
The Chinese character system is a brake on development - temp
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2016/01/20/the-awful-chinese-writing-system/
======
b6
Wow. I am an intermediate speaker of Mandarin, and I think this article is
pretty unfair.

It's true that there are many tens of thousands of characters, but relatively
few are actually used. To me it's very similar to there being a million
someodd words in English. And nobody writes that biang character. It's
notorious for being huge and weird. I could easily find some comparable
ridiculous English word that we don't actually use.

I spend a few hours a day practicing writing characters, and yes, it is
difficult and time-consuming. But the information density of a language has to
go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular
sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple
and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into
the characters.

No, they can't just write pinyin instead of characters. Well, they could, but
it would be profoundly annoying. It'd be like looking at a TV much too close,
or looking at assembler instead of Ruby.

Yes, it was a terrible mistake to "simplify" the characters. It did not
simplify the process of learning the characters in any meaningful sense, and
split the user base. But I find it very hard to understand why anyone would
say it is necessary to know both simplified and traditional characters. In my
experience, it's just not true.

At the end of the day, we more or less choose to keep these anchors around our
necks because they're fun and interesting playgrounds. I don't really need
Mandarin for anything, but I still learn it, just because it's interesting,
and because when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get
along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight
to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me,
too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.

~~~
tzs
> But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I
> guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex
> grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound
> system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.

What do you mean by "information density of a language"? The way you used it
makes it sound like a human language must have a certain "information density"
to be useful, and that in English this is achieved via complex grammar but in
Mandarin it is achieved via complex characters.

That is confusing to me, because if a certain level of information density is
necessary for an effective human language, then wouldn't it be necessary to
have that in both the spoken form and the written form of that language?

With most languages, the written form and the spoken form are essentially the
same language. Any sentence in one can be expressed in the other. People often
use longer sentences and more complex sentences when writing, and use more
redundancy when speaking, but that is due to the medium, not the language
being expressed using that medium--with the written language the reader can
control the rate of reading and can jump around in a sentence if needed to
deal with complexity, so longer and more complex sentences work better written
than spoken. They are still the same language. One _could_ write just like one
speaks, or speak just like one writes. Is this not the case with Mandarin?

~~~
b6
I can tell you some thoughts I have, but please be skeptical.

If the number of combinations of sounds in your language's sound system is
lower than the number of things and actions you want to talk about, words
might have to get pretty long to unambiguously represent ideas. To avoid
having to talk so much, we might use shorter words that would be ambiguous
without context. I think this is kind of what's going on with spoken Mandarin.
Too few sounds are chasing too many ideas, so there are necessarily a bunch of
homophones. But it still works fine, as long as there's context, and the
listener can ask for clarification.

But reading a book isn't a dialogue. The reader can't ask for clarification.
Maybe this is part of the reason Mandarin tends to be written differently than
it's spoken? I'm not sure, because I'm not advanced enough. Reading advanced
Mandarin like in newspapers is very daunting. In text messages and IMs, my
friends and I seem to write exactly how we'd talk out loud, and it works fine.
But maybe this is because we're talking about simple subjects?

There are actually at least two issues here. One, Mandarin written with
Chinese characters is often written differently than would be spoken aloud.
Two, reading Mandarin in pinyin would be annoying.

On the first issue, I think it may be possible to write Mandarin just like
you'd say it -- I think maybe it's just a tradition to make it so stilted. On
the second issue, I think the problem is that there would be a bunch of
annoying misparses that required back and forth clarification.

------
infinity0
I sympathise with his assessment but pinyin is really not suitable as a
replacement. There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word". You can
make the same argument for speech but there are other cues such as temporal
spacing to help a listener parse that; none exist for pinyin.

~~~
mahyarm
Pinyin is phonetic right? So if I say this word in a sentence in Chinese,
people have to figure out which one it is out of the 30 possible meanings?

~~~
wodenokoto
As parent mentions, there are things that pinyin doesn't encode, such as
temporal spacing.

Even in English we tend to opt for spelling homophones different. Witch and
which, for example.

------
pouetpouet
Recently on HN on vietnamese writing
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755)
and how the population of Vietman grew rapidly literate with the romanisation
of the written language.

Another thing comes to mind: movable type printing could not take off without
the small set of characters of an alphabet. The efforts to simplify chinese
characters come from the realization that it held back the country's literacy.

~~~
llull
No, Chinese characters do not stop "moveable type taking off". Moveable type
printing was in fact invented in China, nearly 1000 years ago, and widely
used.

~~~
yen223
Movable type actually proves the author's point. It was an amazing idea which
didn't take off in China as fast as it did in the West, precisely because it
was a huge hurdle to manufacture the ~1000s of blocks required to represent
each Mandarin word.

~~~
sorpaas
See Wikipedia [1]. Movable type was first invented in China around A.D 1040,
about four hundred years earlier than in the western world.

In Qing Dynasty, the government used it to print 64 sets of the encyclopedic
Gujin Tushu Jicheng. Each set consisted of 5040 volumes, making a total of
322,560 volumes printed using movable type.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type)

~~~
pouetpouet
It should be noted that this Qing Dynasty encyclopedy was printed in 1726,
seven centuries after the invention of movable type and more than 270 years
after Gutenberg's Bible. It is also a Government sponsored project and
probably wasn't cheap. The point still stands that compositing a book was far
more labor intensive with chinese characters than with any alphabet. You need
a few dozen types for an alphabet and at least 100 times more fore Chinese. An
alphabet makes it considerably cheaper and not reserved to a tiny elite with
64 copies. That's the main point. Common people couldn't afford it.

There is no doubt possible that using an alphabet greatly helped the
dissemination of knowledge. Between 1455 and 1500 there were over 30,000
distinct incunables edited in europe. Not 30,000 copies. More than 30,000
different books. [1] Gutenberg's press went viral [2] and vastly more
widespread than what was seen in Asia.

In the 15th century Korea adopted Hangul, the Korean alphabet. "A potential
solution to the linguistic and cultural bottleneck that held back movable type
in Korea for 200 years appeared in the early 15th century—a generation before
Gutenberg would begin working on his own movable-type invention in Europe—when
Sejong the Great devised a simplified alphabet of 24 characters (hangul) for
use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and
compositing process more feasible. Adoption of the new alphabet was stifled by
Korea's cultural elite, who were "appalled at the idea of losing hanja, the
badge of their elitism."

"It was effective enough at disseminating information among the uneducated
that Yeonsangun, the paranoid tenth king, forbade the study or use of Hangul
and banned Hangul documents in 1504,and King Jungjong abolished the Ministry
of Eonmun (governmental institution related to Hangul research) in 1506.

The late 16th century, however, saw a revival of Hangul" [3]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incunabula_Short_Title_Catalog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incunabula_Short_Title_Catalogue)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_press)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type#Metal_movable_typ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type#Metal_movable_type_in_Korea)
&
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#History)

------
reuven
I have been learning Chinese for about 18 months. Before I started my studies,
I had similar opinions to the author of this article -- that Chinese
characters are antiquated, hard or impossible to learn, and a hindrance to
anyone who wants to learn or use Chinese.

Since starting my Chinese studies, I've changed my mind entirely.

First and foremost, the characters are far from random; the system is very
different than an alphabetic one, but it works -- providing the reader (or
even the learner) with hints as to the meaning and pronunciation. It's not
perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. But yes, it means that
if I see a character I haven't learned before, I can be a bit stuck. And yes,
Chinese children spend lots of time learning characters in school.

Secondly, Chinese has a ridiculous number of homophones. Even if you take the
tones into account, there are lots and lots and lots of characters that sound
precisely the same when spoken. However, they look completely different. For
example, the character 店 (for a shop) and 电 (electricity) look totally
different, but sound precisely the same, diàn. This makes understanding the
language difficult (as I'm learning), but a switch to Pinyin (the Latin-
character transliteration) would make the written language as ambiguous and
hard to read as the spoken language is to hear.

Thirdly, there's a huge amount of national pride associated with characters. I
can't imagine telling the Chinese people, or even a subset of them, that
they'll be abandoning characters in favor of Pinyin.

Now, does this mean that Chinese is unlikely to overtake English as the
international language of business and academia? Yes; I think that English has
firmly cemented itself in that position for a long time to come. (I say this
one day after returning from teaching a course in Brussels, where my students
were from Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Serbia... and spoke
English among themselves.) But there's a difference between saying that
English will continue to dominate in business, and saying that Chinese
characters have to be tossed out. The latter just isn't going to happen.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Another point I would add: the Chinese language - to my knowledge - has the
most functional and discrete method of forming complex concepts by smashing
characters together. Many times in classes I have made up words or phrases
simply by stringing characters together, and lo and behold, my teachers never
blinked. It is astounding how easy it is to build your understanding of the
language exponentially the more you learn. Add in the total lack of
grammatical tidbits like articles and verb tenses, and you come to a language
- tens of thousands of characters no withstanding - that is quite intuitive
and fun to learn. Just sucks to speak.

~~~
wibr
Careful with smashing those characters, you might end up saying something not
quite as you intended. Seemingly harmless combinations I learned the hard (but
funny) way: chu1jia1 (leave home -> become a monk), pao3lu4 (go running -> run
away from the police), jie1ke4 (receive a guest -> as a prostitute)

------
laurent123456
That "biang" character is not a good example since it's not commonly used and
was possibly made up by a noodle shop (it doesn't appear in dictionaries). The
most common Chinese characters are made of less than 9 or 10 strokes.

------
wodenokoto
While the article might be too harsh, I think the general sentiment in the
comments are way too lenient.

hanzi _is_ a particular difficult writing system.

~~~
Arnt
So it is. Rather like how the English word order rules are particularly
difficult, e.g. look at the weird table in
[http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/adjectives.htm](http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/adjectives.htm),
or German plurals.

Most children learn their native language(s) properly at about the same age,
which suggests that the languages are comparably difficult to learn, and
perhaps that if a language takes too long, it'll be simplified. But there's
nothing that pushes languages to have the _same_ difficulties.

~~~
pja
Using adjectives in the “wrong” order doesn’t really change the meaning
significantly though, it just sounds a little weird to a native speaker.

I don’t think anyone claims that spoken Chinese is particularly hard compared
to other languages, but that the written form is measurably harder than
languages that use an alphabetic orthography.

(I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can anyone
comment?)

~~~
Grue3
>(I have read claims that Russian is particularly difficult though - can
anyone comment?)

In what way? It uses an alphabet just like Latin-based languages, and it's
more phonetic than English (but not completely phonetic). I'm sure anyone can
learn to write/read Cyrillic in a few days if they already know Latin. The
actual language is harder than English because of large number of
noun/adjective declensions (depending on plurality, case, gender) which would
be a pain to memorize for a non-native. But being an Indo-European language
it's still pretty similar to English as far as languages go. Chinese, having a
completely different writing system, completely different sentence structure,
completely different fixed expressions, completely different sounds (and
tones!) is orders of magnitude harder.

~~~
EvenThisAcronym
Chinese sentence structure is in many cases identical or very similar to
English, and follows the same general word order, Subject-Verb-Object.

------
dangrover
This seems kind of specious.

Have been living/working in China for nearly 2 years and studied the language
in that time.

While individual characters can have many strokes (usually, like, 10 at the
most), they're more like words or half-words.

While it can be tricky for foreigners to gain confidence with characters and
radicals, due to the way they work, you'll realize it is surprisingly easy to
remember new words (or even guess the meaning of words when you see them).
Much easier than English in that regard. Once you have a certain baseline
level of competence (and ability to "chunk" things appropriately), the
learning curve quickly softens out.

~~~
mrweasel
>or even guess the meaning of words when you see them

That's the thing I don't get. You may be able to guess the words, but would
the characters allow you to pronounce it? In English, and most other
languages, you can spell your way through pronouncing a word, even without
knowing it's meaning. Is that possible in Chinese or Japanese?

It also seems like you would need to be constantly updating computers to allow
them of deal with new characters.

The argument that "these characters aren't widely used" isn't really helpful.
The characters either exists or they don't. Because you might need it in the
future means that you need to deal with it's existence. X isn't a widely used
letter in many language, so should we just throw it aside? In case of the
biang it might be more akin to throwing out a word, because it's rarely used,
but still.

~~~
looki
There are so-called phono-semantic compound characters [1] which consist of
two other characters, a part indicating its meaning, and one part indicating
its reading. This has helped me tremendously while memorizing the readings of
Japanese kanji - and guessing the readings of unknown characters does work
incredibly well after you have learned the most common ones which are used as
components in more complex characters. As a very simple example, 仲 is a
combination of 人 (person) and the reading of 中 and means relation,
relationship (which is vaguely indicated by the human character).

You are correct, though: This is not failsafe and characters can have multiple
readings or lack this phono-semantic notion altogether (also, since the
characters are originally Chinese it doesn't work as well in Japanese, I
believe), but I think it is the closest thing to guessing a word's
pronunciation that these languages offer.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Phono-
semantic_compound_characters)

~~~
ggreer
You're right that some aspects of logographic languages can hint at meaning
and pronunciation, but those are still just hints. The only way to be sure is
to memorize.

Take your example of 仲. How is that pronounced? In Japanese, 人 is typically
pronounced "jin", "nin", or "hito" depending on context. 中 is usually
pronounced "chuu" or "naka." How do I know these things? Rote memorization.
While I can recognize that 仲 contains 人 and 中, that doesn't tell me how to say
仲. The only reason I know its pronunciation is because I memorized it. (In
this case, it happens to be the same as 中.)

And that's just for reading. Writing is worse. Character amnesia is extremely
common among native speakers of Chinese and Japanese. From Wikipedia[1]:

> Another anecdotal example can be seen during a spelling bee show hosted on
> CCTV in 2013, where only 30% of participants were able to write "toad"
> (Chinese: 癞蛤蟆; pinyin: Lài há ma) in Chinese.

That sort of thing simply can't happen in phonetic writing systems.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia)

~~~
looki
I'm not disagreeing with you - I actually agree that this is a big problem
with the system, but I believe most outsiders have no idea that there is any
phonetic connection between the characters.

------
legulere
> Training yourself to recognize 3,000 discrete graphic symbols

They're not discrete but composed of radicals that might hint at the meaning
or pronunciation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_\(Chinese_characters\))

~~~
wibr
Radicals are just a system which was invented to look up characters in
dictionaries, so a character is often composed of components with different
functions (e.g. sound component or meaning component) and one of those
components can be the radical.

~~~
GordonS
> Radicals are just a system which was invented to look up characters in
> dictionaries

First I've heard of it; source please?

~~~
wibr
[http://blog.outlier-linguistics.com/learning/getting-
radical...](http://blog.outlier-linguistics.com/learning/getting-radical-
radicals/)

~~~
GordonS
Actually, most of the radicals existed long before the Shuōwén Jiězì, as
recurring graphic elements[1].

They might not have been called 'radicals', or been used to look up
dictionaries, but they certainly existed.

[1] Wilkinson, Endymion (2013), Chinese History: A New Manual, Harvard-
Yenching Institute Monograph Series, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia
Center, ISBN 978-0-674-06715-8

~~~
GordonS
Downvoter care to comment?

------
Nutmog
It's funny that most of the arguments people make for retaining old languages
and writing systems are "so we can read old literature or perpetuate old
cultures". Surely if everyone used the same language, that would have the
opposite effect and open up far more writing to more people - Chinese people
could read Shakespeare. Translators would only have to convert from each old
language to the lingua franca, so Hebrew speakers could read Confucius too.
That's an O(n) task instead of the O(n^2) that we currently have.

------
arien
Complex doesn't mean awful. Impractical and slow for our fast-paced life,
sure. But the characters are beautiful and the etymology, shape and
composition is fascinating.

I'm currently learning Chinese (using Remembering Simplified Hanzi from Heisig
[0] for characters and Iknow [1] for words/pronunciation) and I find it a lot
easier than I initially thought it would be. It helps a great deal to know
that all these characters that look so complicated are mostly made of the same
200-some radicals [2], suddenly it's a lot less daunting and the characters
even make sense most of the time. And sure, one might forget characters with
lack of use, but the same can be said about other languages. Grammar is a hot
topic on the internet, isn't it?

[0] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-
Meaning...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-
Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2)

[1] [http://iknow.jp/](http://iknow.jp/) (originally for Japanese, but Chinese
course is excellent, too)

[2] [https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/05/Radic...](https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/05/Radical_chart_highjpeg-e1435044530864.jpg)

------
ignord
Lived in Taiwan 3 years - picked up Advanced spoken proficiency and
intermediate reading / writing in Traditional Mandarin. Studied Simplified
Mandarin @ Brigham Young University. While studying we became conversant in
modern Mandarin and also Ancient text including The Dao De Jing, Mencius,
Confucius etc.

There is a beauty and depth to the language not available in the romance
languages or German: may I recommend www.zhongwen.com as an introduction.

With modern keyboard input methods producing Chinese text is not a difficult
task although learning the writing system is not for the faint of heart. Not
just due to the characters but also the syntax of the language. English
generally is a head-first language where as Chinese is a head-last language.
Combine this with careful character placement within the syntax and you have a
minefield awaiting the non-native writer.

What English lacks in concentrated depth and beauty it makes up for in
flexibility and diversity.

------
DominikR
Interestingly, Kemal Atatürk made similar reforms in Turkey after the end of
the Ottoman Empire.

He abolished the use of the Arabic script and introduced a new Turkish script
based on the Latin alphabet.

His reasoning was the same one used in this article. But there were other
goals too, like promoting Turkish nationalism against a wider Muslim identity.

------
jensen123
Guess I'm somewhat ignorant about history, so maybe this is a stupid question.
But I've been wondering about this: Until about 500 years ago, I guess China
was ahead of Europe culturally, economically, scientifically etc, but then
Europe raced ahead. How much does this have to do with the printing press? How
easy is it to use a traditional printing press with Chinese characters
compared to the Latin alphabet?

Obviously, access and spread of information must have a lot to do with a
society's development. Did the traditional printing press cause information
(i.e. books and newspapers) to become cheap and widespread in Europe, but not
in China?

Writing Chinese characters on a computer is relatively quick and easy. I
wonder if this has something to do with the rapid development that we're
seeing in China now?

Some might say that embracing capitalism is why China is developing so fast
now, and I guess that is partially true. However, wasn't China kinda
capitalist before the Communist revolution? It didn't develop that much back
then.

Edit: I found a bit of info on this on the Wikipedia page for the printing
press. According to that "a single Renaissance printing press could produce
3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing
prevalent in East Asia".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press)

------
Xophmeister
I generally find this article lacking in anything beyond personal opinion.
However, I think the kernel of the problem is hinted at when he writes about
chemical elements (and the article it links to is more suggestive of this):
That is, synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese -- due to
the large number of homophones -- which is compounded by the inflexibility of
the writing system.

If this is true -- I'm not a Chinese speaker, but I'm married to one and have
had this discussion before! -- then that _is_ a burden on development as it
clearly makes communication of new ideas clumsy.

~~~
rahimnathwani
"synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese"

It's not. You just slam two existing characters together. So many
possibilities. Computer? Electric brain.

If you want a new individual character, just put them on top of each other and
invent your own single character (like
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duang)) as
long as you don't expect it to be added to unicode.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
If you're going to spoit nonsense about how writing systems hold people back,
you might as well attack Japanese, since its use of the same characters is
much more complicated. Chinese is pretty simple: one character, one syllable,
one pronunciation. Japanese kanji? One character, many pronunciations,
context-sensitive.

~~~
mystikal
Some Chinese characters are pronounced differently depending on the
surrounding characters. Example: sometimes in Mandarin a 4th-tone character is
changed to 2nd-tone because saying two 4's in a row is hard.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Mandarin does do that, but it's not quite the same thing.

------
ksec
I am afraid I am not qualify to say whether the Chinese Character is, or not a
brake on development of its language.

But I do have a story to share, just one story, nothing more.

When I was a kid studying in UK, during an Art Session we had to cut a black
card and overlay on top of white paper to create some form of Art. I have
absolutely no idea what to do! Compared to some of my classmate who start
creating and cutting some beautiful images, I was starring in the air and
didn't know what to do. I try cut a few things but they all look so dull, ugly
and meaningless in my mind.

After 30 mins of not going anywhere, my teacher came around and pat on my
back, he said, "Beauty is in the eye of beholder. It doesn't really have to
mean anything, it could just be some random cutting, some shape or even some
words like your name. It doesn't matter. Try your best"

At that moment i really needed some encouragement, So i thought, since
everyone were doing something good and fancy, why dont I cut out a Chinese
word? He did said some words. Since i am the only Chinese in the class, surely
no one would be doing it and no one would understand it anyway.

So in the remaining 15 min or so I drafted out the Chinese letter "愛", (
meaning love ), it is complex enough and easy to explain.

In the end when everyone were presenting their work to our teacher, I still
remember the look on his face when he saw mine, he was, awkwardly staring at
it for 30 seconds, without making a single noise. The silence was quite
intense I was thinking I make some crap...

"What is this?" He asked. "A Chinese Letter" "What does it mean?" "Love" "This
is beautiful! This is actually a letter?" "Yes"

I thought all these were just some encouragement so i dont look too bad. When
we left the classroom, I turn around and my teacher was still standing there
staring at my form "art". Later on that Week my teacher asked me privately to
make him a few more of these Chinese Characters, I wrote out a few so he could
choose, he was truly fascinated at the act form of these Characters.

I couldn't grasp the idea then. Because I never saw them as act, merely as
what the article suggest as a painful tool to write. It was only as i grow
older and older, did i start to appreciate this beautiful form of Chinese
glyph.

I hope you all too, would some day appreciate the beauty of these characters.

------
Houshalter
I read an interview with Andrew Ng, a well known Chinese AI research that
works for Baidu. He talked about his work on speech recognition. And how it's
such a big deal in China. I guess they use it a lot more than in the US. That
makes more sense in the context of this article.

------
gbog
That's not really sensible to call a Horror-show the very writing system upon
which one of the longest and most fertile culture on Earth has been built...

But it is also right to say that the difficulties of learning Chinese makes it
an unlikely candidate for a universal language.

------
happyindeed
The past/perfect tenses, the infinitives and gerunds, the
active/passive/possessive/nonpossessive, the he/she/his/her, of the English
language is... a pain.

Chinese is much simpler! :D

------
swang
This guy is a linguist? And his best argument is that characters take long to
write using the example of a word whose only real use is the answer to the
trivia question, "what is the Chinese character containing the most strokes?"

Also I would say a lot of Americans couldn't spell English words correctly to
save their lives, does that mean English is a problem? (I would say in
general, yes. It's a very hard language to learn)

So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other
languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because
English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best
choice in this case. /s

Edit: Also the author fails to recognize that even if a Chinese person doesn't
recognize the word exactly, the radical and underlying pictograms in the word
describe what that word means and sometimes the tone/pronunciation of the
word. It is not just a bunch of random strokes on a paper.

~~~
temp
> _So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn 't want to learn other
> languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because
> English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the
> best choice in this case. /s_

Did you even read the article? The author wrote a critique of English and
listed problems non-natives have with it and its potential unsuitability as a
lingua franca. Then they received a question regarding Chinese and this is
their follow-up and answer to what it is that makes Chinese potentially
unsuitable as a lingua franca.

If what you got from the article is "they're too lazy to learn Chinese and
think English has no faults" then you didn't really even try to comprehend the
article.

~~~
swang
I actually totally missed that one-liner at the top, which unless you follow
this guy, would make it seem like he was promoting a pro-English view. So any
of my comments regarding English I withdraw.

I still think his view about Chinese characters is _wrong_, especially when he
uses the extremes of Chinese problems as arguments against Chinese completely.

------
tokenadult
沒錯。After reading the fine article kindly submitted here and all the previous
comments, I think I should draw on my education and life experience to comment
too. I have been studying the Chinese language since 1975, my undergraduate
major subject in university was Chinese language, and have I lived after
university graduation in the Chinese-speaking world for two three-year stints
(mid-1980s and spanning the turn of the last century). I have worked for many
years as a Chinese-English translator of written texts and as a Chinese-
English interpreter for official visitors to the United States. Besides
learning Mandarin well enough to work as an interpreter, I have also studied
other Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka. My
university studies acquainted me not only with Modern Standard Chinese but
also with Literary Chinese.

The blog post kindly submitted here is by a linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, who
specializes in the English language and who co-edited the most definitive
grammar of the English language.[1] Pullum is not a specialist in Chinese
language but he cites the numerous writings of Victor Mair,[2] who does have
deep professional knowledge of the Chinese language. Simply put, the author's
comments are linguistically and sociologically correct. My nieces and nephews
who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world were faced with a considerably more
difficult task in learning to read and write than was strictly necessary,
solely because of clinging to the tradition of writing Chinese in the
traditional characters rather than the alphabetical writing systems that are
used EVERYWHERE in the Chinese-speaking world for initial reading instruction.

The late Y.R. Chao, an eminent Chinese linguist, made the simple point about
alphabetical writing of Chinese: if one claims that alphabetical writing
cannot be understood, that is equivalent to claiming that Chinese people
cannot speak to one another over the telephone. But in fact Chinese people can
speak to one another over the telephone just fine--I have seen it done, and I
have been party of many international voice-only conversations in Chinese. See
a whole book _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ by the late John
DeFrancis,[3] a linguist who specialized in the study of the Chinese writing
system, for more details.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-
Language...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-
Language/dp/0521431468)

[2]
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13)

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-
DeFranci...](http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-
DeFrancis/dp/0824810686)

------
dang
It's an interesting article by a competent and well-known author, but that
baity title is guaranteed to produce a flamewar, so (in accordance with the HN
guidelines) we replaced it with more neutral language from the article. If
someone suggests a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can
change it again.

