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gato -



Quote:

wow...what kind of magazine is that?

I think he's referring magazines in English, not Chinese. See his reference to Thomas Mann's
"Magic Mountain."



Quote:

That experience did not convince me that reading was something I like, I just learned that many of
the "classics" are really bad, see "The Magic Mountain" by "Thomas Mann".

Maybe you should try Hermann Hesse, another German.



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bomaci -



Quote:

The Chinese system may provide a good example of how not to learn a foreign language, but doing
exactly opposite of what they do is not really optimal, either. Consider many Europeans who learn
English as a second language who can readily read, write, and speak English.

I am one of those europeans but although we in Sweden learn English for 9 years in school I still
feel that most of my English was picked up by watching subtitled American and English tv programs
for years followed by alot of reading.










sthubbar -



Quote:

wow...what kind of magazine is that?

Forbes, The Economist, Scientific American, National Geographic, Time, and Reader's Digest. Does
"Obsessive Compulsive Disorder" mean anything to you?










zozzen -

I get used to whine about learning language too, but my targets are european languages. While
French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian share many common vocab and similar grammer rules, spellings
are just different and divide into different "languages". Had Latin adopted European Characters
2000 years ago, I would spend much lesser time in learning to read more articles from this
continent.










JimmySeal -

Not really sure what you're saying here, zozzen. What are "European Characters?" Latin was using
the same alphabet 2000 years ago as it still is now.










atitarev -

Me too, I got very confused with the meaning of Zozzen's post. Zozzen, maybe, you need to read
your post carefully and rephrase it, otherwise it's hard to understand what you meant.

BTW, it's grammar, not grammer

Although, http://www.pinyin.info site somewhat demoralises the will to learn Chinese characters by
explaining how to do without them, the site has a lot of interesting thoughts. It's true that our
speech is often affected by the writing system, e.g. why is "chance" pronounced the way it's
pronounced? It's a French word and it should be "shahngss" but it's spelled with "ch". If Chinese
adopted a phonetic script a long time ago, it would have a lot of words pronounced differently
from the way they are pronounced now, especially onomatopoeia, foreign and dialectal borrowings.
As the original poster said, far from 100% of characters are intuitive and can be explained. The
Japanese reduced the usage of characters (kanji) for a reason - why write in Chinese characters
words, which have no connection whatsoever with the meaning of the characters used, especially
foreign words?










zozzen -



Quote:

Not really sure what you're saying here, zozzen. What are "European Characters?" Latin was using
the same alphabet 2000 years ago as it still is now.

Had there anything called "European characters" , "pictogram" or non-phonetic scripts, which had a
loose relationship between spoken and written language, European might have a single set of
written scripts to represent many different European languages. Learning alphabets seem to be
easier, but difference in phonetics can often produce a new breed of language and it takes time to
learn too. I'm not so keen in saying which written form is better, I just feel that it's like
comparing apples with oranges.










JimmySeal -

The main difference between the situations in Europe and China are not the writing systems they
use. The main difference is that Europeans read and write in their own languages while a large
portion of Chinese do not. Anyone other than Mandarin speakers must learn to read and write in a
word order they don't speak and hear, and to read and write words they don't use.
Europeans could do the same. They don't need a special writing system to do it. Europeans could
all learn to read and write in Spanish, or French, or Latin, and it would be a lot faster and
easier than learning 3000 separate characters and a special word order for using them. In fact,
many people did use Latin in the past when they wanted to communicate across language borders, but
now that place of honor has been replaced by English.

A complex writing system is nothing without the language behind it. The Chinese written language
is ok for writing the dialects of Chinese because they share relatively similar vocabulary and
word order, but just try and get Koreans and Japanese to read and write in Written Chinese. Not
gonna happen.
Similarly, I don't think there could exist a phonetic/ideographic/logographic writing system that
could be used by French, Germans, Hungarians, and Portuguese, that wouldn't require more extra
effort than it saved.










zozzen -

"To use Chinese characters" and "To use Chinese characters to write Mandarin as lingua franca"
shouldn't be mixed up. Brushed away political bias, Mandarin is only one of the Chinese "dialect"
written in Chinese characters. Like Japanese Kunyomi, many Chinese dialect speakers also read
Chinese characters in their own tongues.

While Europeans read and write in their own languages, it's true many Chinese do not, but it's
more a political and cultural than linguistic issue. Some Chinese dialects has developed its own
written style (like Taiwanese and HongKongese) but these are taken as polticial incorrectness in
the Mainland China. So far the Proprogranda Minstry is still notorious to maintain "a cleanup on
regional dialect appeared in newspaper". Perhaps it's too easy to adopt Mandarin as written
language, vast majority Chinese seems not so eager to develop their own written form too.

But it doesn't mean that Chinese characters exclude this possbility. In the past, Japanese, Korean
and Vietnamese all developed its own system of mixing Chinese characters and locally invented
script to write a lot documents. Although read in different pronunication, these documents can be
roughly read, without translation, across different countries.

I don't mean Chinese characters are the better form of "lingua franca" than Latin or English.
They're just different from many aspects. Direct comparison is often misleading, if not tricky.
For example, those who suggest Latin is easier to learn than Chinese characters may oversee its
conugation, declension, genders.

"Anyone other than Mandarin speakers must learn to read and write words they don't use." I don't
get what you mean. Do you refer to different regional vocab? (like 夜宵 in Beijingese and 宵夜
in Cantonese? ) That just can't be avoided.










JimmySeal -



Quote:

But it doesn't mean that Chinese characters exclude this possbility. In the past, Japanese, Korean
and Vietnamese all developed its own system of mixing Chinese characters and locally invented
script to write a lot documents. Although read in different pronunication, these documents can be
roughly read, without translation, across different countries.

Chinese characters can indeed be used to write different dialects and languages, but that doesn't
mean they're going to be mutually intelligible. I think written Hakka is probably as difficult for
a Mandarin speaker as written Spanish is for a French speaker. They have to learn that
系 means 是
唔系 means 不是
曼人 means 誰
etc. And a whole different word order.
Hardly a simple difference. So unless everyone writes and reads in the same written language (e.g.
Mandarin), the benefits of the Chinese characters that you are touting don't exist.
A Chinese speaker might be able to pick out individual words from a Japanese text, but they would
not grasp the overall meaning well, if at all. Similarly, a Japanese person trying to read Chinese
would be completely and utterly lost. Simply writing in the same character set in no way ensures
that people from different languages will be able to understand each other.












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