

If English was Written Like Chinese - mnemonicsloth
http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

======
albertni
I must admit, as someone who was born in the USA but is reasonably fluent in
Chinese (can pass as a native in Beijing when speaking, at least on the phone,
and can read/write at like a third-fifth grade level which is harder than it
sounds in Chinese), as soon as I saw this I thought "why????". Still, the
article did turn out to be quite interesting.

What I've also found interesting in my own personal experience with my parents
(born in China, immigrated in their 20s) is how they go about learning new
words in English. For example, I used to dismiss my mom's horrendous spelling
as simply a byproduct of immigration, but only recently have started to think
about it more deeply and I've noticed a couple of things. First, she tends to
insert nonsensical letters (or miss extremely obvious ones) when trying to
spell words she's recently just heard for the first time. This used to bother
me a lot because it seemed like the mistakes were so obvious to correct, but
now I've realized that because of how Chinese is designed, the concept of
breaking a word down into pieces just simply isn't natural for someone who
only started learning English in their late 20s. Not to say it can't be
learned, but just that even after 20+ years in the states, my mom still
doesn't default to "break it down" mode when attempting to spell words, partly
because she never had any formal English training (my dad is much, much better
about this, and I think it's because of more formal training in a university
environment) and just picked it up.

~~~
tokenadult
_because of how Chinese is designed, the concept of breaking a word down into
pieces just simply isn't natural for someone who only started learning English
in their late 20s_

Yes. There is much research to back this up.

[http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Read-Thinking-Learning-
about...](http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Read-Thinking-Learning-
about/dp/0262510766/)

Phonological awareness (being able to divide words into sounds, simply put) is
a learned skill that not everyone learns. It has implications for two issues
we are discussing under this subject:

1) A country with a large number of speakers of regional dialects of the
national language will find it harder to have people's speech converge to the
national standard language without a boost from alphabetic (or at least
syllabic) writing,

and

2) once a learner is well acquainted with alphabetic writing, phonological
awareness can become so "second nature" that it feels natural, and the sound
processing happens below the level of conscious awareness.

------
silencio
hah, I was reading the page and going "why does this 'yingzi' sound more and
more like chinese as I keep reading?"

The English spelling system doesn't sound like that _much_ of a pain compared
to Chinese since some of the aspects of both spelling methods are similar
enough: prefixes and suffixes and some Latin roots are pretty close to the
idea of radicals. But consider this: pronouncing English words are nowhere
near as difficult as pronouncing hanzi because English uses an alphabet and
has pronunciation rules that make it easy to at least approximate what a word
should sound like. Chinese has no such luxury with hanzi (i.e. the characters
alone, without pinyin)...if you come across a character you don't know how to
pronounce and you have no way to look it up, you _might_ be able to guess at
best if you see some sort of radical or character that looks like some other
one you know.

Lastly, I will say this having spent the last few months trying to learn
Mandarin...both typing and writing is frustrating to me. One accidental
_lengthening_ of a stroke turns a hanzi into something completely different.
If I don't know the pinyin for the hanzi it takes me forever to type it (and
unfortunately I haven't gotten used to any other keyboard-based input method)
and I end up going to my iPhone to use the handwriting recognition. I type
slow as molasses despite being comfortable writing in both hanzi and pinyin. I
grew up bilingual (english and korean), but this is a completely different
experience. And of course, the page mentions the simplification of hanzi...I
can't practice using the language because all my Chinese-fluent friends know
Cantonese, and not Mandarin Chinese. Talk about a massive brainfuck because of
the differences in writing (simplified vs. traditional, which affects lots of
commonly written radicals and characters) and speaking, although it's
interesting to see how the same characters can be pronounced so differently.

On the upside, I would not mind dreaming that I could take the best of both
worlds and combine it into one language. Chinese grammar is ridiculously
simple while the English vocabulary simpler to use. I took French and Spanish
back in high school and all I remember from then are nothing but conjugations
while with Chinese I didn't have to stress over that and could focus on other
things. Soooooo simple. Can't get over how simple it is ;)

~~~
kingkongrevenge
> The English spelling system doesn't sound like that much of a pain compared
> to Chinese

English spelling is only mildly complicated compared to the romance languages
or arabic. All ideographic writing systems are a horrible mistake. They are
much harder. In an ideal world the Chinese and Japanese systems could be
completely scrapped and replaced with purely phonetic systems. This gets
tossed around every now and then, and was seriously considered during the
cultural revolution, but it would obviously be close to impossible to pull
off.

~~~
whacked_new
> All ideographic writing systems are a horrible mistake.

Practically, yes; functionally, no. I recall there was research on the
phonetic activation (and thus dependence) during reading of Chinese
hieroglyphs: as predicted, there was less phonetic activation.

There are some characters I cannot pronounce, but know the meaning of. It's a
strange sensation, but very efficient.

~~~
tokenadult
_but very efficient_

It's not efficient for a country to have low rates of literacy, and indeed low
levels of speaking proficiency in the national language.

~~~
nwinter
From

[http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-
fo...](http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-foreign-
language-problem-you-have-an-adult-literacy-problem)

“Do you know what it means to sinter something? I didn’t; but the kanji are so
clear: 焼結 “burn + join”.”

I could believe that because specialized vocabulary is transparently made of
simple characters put together, there is much less of a jargon/terminology
barrier, so those that become literate actually can read specialized language
just fine. This is not true of English.

~~~
tokenadult
Native speakers of English can pick up a lot of Greek and Latin etymology,
even if they don't formally study Greek and Latin etymology (which is a pretty
good idea, by the way) so that they can find many technical terms to be every
bit that transparent.

How transparent is the term 車床 ? It doesn't mean "chassis," nor does it mean
"flatbed of a pickup truck," nor anything else that a speaker of another
language might guess. Some terms in any language are just plain arbitrary,
even if they are made up of simpler morphemes.

~~~
xiaoma
I think you need to consider that the character 車 is far, far older than the
automobile. If you think of what kind of bed a _carriage_ would be on, it
makes a bit more sense.

The real problem is that few people even know what a lathe is nowadays.

------
mhartl
This raises an issue I've often wondered about: how much richer would China be
if Chinese used an alphabetic writing system? I mean, they sure are spending a
lot of CPU cycles on their crazy writing system. English orthography, though
it may seem perverse to the typical Spaniard or Italian, is nevertheless
light-years ahead of written Chinese. That has to be worth _something_.

