MAKING EVERY LETTER UPPER CASE, LIKE THIS SENTENCE. ALL THE PHONEIC INFORMATION IS THERE BUT IT’S HARDER TO READ. I DON’T KNOW IF YOU CAN TELL FROM THESE FEW SENTENCES, BUT THEY’VE DONE TESTS. Is seems that the way people read is mostly by seeing the general shape of the words - maybe the first and last letters, and ‘l’ sticking up in the middle - that sort of thing. Also tiem yourself or someone reading a passage in your head, and then out loud. You’ll find that reading in your head is much much quicker, because you don’t have to sound it out.

Now pinyin is designed not as a form of writing, as such, but as a phonetic notation system - similar to KK phonetics. That means that any words that are pronounced the same, must be written the same. I also believe that reading with any speed whatsoever, we do not pick up the information contained in tone marks. This means that there are many many times more words with the same shape, or nearly the same shape in Chinese than there are in English. O focurse you can think of examples in English, but there are many times more in Chinese. Presumably there is a certain number, or range of homophones, where it starts getting difficult to read. I think this probably lies somewhere between English and Chinese.

I’m not denying that Chinese charcters are overly complex and probably deliberately so to maintain the position of privilege based ont he arcane knowledge held by the scholars. I like the (ideal world) sugestion in the FAQ page form zhongwen.com. Take the 400 or so syllables (without tones) and give them a phonetic element that is conistent. Then take 200 or so radicals to indicate meaning. Combinations of these two elements could be used to write all characters. The phonetic element would be enhanced (in fact characters with tone marks could be read by people who hadn’t learnt those characters) and the process of learning would be greatly simplified.

Brian

12

[quote]Is seems that the way people read is mostly by seeing the general shape of the words - maybe the first and last letters, and ‘l’ sticking up in the middle - that sort of thing[/quote]I believe you only tend to read the top half of letters. Take a newspaper headline and cover over the bottom half of the words, try it again by covering up the top half of the words and see which is easier to read, interesting…

13

I really like the www.pinyin.info website, but I haven’t come across what you are referring to. If it does say this, I must respectfully disagree. Both Wade-Giles and Pinyin were designed for an English-speaking audience, maybe not consciously but because its authors were English-speakers. Yes all romanizations have to be learned, but some conventions are easier for certain speakers to associate with their own phonetics than others, hence the proliferation of romanizations around the world, as I said before.

Taking my native Hungarian as an example, our letter “j” is not pronounced as in English, but more as the English “y”, and we use the letter “cs” to represent the English “ch”. Our closest equvalent to the English “j” is “dzs”, so we’d write the YangZe River as CsangDzsiang. Weird huh? So you see that while non-English speakers can learn English Pinyin, it’s not the most natural solution for them.

Also, romanizations can vary within a target language depending on its intended purpose. There might be a strict linguistic romanization with tone marks and other decorations, and a popular one without tone marks whose sole purpose is to allow laymen to read Chinese proper names from their morning paper without requiring a user’s manual.

[quote=“joesax”]an all-phonetic system such as you recommend for common usage would completely eliminate the connection between Mandarin and Cantonese writing. Maybe that’s fine with you, but perhaps you shouldn’t contradict your own argument.
[/quote]

The connections that exists between dialtects would be not eliminated. Each dialect would assign its own phonetic variations to the same phonetic symbols, and so the same written words would be pronouced differently, as they are in the various dialects of English.

The connections that don’t exist shouldn’t be maintained artificially.

But to qualify this last statement, I did propose that the phonetic Chinese alphabet might include a radical system to deal with homonyms and to preserve the aesthetic quality of characters, and this could be another common thread between dialects.

And yes I know that I oversimplified things by talking about a single Chinese phonetic alphabet. There would have to be several variations of the same core phonetic alphabet, with each dialect adding its own special symbols or extra tone marks.
:wink:

14

You’d think so, given the number of homophones. But why should it be harder to understand romanized Chinese than to understand a radio announcer? The listener gets the same amount of information in each case.

BTW, if you don’t think readers pick up tone marks when skimming through Hanyu Pinyin, there’s always Gwoyeu Romatzyh which has the tones built into the spelling

15

I disagree entirely. Reading is mostly a visual process. The phonetic element is very small unless we are learning the language or get stuck.
[/quote]

Well it certainly is a visual process! Unless you are using braille :slight_smile: I think you missed my point. Unless you are unlike me, reading is 100% a phonetic process. I cannot read any word English or Chinese without sounding it out in my head.

[quote]
I did SOME RESEARCH INTO THIS FOR A REPORT I had TO WRITE ON THE USE OF ‘ALL CAPS’ - THAT IS MAKING EVERY LETTER UPPER CASE, LIKE THIS SENTENCE. ALL THE PHONEIC INFORMATION IS THERE BUT IT’S HARDER TO READ. I don’t KNOW IF YOU CAN TELL FROM THESE FEW SENTENCES, BUT THEY’VE DONE TESTS. Is seems that the way people read is mostly by seeing the general shape of the words - maybe the first and last letters, and ‘l’ sticking up in the middle - that sort of thing. Also tiem yourself or someone reading a passage in your head, and then out loud. You’ll find that reading in your head is much much quicker, because you don’t have to sound it out.[/quote]

The shape factor is important, but it’s still a phonetic tool. If I read a long English word I will break it down into parts. The shapes of the letters will suggest the sounds of syllables. Certainly the sound of more common short and even longer words as well as individual syllables will come directly to mind due to their shape. Yes this is a fundamental part of reading. With English, I only need to know 26 and I soon will be cracking!
With Chinese the shape factor is obviously much more important. I will have to remember the shape of many characters where there is no obvious phonetic clue. many others will only offer an imperfect phonetic clue. I will have a much much harder time learning the characters, and while it is certainly within the human capacity to read them it cannot be anything but more difficult.

As for the all caps, i find them easy enough to read. They are used much less often, yes the shape clues to the sound are different to us and so naturally they will be a bit harder to read. Try changing some Chinese to seal-style script and see how much longer it takes you, ha ha just joking.

As for the mouthing of words, imo this is silly. You’re comparing a physical to a mental process, of course the mental process is faster. I still say you can’t read without sounding out the words in your head.

If you can understand the homophones in spoken Chinese than you can read Chinese written in phonetics. Of course tone marks are a hindrance but still preferable to characters in my opinion. I like the Korean idea suggested above, each word consists of an initial and a final (or just a final) and a tone. Is Korean tonal?

[quote]
I’m not denying that Chinese charcters are overly complex and probably deliberately so to maintain the position of privilege based ont he arcane knowledge held by the scholars. I like the (ideal world) sugestion in the FAQ page form zhongwen.com. Take the 400 or so syllables (without tones) and give them a phonetic element that is conistent. Then take 200 or so radicals to indicate meaning. Combinations of these two elements could be used to write all characters. The phonetic element would be enhanced (in fact characters with tone marks could be read by people who hadn’t learnt those characters) and the process of learning would be greatly simplified.

Brian[/quote][/quote]

A highly radical suggestion! You still have an overly complex system though. I prefer the Korean idea more.

16

mangalica, good post. I also think perhaps this thread should be re-entitled “Characters vs Alphabets” rather than “Characters vs Romanisation”. All those who are arguing in favour of romanisation without considering alternatives are missing an important point and displaying a good degree of eurocentrism. The crux of the matter is alphabets are more efficient than characters. However, there is nothing particularly special about the Roman alphabet apart from the fact that it is widely used. Noone could sensibly argue that Greek, Thai or Hindi should abandon their alphabetical systems for the Roman alphabet.

I don’t think the accuracy of pinyin is being questioned. Pinyin, Wade Giles and zhuyin fuhao are all very accurate ways of phoneticising Chinese, but there are other reasons why some systems are better than others.

salmon, I hope this was a joke (and sorry if I didn’t get it). Gwoyeu Romatzyh has to be the most horrible romanisation system ever invented. It makes Wade Giles look good!!!

No. Here’s a good website for more information about the Korean Language. declan-software.com/korean.htm

Sir Donald Bradman, your idea from Zhongwen.com is a good one, but really there is no need to use 400 different symbols to indicate the sounds. Something similar to (or the same as) Zhuyin fuhao would achieve the same result with a lot less symbols and be even easier to learn.

17

I’m not certain about this, but I think pinyin was derived from an earlier system which actually used the Cyrillic alphabet. How pinyin manifests its supposed bias towards English is unclear to me. The sounds represented by the vowel letters are largely the same as those in the orthography of the other (non-Great Vowel Shifted) languages which use the Latin alphabet. The only consonants which seem to be especially English-influenced are ‘j’, ‘ch’, and ‘sh’. ‘c’ one might argue to be Slavic- or German-influenced, and maybe ‘z’ as well. At any rate, I don’t think 3 consonants makes the entire system overly English-like.

I’d have to disagree with this as well. How many Turks do you see demanding a return to the Arabic system of writing? How many Vietnamese want to return to their own Chinese-character based system? Either every culture is going to have to have their own idiosyncratic writing system using non-shared symbols, or people are going to have to use writing systems based on those of other cultures. Why is it that many people don’t mind sharing? Because it makes life easier if you can use pre-existing technology. Even when Sequoya invented the Cherokee writing system, he used many other symbols from other languages, simply because this made it easier to print.

18

I personally don’t think you can divorce this issue from the cultural, economic and political aspects. Like, a mainland government is ever going to adopt a system based on taiwanese bopomofo? The problem of isolating different language groups (like mandarin and cantonese speakers) has been touched on, but what about the impact of having a generation of chinese kids growing up using a different written language to their parents? You might say that this is just a transitionary problem, but with 1.25 billion people to ‘convert’ that’s quite a transition.

I appreciate that you are trying to keep things to a more theoretical linguistic level, but even there I personally think characters have a lot going for them. Reading pinyin is just not as easy as reading characters. Someone has said that it should be just as easy as listening to a radio announcer, but I don’t agree. When you listen to spoken langauge you don’t hear each word individually, you hear phrases and segments of sentences. When you read pinyin you have to do the same - read out whole sections before you can determine the meaning of individual words that make up that section. (I think this is the point that was made earlier about needing to ‘sound out’ pinyin). You would also need a very sophisticated system of punctuation to convey the same level of information you get in speech from phrasing, emphasis etc.

If we are talking about making the language easier for foreigners to learn, I like the taiwanese method of writing bopomofo down the side of the characters. But I can’t see any purely phonetic system being able to provide a readable writing system for spoken chinese which is better than characters. And it seems that if you are going to add ‘radicals’ to the phonetic system to make it work, then you are heading away from a phonetic system and back towards a character based system. Also, if the radicals are based on the original character (which people no longer learn) how does it help?

One other cultural point. Chinese characters convey meaning concisely and beautifully. I don’t think you can dismiss the aesthetic element because it doesn’t fit into some more logical system. It’s just my personal opinion, but one of the things I’ve come to like about china is that logic is not the only consideration in issues like this.

19

[quote]You’d think so, given the number of homophones. But why should it be harder to understand romanized Chinese than to understand a radio announcer? The listener gets the same amount of information in each case.
[/quote]

But my point is that unless they ‘sound out’ the words that they read, they don’t get the same information. Daltongang, I don’t really understand what you mean when you say you sound out the words in your head. I certainly don’t, and from what I’ve read most people don’t either. If this was the case, reading would be as slow as listening, as you sounded out and listened to the words. English seems phonetic, but from some research I read regarding teaching kids to read, it’s not. Current educational practice in NZ is not to teach kids to read phonetically, but to get them to recognise whole words. Why? Because research indicated that this is the way people read.

Salmon’s mention of Guiyu romatz (or haowever it’s spelt) makes a bit of sense. This is beacuase I doubt it’s possible to properly assimilate tone infoprmation when speed reading. However it still leaves you with an inordinate number of homophones and words that seem identical without a closer look.

No, you couldn’t use less, because the idea is to have one character/radical to represent every single syllable in Chinese (of which there are about 400). Actually the advantage of this idea is that it retains the basic characteristics of Chinese character, but simplifies it incredibly.

Here’s how it works. Take a syllable at random, let’s say ‘wang’ from my name. Here’s the first load of 'wang’s that I get typing zhuyin:

20

Is that your original idaa brian? It’s kinda cool. In that case it would be very easy to learn Chinese, because one only needs to memorize the 400 sonants and the 200 radicals.

If this get standardized and laid out properly, it sure simplifies things a whole lot.

ax