I see thirteen distinct “real” meanings, all of which came from the collegiate edition of the standard dictionary of American English, so if some of them are slang they are nonetheless important enough to require inclusion. I also see three different parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, and verbs. You want to say that one meaning is more common than the others? Guess what: Mandarin speakers also have that sense about Mandarin words.
Apples and oranges, o fluffy one. Apples and oranges.
And anyway, I never said any of that.
I am saying this: [ul][li]Mandarin’s so-called homonym problem is vastly overstated.[/li]
[li]It’s essential not to confuse writing with the language itself. [/li]
[li]There is generally a disconnect between the written and spoken forms of languages. In the case of Mandarin, this disconnect is especially large. This is due to the use of Chinese characters, not to anything inherently different about Mandarin. [/li]
[li]The “difference” of Mandarin from other languages is overstated, largely because of Chinese characters, which have nothing to do with the grammar of the language. [/li]
[li]Much of the teaching of Mandarin is relatively ineffective because of inappropriate pedagogical methods. (I’ll leave the ranting about this topic to Ironlady, who’s better at it than I am.)[/li]
[li]The increased use of hanyu pinyin would do more to boost Mandarin’s chances of becoming an international language than anything else.[/li]
[li]Aw, c’mon now! You know I’m not saying that Mandarin is easy.[/li][/ul]
Define “native speaker” in relation to Mandarin Chinese. How many people do you think are native speakers ? Are people from the following places likely to be “native speakers” ? I think the number of native speakers of Mandarin Chinese is not anywhere near the figures of hundreds of millions I have heard quoted over the years.
Shanghai
Guangdong
Kunming
Hong Kong
Zhong He
Tainan
How come dyslexia is a more common problem among english-speaking students than of chinese-speakers? I know there has been done research on this subject (but I am sorry that I couldn’t find any links at the moment). People learning chinese has a dyslexia-percent far lower than their english counterparts.
Just some thoughts on the defence of the use of symbolic characters as opposed to our phonetic alphabet…
Also, chinese is definately a more compact language - It litteraly takes up less space, hence saving trees, therefore being more environmentally friendly.
In addition it is my experience here that most students here read normal (i am not referring to heavy literature) chinese faster than most students in Norway read norwegian (and americans read english).
Probably because Chinese schools and teachers don’t diagnose dyslexia properly. kids with dyslexia would just be beaten by their teachers for being “stupid” or “lazy” or mocked by fellow students.
The diagnosis and understanding of dyslexia is improving, but I would think the discrepancy in numbers has to do more with the underreporting and under-diagnosis with Chinese students than any ‘true’ difference attributable to the languages themselves.
[quote=“Jack Burton”][quote=“Han-Wei”]How come dyslexia is a more common problem among English-speaking students than of Chinese-speakers? I know there has been done research on this subject (but I am sorry that I couldn’t find any links at the moment). People learning Chinese has a dyslexia-percent far lower than their English counterparts.
[/quote]
Probably because Chinese schools and teachers don’t diagnose dyslexia properly. kids with dyslexia would just be beaten by their teachers for being “stupid” or “lazy” or mocked by fellow students.
The diagnosis and understanding of dyslexia is improving, but I would think the discrepancy in numbers has to do more with the underreporting and under-diagnosis with Chinese students than any ‘true’ difference attributable to the languages themselves.[/quote]
I’ve gotta throw in with Jack Burton. I’ve known plenty of dislexic Chinese kids. Some of them were not initially recognized as dislexic by their Chinese teachers but instead by English teachers at an anqingban or buxiban. Most teachers in Taiwan, HK and China have no understanding about dislexia. I’m no expert on it, but it seems to me that a person’s dislexia is something that is with them from the start, no matter what their first language is.
Maybe you just write too big in English. Try to write smaller!
Actually, I’ve seen plenty of so called scholarly research saying the exact opposite: educated Chinese people take longer to read something in Chinese than a native speaker of English would require to read the same thing translated into English. I think both assertions are pretty much BS and impossible to prove.
As Jack Burton and Jive Turkey have already pointed out, that’s not the case.
The claim, as it is usually made, is that using Chinese characters rather than an alphabetic system somehow decreases dyslexia because character-based writing heads directly into a different segment of people’s brains, or some other such nonsense.
One source of this notion is “American Children with Reading Problems Can Easily Learn to Read English Represented by Chinese Characters,” by Paul Rozin, Susan Portisky, and Raina Sotsky. It appeared in Science in 1971. The article is thoroughly debunked on pp. 171-76 of The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, by John DeFrancis, a book I recommend most
highly.
They’re not “symbolic characters.” You’re just repeating the ideographic myth, which has been thoroughly debunked several times over.
I wonder how many pieces of paper people go through in all the additional practice of learning how to write characters.
But this is all rather silly.
And, anyway, you might want then to protest against publishers that print things top-to-bottom and right-to-left, because books in that style take more paper than works following the Western pattern.
I would guess Ironlady would have something to say on that subject. I know of several foreigners who can speak it correctly and have no trouble reading most things as well.[/quote]
Anybody who doubts the homophone stuff, pick up a copy of the excellent Lanbridge Pinyin Chinese-English dictionary, and you’ll see how few identical homophones there really are. (It sure burst my bubble…I was SURE it was all those darned homophones that inhibited my Chinese comprehension, but all the time it was just me… )
Anyway, CSL in general, and CSL in Taiwan in particular, is way, way behind English language teaching. We just got back from Shanghai where we went ape-shxt in the Foreign Languages Bookstore. There was a section just on “Chinese for Foreigners” bigger than my apartment. I’m not kidding. Taiwan would do well to cast off the political cr*p and adopt some of those textbooks (hey, they’re not my excellent method, but at least they’re substantially more systematic and comprehensive than what they have here.)
I mean, why is Shita insisting on developing “their own” Chinese as a foreign language exam – as though they have the resources to norm it and have it be really meaningful in a technical sense – when the HSK has been going strong for a long time now? Why not just adapt that? I realize there are major differnces between TW and ML usage, but surely it’s better to paint the wheel than to re-invent it?
[quote=“ironlady”] There was a section just on “Chinese for Foreigners” bigger than my apartment. I’m not kidding. Taiwan would do well to cast off the political cr*p and adopt some of those textbooks (hey, they’re not my excellent method, but at least they’re substantially more systematic and comprehensive than what they have here.)
[/quote]
Sigh. Makes me want to make a trip to China. I managed to buy one mainland Chinese textbook–when I was America. It has better usage notes for the difficult vocabulary than I’ve seen in any textbook in Taiwan. I don’t think I’ve even seen anything that you could call usage notes in a textbook here. And it also had supplementary texts for each chapter that used the chapter’s vocabulary. Sure, you can become proficient using dictionaries and asking locals, but it would sure be a lot faster if there were some good textbooks.
And considering that the majority of the students in intermediate and advanced Chinese classes are not native English-speakers, it’s strange that only one or two textbooks here give definitions in Chinese.
I have to disagree with the posters who think writing Chinese in pinyin is a good idea. There are fewer homophones in Chinese than foreigners generally think, and of course context helps a lot, but I still think it would make it more difficult to read, not easier. For centuries Chinese people have written Chinese using characters, so their written language is adapted to being written with characters. Many common written expressions would be meaningless if written with an alphabet.
We tend to think that writing Chinese with an alphabet would make it easier to read just because the letters used in pinyin are our alphabet. The problem with this is that we have forgotten how hard it was to learn to read English, since we were children at the time. Just think, if you learned bopomofo, did you really find it easy to read? Would you find it easy to read sophisticated material in bopomofo? I don’t think so, because written Chinese, since it uses characters that clearly differentiate between meanings, can be more compact than spoken Chinese.
My personal experience in learning languages makes me think that pinyin is not suited to writing Chinese. I have studied Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. It’s hard to judge your own language level, but at my best the three were at approximately the same level - I could carry on a fluent conversation with a native speaker about politics, the economy, cultural questions, etc., but no one would mistake me for a native speaker. For reading: 1. Korean is written using an alphabet - their own alphabet, not ours 2. Japanese is written using Chinese characters for most of the nouns, verbs, and adjectives; and using two syllabaries (like an alphabet, but one symbol is used for each syllable): hiragana for verb endings, adverbs, and a few others; katakana for words borrowed from Western languages 3. Chinese.
Of the three, the one written with an alphabet (Korean) is the hardest to read. True, it only takes an hour or two to learn how to pronounce the symbols, but it takes a long time to get good enough at Korean to be able to read a book. About 70% of Korean’s vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese, and so there are a lot of homophones. It is not easy to decipher. Even my Korean friends would say that it was hard to figure out which word a writer meant sometimes.
I find Japanese easier to read than Chinese: the characters give you the basic meaning in Japanese, but the grammar markers and word divisions are very clear because they are written in a different kind of script.
In other words, characters are the root of the problem, not its solution.
Um, no. Who’s “we”?
You can’t possibly be serious in comparing the difficulty of native speakers of English learning to read English through the alphabet with the difficulty of native speakers of Mandarin learning to read their own language through the use of Chinese characters. Would you claim that for a native speaker of Mandarin, learning to read and write using zhuyin fuhao (bopomofo) is just as hard as learning to do so with Chinese characters?
See above quote by Hannas. I also strongly recommend reading the whole book. The entire chapter the quote is from is available on line at my Web site.
Keep in mind, too, that Chinese people manage to carry on conversations all the time without the additional use of “characters that clearly differentiate between meanings.” If something can be spoken and understood, it can be written alphabetically and understood when read. And it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference whether the material being discussed is a laundry list or something “sophisticated.”
Or are you really claiming that characters are superior to romanization because they are more “compact”? That would be like saying that U.S. military jargon, with its interminable abbreviations and initialisms, is better suited for sophisticated writing than the style of plain speech.
I don’t understand what this has to do with characters. It seems you’re just talking about the difficulties of the languages themselves, not of their written forms.
about this “ideographic myth”
How come chinese characters all are SYLLABLES, consisting of one or more sounds, while alfabets generally only makes up one short sound that in very few cases can be used alone. ie. A character is seen remembered and pronounced by a native speaker - the same is the case for a english native or fluent speaker, but for one not fluent (or encountering new words) in the language, a reader of english will read every letter, and pronouncing them as according to the rules. But for a reader of chinese this is never possible - every single character must be memorized in order to be pronounced correctly, thus addressing a different segment of the brain.
This was while they were reading english right? not chinese. ergo back to my point, dyslexia because of different system of writing, not because of difference between chinese and english people.
and dyslexia is allways present in a person (it depends on the language if it actually becomes an obstacle in reading)
This was while they were reading English right? not Chinese. ergo back to my point, dyslexia because of different system of writing, not because of difference between Chinese and English people.
and dyslexia is allways present in a person (it depends on the language if it actually becomes an obstacle in reading)[/quote]No, actually the kids were writing Chinese. The two Taiwanese kids I’ve known who a specialist later described as dyslexic were having trouble putting letters in the right order in English and would also write letters or whole words backwards; one of them was a very fast learner of spoken English but couldn’t read or write to save his own ass. At the time, I didn’t know anything about dyslexia, but I was curious about why this boy had such consistent and strange problems. One day at school, I had him show me his Chinese homework. It was amazing how he did pretty much the same thing with written Chinese as he did with written English. First, he couldn’t read anywhere close to his age level in Chinese. Also, he could not read most of the characters in his character practice book (even the ones he had written just a few minutes before) and he couldn’t associate bopomofo with sounds. His parents were waishengren and spoke nothing but guoyu at home; it was not a problem of having to learn a second language. Most interestingly, and I’m not sure whether this is a typical trait of dyslexics, he would often write even the most complex characters completely and perfectly backwards (he was right-handed, so that was not the problem). He would also very frequently write compound words backwards, i.e. first character second, second character first. He was in the fourth grade and had been doing this since the beginning of primary school. The other kid was not as extreme, but he did the same things in varying degrees. A couple of other teachers I know have seen the same thing in a few Chinese students. 99% of the time, their Chinese teachers at school either don’t recognize it or don’t know what to do about it other than give the kid more pressure. They usually tell the parents that the kid is just a poor student rather than telling them that their kid actually has a learning disability. Even if the teacher understands dyslexia, parents often can’t accept that their child has any sort of learning disability; they think it’s embarrassing. The kids I’ve known of who actually got some professional help for their dyslexia got it only because their parents were smart enough and cared enough to find out about it themselves. Their kids’ teachers at school were no help at all, perhaps because they believed the same nonsense that dyslexia is impossible for Chinese learners.
Chinese, Korean and Japanese offer us three examples in the real world of how nations actually deal with writing a language like Chinese. I am well aware that Korean and Japanese are not in the same language family as Chinese, but both have been heavily influenced by Chinese. Korean vocabulary is 70% borrowed from Chinese. Japanese is about the same.
Writing a language like Chinese strictly in a phonemic script is possible -Korean is. But it is difficult to read; for a foreigner, it is more difficult to read than Japanese, which uses some Chinese characters. Why? Because there are too many ambiguous words, too many words that sound the same. Written with at least some characters, the meaning is clearer.
In all three languages, people’s written and spoken language use differs a great deal. Speakers of all three use abbreviated forms of the language when they write, because the use of characters makes it obvious which meaning they mean. Even though Korean has stopped using characters, they still write like this. It is a mark of education.
Of course, native speakers of a language like Chinese could stop showing off their erudition by the use of highly compact literary language. If they wrote more like they spoke, pinyin or some kind of phonemic script would be fine. Unfortunately, the example of Korean shows that they don’t do this. Educated speakers continue to write as if they were writing with characters. In this kind of situation, pinyin or bopomofo or any other phonemic script is not easy to read. Easy to pronounce, yes - but not easy to understand.
Don’t you think that writing, OVERALL, is going more and more in the direction of being like spoken language, especially with the impact of the Internet and e-mail and online chat and such? High-school-age kids in the US as well as kids in Taiwan are using more and more abbreviations, Internet spellings (“u” for “you”) and stuff like that. It won’t happen overnight, but don’t you think that the trend is toward a more oralized written language, which would then make a phonetic script OK for Chinese?
OK, I’ve only read the last page of this thread, so pardon me if I’m retreading ground here.
This “too many ambiguous words” thing is rubbish. Plain and simple. English has exactly the same problem; there are several words that can have entirely different meanings in different contexts - and therein lies the solution, both in Chinese and English. CONTEXT. To use an example I’ve seen (and seen mocked) recently: if you saw an entry in a tour itinerary for a tour of the mainland saying that one day you were to “you2 xi1 hu2” would you be more inclined to assume it meant “tour the West Lake” or “swim the West Lake”? They’re exactly the same phonetically - hell, in simplified characters they’re exactly the same too. But no-one - well, very few people - are likely to stuff that up.
And as was said earlier - if people can speak the language without having to rely on using visual aids to indicate what one of the range of possible characters they’re using with the same pronunciation, then the language is perfectly capable of being phonetically rendered.
[quote=“Jack Burton”]2. the English reader was able to comprehend accurately the content overall, because the Chinese language lends itself to multiple interpretations and variation and is generally less “precise”. i realise this happens in any language, but English at least generally can be more precise than Chinese. (which might make Chinese a wonderfully rich, deep language for metaphors, poetry, etc, but not say for a scientific document).
btw, this is a generalization but I think it does have some merit.[/quote]
I don’t. You’re talking out of your ass. I translate Chinese scientific documents into English every day. Chinese is as amenable to precision of expression as English is. There are times, naturally, where singulars and plurals are not so clearly defined in Chinese. In these instances you simply go by context and choose whether you will add an “s” to the end of “fluidized bed reactor.” When the distinction is crucial to the claims of something like a Chinese patent application then, of course, the Chinese makes it clear.
Well, Chinese certainly can be as precise as English, but seems to me the thing is that most Chinese don’t seem to think that’s a worthy goal to pursue! At least they don’t bother to pursue it most of the time…
But it’s interesting that some of the most difficult stuff to interpret into Chinese is touchy-feely, almost-content-free business fluff, like “empowerment” and “enforcement” and stuff like that. If you really, REALLY think about what the English is saying, you find it’s almost unbearably vague, but the two langages seem to be vague in different ways.
I think there are two issues operating: one is what the language CAN do, and the other is what the speakers/writers of the language are in the habit of doing with it. Of course you could modify every noun phrase with a specific number or even just the annoying “men5” suffix to show plural, or use “na4ge” to indicate “the” instead of relying on topic and the reader’s memory, but most users of Chinese don’t feel that’s necessary.
Anyway, English can be vague too:
“I can’t begin to tell you what I think of your performance.”
“No one would be better for the job than she is.”
[quote=“Tetsuo”]
This “too many ambiguous words” thing is rubbish. Plain and simple. English has exactly the same problem; there are several words that can have entirely different meanings in different contexts - and therein lies the solution, both in Chinese and English. CONTEXT. [/quote]
English does not have the exact same problem - Chinese has far more homonyms. Of course, when speaking, this is not a problem, because people expand their speech to be understandable. However, just look at a normal book or newspaper article in Chinese. Do you really think it would be perfectly clear if it were written in pinyin? The problem is that Chinese writers write a compact form of Chinese which is dependent on characters for its meaning. If Chinese writers change their written language so it becomes more like their speech, then writing it in pinyin could work.
I don’t see much evidence that Chinese writers are ready to change their writing style, however. Internet use may encourage it.
As an aside, try asking a native speaker of Japanese if they prefer reading Japanese written in a mixture of Chinese characters and kana, or written only in kana. They find normal written Japanese (which uses Chinese characters and kana) to be easier to read. This is the same issue as writing Chinese in pinyin or characters. If it were really easier or better to use a phonemic writing system, why have Japanese peole not yet abandoned characters?
Yes I do think it would be perfectly clear if written in Pinyin. If you disagree, I challenge you to send me a short newspaper article in pinyin and see if I can translate it or not. You have spell correctly and break your words reasonably though.
[quote]
If it were really easier or better to use a phonemic writing system, why have Japanese peole not yet abandoned characters?[/quote]
There are all sorts of political, cultural, and aesthetic reasons not to do so. Why did the Koreans adopt a phonemic writing system?
Unlike some, I have no gripe with Chinese characters and I don’t think they are that hard to master. It just takes time. But you are simply wrong if you think we can’t replace them with Pinyin. I text frequently in pinyin and in Taiwanese romanization and never have any problem understanding other people. I have also used University catalogs that are romanized (MUCH easier than using the ones here in Taiwan) and have never had trouble recognizing titles and authors without the characters.
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