Mandarin... the new "must learn" language

I agree - there’s also a simple test to prove this:
Watch a native speaker writing on a computer. The standard way is to type the bopomofo (zhuyin), and leave it to the computer to ‘translate’ that into Chinese characters; the computer will always guess, but allow the user to go back and pick from a set of possible characters if necessary. The number of times I see people correcting the characters doesn’t seem to me much different to the number of times I have to go back and correct my English (mistyped/misspelled). There are some occassions that do regularly need editing (names, very short phrases, and I’d guess poetry), but for the huge majority of cases, it just works. If a computer can understand typed zhuyin, a human definitely can - and of course the same applies to pinyin as to zhuyin.

Incidentally, I believe professional typists don’t use this phonetic based input, but instead use a system based on the characters construction - implying that phonetic input is less efficient (but easier to learn).

This is backwards. People do not “expand their speech.” The change is made when writing in Chinese characters, which allow for abbreviated references.

Feiren already noted several of the reasons. For a detailed discussion of moves in Japan toward writing reform, see the works of J. Marshall Unger, especially Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading Between the Lines. I have most of that book’s introduction on my Web site.

The Vietnamese have also changed their writing system from one based on characters to one that uses the roman alphabet. It works just fine for them.

Good point. I’d also mention that in China by far the most commonly used input method is Hanyu Pinyin. In a way, people are already writing in pinyin; it’s just that they then have a computer translate that into Chinese characters. I think it’s just a matter of time before more and more people skip the character-input altogether and simply read and write in pinyin. Indeed, it has already started, as Feiren’s example shows.

As for the computer’s ability to recognize the correct character from the context, keep in mind that this is generally even without spaces being typed between words. With spaces, word boundaries and meanings become even less ambiguous.

Unger has some remarks on this, but offhand I can’t remember where. He would disagree with the assertion that phonetic input is less efficient.

One thing that is demonstrably less efficient is typing characters as opposed to romanization because it is impossible to touch-type characters with the same reliability as romanization. No matter the input method, people must look at the screen to ensure the computer selected the correct character. This is unnecessary when typing texts written in an alphabet.

Another note: Typing in Hanyu Pinyin is more efficient than using zhuyin fuhao (bopomofo) because zhuyin input requires the use of the keys on the number row, which are more troublesome to reach and reduce accuracy.

To me, or (I’d hazard to say) most who know Chinese, be they native or CSL, no, it wouldn’t be. But that’s not because pinyin is somehow less effective at demonstrating meaning - it’s because characters are what we’ve learned and what we’re used to. If I had learned solely in pinyin, then of course the pinyin form would be clear.

Actually, in my experience I’ve found that where meaning is not immediately obvious because of this “compacting” it’s more because of either common abbreviation or because the phrase in question has been influenced/quoted from something in classical Chinese. But again, this is just my experience.

No it’s not the same. In fact, invoking Japanese as a parallel actually works AGAINST you rather than FOR you. Japanese is entirely understandable solely in kana. I could point out, for a start, any number of video games produced in the past 20 years that contained no kanji whatsoever. Japanese people could still understand that perfectly. Just because they prefer texts that mix kana and kanji doesn’t mean they can’t understand kana-only texts, just that they prefer kana/kanji ones.

[quote=“bababa”][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. [/quote]

Show me the homophones. I mean words (not single characters or syllables, but independent words) that have precisely the same pronunciation including tones. There are remarkably few. And the ones that do exist can be easily disambiguated through context. The reason Westerners feel there are so many homophones is that we are simply not sensitive enough to tones.

A random list of one syllable words in English -

cat
dog
bug
yes
no/know
here/hear
jam
fear
nun/none
son/sun
bun
fat
car
us
gum
gun

I think that list off the top of my head disproves your theory that English has as many problems with homophones as Chinese does. Every single-syllable word in Chinese has dozens of homophones. Homophones are very much the exception in English, not the rule as they are in Chinese.

[quote="Tetsuo
… invoking Japanese as a parallel actually works AGAINST you rather than FOR you. Japanese is entirely understandable solely in kana. I could point out, for a start, any number of video games produced in the past 20 years that contained no kanji whatsoever. Japanese people could still understand that perfectly. Just because they prefer texts that mix kana and kanji doesn’t mean they can’t understand kana-only texts, just that they prefer kana/kanji ones.[/quote]

Surely the point here is that Japanese people prefer a mix of kanji and kana. They could write and read entirely in kana; unlike Chinese speakers, who are not used to reading pinyin or bopomofo and so find reading them difficult, Japanese speakers are completely familiar with reading kana. After all, they read kana hundreds of times a day. Nevertheless, they prefer to read kanji. There must be some reason for this, other than the collective insanity of a nation.
Computer use seems to causing people to forget how to write kanji, but it is not causing them to forget how to read it.
And the homonym thing - I agree that spoken Chinese does not have as many words that sound exactly the same as many foreigners might think, but we are not talking about writing spoken Chinese. We are talking about writing written Chinese, and there a casual glance at any newspaper or book will show you that there are a lot of characters being used alone, and therefore a lot of ambiguity, or at least a lot of what would be ambiguity if written in pinyin.

You’re arguing a chicken and egg situation. Part of the reason Chinese writing uses single characters at times is because they CAN – i.e., characters permit it. If characters were not and had never been used, other means of disambiguating words would have been developed. For example, Tibetan “decided” early on not to go the tone route – instead they opted for silent letters “stacked” on top of one another (sometimes four deep). It makes spelling a huge challenge, but you CAN tell which of the homophones they’re writing.

There was a (horrible, IMHO) attempt at Taiwanese romanization by some guy using this principle, sort of – he had a system something like adding a silent “q” to words that were “food” words and a silent “v” to “animal” words and so on (I’m making this up, it’s not his real system, but that’s the principle.) Visually awful, but I suppose it did serve to distinguish between the words.

Terry’s on the right track here by suggesting that if people began to use only pinyin or some other romanized system, conventions would arise to dis-ambiguate problem words or clauses. We do this in English. It is quite common when speaking to say, “the temperature will rise from 10 to 15 degrees.” But this is ambiguous. Will the temperature rise an extra 10-15 degrees (say from 40 to 55 degrees) or is it going from 10 degrees up to 15? Good writers always dis-ambiguate such sentences by saying “the temperature will rise to 55 from 40 degrees” if they mean an extra 15 degrees.

I think the question to ask though is have they, Chinese writers, found a way to express such ideas with the same clarity as English? It is quite mistaken to believe that every language is as flexible or precise as another when it comes to writing. Written Engish is the product of centuries of writers, thinkers, legalists, scholars, scientists and poets who have made the language both flexible and muscular, capable of great expressiveness and also exactness.

You need only look at early English scientific prose to realize how far we have come. It takes a lot of trial and error before a culture can express concrete ideas fluently and quickly, and in a manner that is agreed upon by all educated people. Writing is not speaking. It has its own conventions and rules and not everyone can master them. How many people have difficulty with the neutral, timeless tone of a formal essay? It’s all just a question of vocabulary choice and sentence structure, and yet it still is a skill to be mastered beyond those every native speaker already possesses.

I guess my question to Jack Burton (not a challenge by the way, but a sincere question) since you translate Chinese to English, is do you think Chinese is at the point English is where written conventions exist to mold the language into scientific or legal precision and neautrality of tone? Or are you making up these conventions as you go along and hoping the result will be clear to others?

Fine, I agree this situation has arisen because Chinese uses characters. I am guessing, however, that even if they stopped using characters, Chinese people would still try to write this way. The result would be that, in an effort to make their written language easier, they would instead make it more ambiguous. Why do I think this? The examples of Korean and Japanese.

for written chinese to become a universal script, it would help if some adjustments were undertaken.

we gotta start teaching the real methodology behind the characters. if you understand why a character is the form it is, such is MUCH hard to forget. enough of this “don’t ask why, just do”.

e.g.: “da” = hit. teach the students exactly why both vertical components are there. the left is a stylized hand and is all over the place and most often indicates “hand action”. the right side is the sound component and retains a “D” sound in most of its appearances.

not such much an alphabet but a partially evolved and then forgotten syllabary.

just standardizing to the extent that determinants go on the left and phonetics go on the right (or whichever) would be a huge step forward in creating a more streamlined system.

a question to be pondered: do chinese leaders want their language to be an international business language? it seems to me that they benefit greatly from being able to speak english and understand us while we are at a major disadvantage because our captains of industry must delegate translating to a person who is most always at least ethnically chinese. keeping chinese language to themselves seems to confer upon them a competitive edge.

[quote=“Jack Burton”]

  1. the English reader was able to skim/scan and digest faster
  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).[/quote]

Many of my chinese friends can read a novel in Chinese in about the time it takes me to read one chapter in English. This is because the Chinese script is logographic while English is written phonetically (kind of).

As for Chinese being a less precise language, this may be true in the sense that it is uninflected and often leaves out subjects. However, I strongly disagree that a Chinese reader of a Chinese essay will glean less information than the English reader. This is especially true if the essay contains complicated vocabulary. The structure of chinese words and characters lends a great degree of transparency. Educated Chinese rarely require the use of a Chinese dictionary in comparison to educated native English speakers.

p.s. You say Chinese is unsuited for scientific documents? If this is true, it is only because that science was developed in another language and its terms have yet to be fully translated into Chinese. (Note: translating specialized English terms into Chinese is much easier than in some other languages that often opt for transliteration instead.)

Sorry, but your example doesn’t prove anything. Your Chinese friends could be way faster readers than you are. You can’t compare different people (particularly 2 individuals) and then expand the conclusion to become a general principle. I happen to read English VERY fast. I’ll bet I could finish a novel before a Chinese person could – but then again we’d have to find a novel of the same complexity, the same word count, the same genre…

Not a workable experiment, I’m afraid.

I know of no studies “proving” that logographic script (if you want to persist in the belief that Chinese is logographic) is more efficient than phonetic script for the educated native reader. But again, since most people have only one dominant language, it’s hard to design a valid study to prove or disprove this kind of thing.

Bababa - just out of curiousity, how long and where did you study Japanese? I’m mostly curious because in my years of studying it, I actually found Japanese to frequently be more flowery, ambiguous, and imprecise than Chinese, on the whole. But that could easily just have been thanks to my teachers and my personal choices of texts…

Like these?
白 bai2
北 bei3
猜 cai1
打 da3
得 dei3
短 duan3
放 fang4
給 gei3
恨 hen4
口 kou3
冷 leng3
卵 luan3
跑 pao3
少 shao3
誰 shei2
收 shou1
熟 shou2
耍 shua3
俗 su2
歪 wai1
外 wai4
我 wo3
窄 zhai3
爪 zhua3
走 zou3
租 zu1
崖 yai2
瓦 wa3
推 tui1
偷 tou1
刷 shua1
肉 rou4
擾 rao3
讓 rang4
切 qie1
牛 niu2
弄 nong4
拍 pai1
胖 pang4
您 nin2
難 nan4
埋 mai2
摸 mo1
:stuck_out_tongue: (sorry, couldn’t resist)

I studied Japanese in Canada with private tutors. How long? It’s hard to say, because I stopped and started a few times.
I agree that Japanese can be more ambiguous and imprecise than Chinese, but I don’t think it is because of the writing system. Japanese seems to me to be a good compromise between phonemic and character-based writing systems. It’s the way the Japanese express themselves that is imprecise. The kanji makes the word the writer has used clear, but what the writer means by it is unclear.

[quote=“ironlady”]
I know of no studies “proving” that logographic script (if you want to persist in the belief that Chinese is logographic) is more efficient than phonetic script for the educated native reader. [/quote]

I don’t think there is much to argue about. The information density of Chinese writing is much much higher than English. So in that respect it is more efficient. And in speed reading, the time is not wasted in comprehension as much as in eye-motion/scanning for content. Chinese writing makes for more information throughput per linear scan rate, ergo, faster reading. Writing speed is another matter altogether.

[quote=“ironlady”]
But again, since most people have only one dominant language, it’s hard to design a valid study to prove or disprove this kind of thing.[/quote]

You simply have not thought hard enough to design a valid experiment. There is ALWAYS a way to prove or disprove this kind of thing.

well, if speed in reading was considered as important, wouldn’t everybody write/read in a bosphoedron (snake) style? think of all the wasted eye movement returning to the “start” of each line. such becomes important when plowing thru “war and peace” or “red chamber”.

both sinitic and western scripts can be made more efficent. implementing a bosphoedron type face woulds cut reading time of novels in a big way. after we all got used to it we would wonder why books were ever printed anyother way.

Has this been proven to be faster? Of course I don’t know the exact layout you’re thinking of, but I assume the words (English example) would be in reverse order on the next line? In that case I was thinking it might take extra processing speed for the brain to comprehend since you’re reading from left to right (word) but scanning from right to left (line) which might ‘slow’ the process of comprehension marginally just as much as having the eye flick from one line to the next. Of course, you might have actual evidence that this wouldn’t happen :slight_smile: Even in the Chinese example I’m thinking the mental switching of gears from left to right, right to left might take up the time ‘saved’ by not having to do the eye flick.

[quote=“zeugmite”][quote=“ironlady”]
I know of no studies “proving” that logographic script (if you want to persist in the belief that Chinese is logographic) is more efficient than phonetic script for the educated native reader. [/quote]

I don’t think there is much to argue about. The information density of Chinese writing is much much higher than English. So in that respect it is more efficient. And in speed reading, the time is not wasted in comprehension as much as in eye-motion/scanning for content. Chinese writing makes for more information throughput per linear scan rate, ergo, faster reading. Writing speed is another matter altogether.[/quote]

Information density is not necessarily equivalent to faster comprehension through reading. You must also factor in the time needed for processing the information. Also, how would you prove that the information was “read”? Comprehension tests? Merely “finishing” the reading passage? How much information was retained? How much could be repeated/paraphrased? etc. etc. You might be able to argue that Chinese script is more efficient in STORING information (i.e., fewer “bytes” or “strokes” or “squares” or “pieces of paper” or whatever) because that is quantifiable. Everything else you’ve said about speed of decoding or reading is completely subjective and based only on your “observations”, which were (sorry :slight_smile: ) not scientific at all.

[quote=“ironlady”]
But again, since most people have only one dominant language, it’s hard to design a valid study to prove or disprove this kind of thing.[/quote]

Well, no, there ISN’T always a valid way to prove or disprove something. In particular, when you’re talking about linguistics and language, it is very difficult to get rid of extraneous factors that you do NOT want to test. In this case, to prove that Chinese is read faster than English, you need to have a person who reads at precisely the same level of competence in Chinese and English. It has to be one person (or a set of people who have this same ability) because you cannot make comparisons across individuals, and you can only do tests comparing the reading speed of these people in Language 1 against their OWN reading speed in Language 2. It’s not valid to say “Mary reads Chinese faster than John reads Swahili, therefore Chinese is more efficient to read than Swahili.” We have no way of controlling for other factors (i.e., Mary is a genius and John is a bit torpid, Mary has better eyesight, John is attention-deficit, or whatever. I’m exaggerating with the factor examples but the point is valid: you can’t compare two different individuals for a study like the one you would like to see.) You’d have to use matched-T tests to determine whether differences in time were significant and it would HAVE to be a set of paired samples.

For example, my own Ph.D. and most recently 2nd MA thesis deal with foreigners’ accent in Mandarin. To compare reactions to “foreign accent” in Chinese, I had to use the same speaker twice on the stimulus tape. If I didn’t do that, it could be argued that the raters gave Speaker A higher ratings NOT because of the accent she used, but rather because of somethign about Speaker B’s voice that they didn’t like, a difference in speed between the two speakers, or whatever.

You really have to implement very comprehensive controls (i.e., you have to speed-match the samples using a two-track recorder or other means, you end up having to use reading passages rather than free speech to eliminate variables related to usage, etc. etc.) to be able to state that your data really supports the conclusion(s) you’ve drawn. Taiwan is not known for being particularly rigorous in this regard but things are beginning to change a bit, and I can guarantee you that no respectable academic institution or rigorously-trained scholar would accept your premise based on the evidence you’ve given nor on the type of experimental design you feel is adequate to prove it. For most studies like this, it takes weeks to figure out the design and mere hours to administer the experiment (well, then more weeks to play with the numbers and see what comes out. But it’s nicer now that you can do it with Excel! :laughing: )

Gads somebody slap me, I knew there was a reason I got OUT of academe!!! :astonished: