Characters vs. Alphabetic Writing

I would most likely agree with them! What could be more pointless than participating in a pointless debate? :slight_smile:

Well I donā€™t think it being decided us is really a point in question :slight_smile: but I learned the damn thing, I can damn well shoot off my two cents about it! :slight_smile:

I doubt anyone would argue that Chinese is not much harder to learn than phonetic writing would be. The question in my mind is more, once learned, is it easier or at least as easy to read as phonetic writing would be?

Hi Scott, how goes it? You completely missed my point, maybe I wasnā€™t clear enough so here it is! Human speech preceded human writing by many thousands of years. The brain understands words essentially as they are heard, writing is a relatively recent development. Writing is understood by the brain as essentially a visual form of speech. The eye is far inferior to the ear for this purpose. Our brains canā€™t understand writing without essentially converting it to speech first. Writing which as closely mimics the forms of speech as possible is preferable. This is just my opinion and gut feeling about it.

It pains me considerably to be largely absent from this thread on a topic so near and dear to my heart. Itā€™s just that Iā€™m damn busy lately. :frowning: I hope to join in properly soon.

In the meantime I would urge those on the thread defending characters to more carefully consider whether the supposed benefits of characters donā€™t also apply to alphabetic writing as well.

Here are some readings that may help to shed some light on the subject.

As mentioned earlier, script reform and romanization are most definitely not just a foreigner thing. For more on this topic, see Sound and Meaning in the History of Characters: Views of Chinaā€™s Earliest Script Reformers, also One State, One People, One Language, and (for some Japanese context) Scholarly Neglect.

For more on Japan, see The Price of Tradition.

For a reality check on some notions of poetry and language, see Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character.

Beginners to this topic might want to start with The Ideographic Myth.

And donā€™t blame the messanger if you donā€™t like the message. The truth is the truth, regardless of whether itā€™s spoken by a Westerner, a Han, or anyone else; regardless of whether itā€™s said by one person or a billion; and regardless of whether it goes against peopleā€™s ingrained beliefs.

Re: Arabic, Japanese, Korean alphabet a challenge to scrabble maker. Iā€™ve made Squabble for each version and have them tested, codenamed Arable, Jabble, and Kobble.

Re: Reform of English writing.

Iā€™ve heard of an American linguist who mocks up a system of writing English with Chinese script. This is fun because it uses the theory in liushu; xiangxing, jieyi, xiangsheng, etc.

His example was somethig like, if we want to write the word ā€œhouseā€
then the the character would be something that sounds like ā€œhooā€ + ā€œseā€ and employ a radical for house.
some thing like

Dear ax,

[quote=ā€œaxā€]His example was somethig like, if we want to write the word ā€œhouseā€ then the the character would be something that sounds like ā€œhooā€ + ā€œseā€ and employ a radical for house. some thing like

[quote]I doubt anyone would argue that Chinese is not much harder to learn than phonetic writing would be. The question in my mind is more, once learned, is it easier or at least as easy to read as phonetic writing would be?
[/quote]

Spot on. That is the question, and I think it is easier.

Actually I also would argue that learning Chinese characters is not much harder than learning to read and write in a phonetic alphabet> Words right - not just letters. How long does it take someone to learn to spell all the words in English? I havenā€™t learnt them all yet. And Iā€™,m talking for Chinese to learn Chinese (ie native speaker/readers) not foreigners.

So far quite a few people here have argued that a phonetic alphabet would be better for Chinese, but I havenā€™t heard a convincing reason yet.

Brian

I think a phonetic system is clearly easier to learn than Chinese characters, for native speakers. English is not a good comparison because the English language is uniquely difficult in that spelling and pronunciation are not very well correlated. But for languages like Spanish or Chinese, if you know how to pronounce it, you can spell it.

This basically means that if you took a totally illiterate Chinese person and taught him the phonetic pinyin alphabet, he could basically become instantly literate and write down every single word he knows and would be able to read all those words. Learning the characters, however, would take years and years.

The primary benefit of a phonetic system is expanded literacy. Historically, wasnā€™t knowledge of Chinese characters a sign of how ā€œeducatedā€ you were? The point of a phonetic system is that basically everyone can be literate quickly without years of schooling. This has big benefits in a poor, developing country like China where educational access might not be available equally to all and some children can only be schooled up until a certain age before they go work on the farms, etc.

Didnā€™t China think about replacing characters with some sort of alphabet ? Anyone know know anything about it ? I think they changed their minds because people didnā€™t want to give up characters. Did they then decide to use simplified characters ?

My contribution to the discussion -> I think characters are dead hard :?

I agree that the question is not whether characters are harder to learn than a phonetic alphabet (clearly they are) but whether once learnt they are more useful. Two points.

(1) I can communicate with speakers of all sorts of Chinese dialects using characters.

In response to John ā€” whom I still owe a beer; will catch up to you next month when Iā€™m back from vacation ā€” I just donā€™t think it works this way. My written and spoken English differ in speed of production and reception, vocabulary, and grammatical structure; and although there is a definite connected between reading and speaking, my self-observation is that reading can be ā€˜more spatialā€™ than picking out visual forms of sounds. Hence,

(2) Although Iā€™m doing fairly well now, having been back in Taiwan for a while, there was a time when I could read a book in Chinese but not tell you the correct tone ā€” or often even the general pronunciation at all ā€” of a good percentage of the characters I was able to understand. The shape with its meaning associations had stuck with me long after the sound association had been lost. This is perhaps due to my investing much more time in reading than speaking but I do think it brings out my point: that reading can be significantly disassociated from ā€˜soundsā€™. This, I might add, is the reasoning that leads to (1) above, that characters cross dialects in a way that phonemic alphabets donā€™t preceisely because of such a disassociation.

Shrug. Anyway, I think this is an interesting debate and I certainly wouldnā€™t want oppose the use of a phonemic script for Chinese. In fact, I donā€™t really see whatā€™s wrong with learning and using only pinyin even now. If you are uninterested in learning characters for all sorts of good reasons, itā€™s easy enough to convert what you do need to read to pinyin.

That said, assuming one has already learnt characters, I do think they have their advantages. The above aside, I suspect that characters are simply quicker to scan than pinyin. (And, of course, given that Iā€™ve already learnt to read the damn things, I like that theyā€™re hard: it keeps the value of my investment high!)

Characters are a real bitch to remember if youā€™re not writing them all day every day. After a few years of being stateside again, I can barely remember how to write the most basic characters (even though I can still read them). Even native speakers often canā€™t remember how to write certain characters, the more out of practice they are.

Kind of neat and cool, I agree, but what a reason to put billions of people through learning characters when they could be learning astrophysics

But by making a phonetic written system the standard, youā€™d eliminate all the competition from the teeming masses who are others experts in Chinese characters. By getting rid of characters, the master class of people able to read characters would become the only mystics capable of divining the mysteries of ancient Chinese texts. You could charge higher rates for your services. Plus, no one could question you because they canā€™t read the stuff anyways.

[quote=ā€œaxā€]His example was somethig like, if we want to write the word ā€œhouseā€ then the character would be something that sounds like ā€œhooā€ + ā€œseā€ and employ a radical for house. Something like

Right on, Neo,
Language should be a facilitator of change and progress, not a cultural relic. Time spent learning how to use a language is time that could have been spent learning using the language for something more constructive.

China was once a truly great civilization with immeasurable contributions to humanity, but what has it to show for in the last say 1000 years? A big stone wall. I know Iā€™m opening up a major can of worms here and will be catching a lot of heat, but I think thereā€™s a direct relationship between an overly complicated writing system and the obstructed development of modern Chinese society. To be fair, language may not be the root cause, but rather a manifestation of an overly tradition-bound, isolationist mentality.

Now this argument can be countered with the Taiwanese example, a nation that boasts a highly skilled and literate population, and this is a truly remarkable achievement, probably the single greatest highlight of Chinaā€™s recent history (and it can be traced back to the successful resistance to Western colonization and the establishment of the Republic), but even here thereā€™s room for improvement. Thereā€™s no reason why such talented & hard-working people shouldnā€™t be fluent in 3 languages by the time they finish high school, and why Taiwan couldnā€™t offer world-class teaching institutions (besides the MTC) to attract foreign students.

An interesting point, one which deserves its own topic - is learning Chinese a good investment? Of course some of us have subjective motivations, like the desire to communicate with the family of our significant other. But given our experiences, would we recommend studying Chinese to the average American or European college student, for anything more than to satisfy their curiosity?

From a pure economical perspective, is does ROI justify the effort spent? Will knowing Chinese improve our career prospects or earning potential?

Another idea to ponder ā€“ noone ever had to defend their decision to learn a phonetic alphabet.


[quote]How about

the epigraphy of chinese characters is fascinating. is there anyone out there with more than a passing fancy for such? it would be great to have someone to sound ideas off of.

This is one of the reasons why I think an alphabet is so necessary. Chinese would be able to slip into the school systems of other countries. With the use of a phonetic alphabet Chinese could be one of the languages a kid could choose from when going to school (Spanish and French were the big 2 with some schools offering Japanese or German). Learning Chinese does NOT need to be the big pain in the arse it seems to be in this day and age.

Does anyone know if pinyin (with tone marks) is a healthy alternative to Chinese charcters?
Iā€™m tired of hearing speaculative arguments. Is there someone here with very good Chinese reading skills that can say pinyin is or isnā€™t an acceptable substitute? If thereā€™s some reading on Crankyā€™s site that cover this, please point me in that direction.

Also, are there such things as Chinese to pinyin converters? Something that would keep words grouped together and stuff? That would be cool if there were.

[quote]Does anyone know if pinyin (with tone marks) is a healthy alternative to Chinese charcters?
[/quote]

Yep, Iā€™ve already said why itā€™s not a good alternative. Nobody has come up with any reasons why it would be a good alternative, except that itā€™s easier to learn, which is outweighed by the fact that itā€™s much more difficult to read.

Brian

Mandarin is already available in quite a few school districts on the west coast of Canada. Itā€™s taught with characters.

Absolutely ā€” provided you live (or are willing to relocate to) somewhere where the language is used. Iā€™m a philosophy major; Chinese moves me into all sorts of positions that I would otherwise be unable to rise above the hores of liberal arts graduates to compete for. And that is just for the moment. Iā€™ll eventually go back for my sticker in law, and Chinese will not only greatly increase my earning potential (Chinaā€™s the market of my lifetime), but will allow me to do interesting, multi-cultural work (as opposed to settling divorces and mergers at home, which Iā€™m not particularly interested in) and hopefully allow me to settle back into a part-time consulting or teaching position by the time Iā€™m in my late 30s. So, yeah, the value is high for me.

The other myth is that Chinese takes significantly longer than learning a European language. This is no doubt true, but it doesnā€™t take that much longer! I was fluent after two years. Not perfectly, but conversationally and able to read more-or-less what Iā€™m interested in reading. Perhaps thatā€™s twice what it would take to become fluent in French or German, but itā€™s not all that much more time. If it took four years to speak a European language well and eight to speak Chinese, that would be another matter. But at one to two for ā€˜Europeseā€™ and two to three for Chinese, perhaps the extra time is not so much more that the economic advantages to learning the latter donā€™t justify it.

Sure it is. Even without tone marks one can usually guess store signs in the Mainland. With tone marks it would be quite readable. Someone already posted a few lines on BPMF (like pinyin a phonemic alphabet) that proved that point.

Mandarin is already available in quite a few school districts on the west coast of Canada. Itā€™s taught with characters.[/quote]
Iā€™ll guess that these are places with a larger population of native speakers of Chinese already there. That just logically makes sense. With out a breakaway from characters in the first year or two of teaching I canā€™t see Chinese turning into a more global language.

Iā€™m not trying to break your balls, but first you said itā€™s a myth and then said itā€™s without a doubt true. For you (and a hand full others) it doesnā€™t take that much longer. Thereā€™s a whole lot of people for whome it does take that much longer.

Fluency is hard hard thing to define, but I donā€™t think there are many people that could claim fluency of Chinese in a 2 year time period. If youā€™re one of them, thatā€™s great, but I think it would take most people over 5 years to make such a claim with my definition of fluency. I beleive a big reason for that is becuase of the Characters. I techinically started studying Chinese almost 4 years ago (my first University class). Even though a didnā€™t apply my self very hard in the beginning, my level should be much higher then it is now. You can make fun of my seriosness of study, but if I took the exact same path with Spanish or French I know I would be approaching fluency (or be fluent). Chinese fluecy for me is at least 2 years away from where I am now. Right now, all I do is study Chinese and post on forumosa :wink: .

See, here we go again. Maybe a thread should be dedicated to pinyin. I have a really low level, but everything Iā€™ve put into pinyin hasnā€™t been a problem for me to read. But could I read a modern day Chinese book translated in to pinyin? (sorry if it seems like Iā€™m beating a dead horse)

[quote=ā€œSir Donald Bradmanā€][quote]Does anyone know if pinyin (with tone marks) is a healthy alternative to Chinese charcters?
[/quote]

Yep, Iā€™ve already said why itā€™s not a good alternative. Nobody has come up with any reasons why it would be a good alternative, except that itā€™s easier to learn, which is outweighed by the fact that itā€™s much more difficult to read.

Brian[/quote]

Your feeling on the matter, though not irrelevant, is probably not a very good measure. Youā€™ve spent the time and effort to learn characters, and since you have said preference for characters you no doubt spend more time now reading them than pinyin or zhuyin. There comes a point for most people in studying characters where they no longer need to rely so heavily on pinyin or zhuyin, and can set it aside, which means that you end up practicing reading characters much more than you do pinyin or zhuyin. While itā€™s not necessarily a given that practice will make perfect (eg, if characters were so much harder than pinyin that no matter how much effort you made you would always still find pinyin to be easier), itā€™s also not surprising to find that, with all that practice, characters seem easier to you now.

Pinyin might be more difficult for you to read, but I think a better question is, if the same amount of practice were put into either characters or a phonetic system, which would be easier to read and result in better comprehension?

I think there are two good ways find an answer to this debate. 1) understand how the brain actually processes written text. Is it basically just a phonetic process, which uses the same system as spoken language, with the added step of having to translate the written text to a spoken form? Or is it possible that weā€™re able to get more information out of written text than we do from spoken language, such that the semantic content of Chinese characters might add to our understanding, above and beyond the phonetic component.

I donā€™t have enough experience to answer these questions, but this thread has gotten me curious enough to go check out some books from the library. Hereā€™s an interesting one, though I wouldnā€™t recommend buying it: it costs US$115 at amazon. I just started reading, so no answers yetā€¦

I donā€™t think the topic of spelling has really been mentioned so far. This is one place where alphabets have a massive advantage over characters. A beginning student of English can ask or be told how to spell any word.

In Chinese it is probably more correct to say write rather than spell. However, in order to be told how to write a certain character you have to have considerable knowledge of existing characters and radicals.

An example which illustrates my point:
How do you spell turtle? T-U-R-T-L-E

And in Chineseā€¦ Wugui de gui zenme xie? :?

I will pay G$$$ to anybody who can give an intelligible answer to this question in Chinese (I am referring to the Traditional character).