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.
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
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.
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 ;)
Yes, it is a repost. Here is a classic essay by David Moser: "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard". David Moser has taught linguistics at Beijing Foreign Studies University, and he has dubbed the voice of Curly for Three Stooges in Mandarin.
I am a native speaker of English who learned Chinese as a second language, beginning at the beginning of my university studies. I was part of the norming administration for the (never officially launched) test of Chinese as a foreign language developed in the early 1980s by a consortium of United States universities, and set the bar for all other test-takers with my reading score, and did very well in my grammar score too. For most of the 1980s, I was a contract Chinese-English interpreter for the United States Information Agency.
On Professor Moser's points:
1) Agree. Professor William Boltz points out that China missed one chance, historically, to transition to a more user-friendly writing system along the lines of Japanese kana syllabaries more than 2,000 years ago.
2) Actually, there has only been mass literacy in China since alphabetical writing (either National China's zhuyin fuhao [BO PO MO FO] system or the PRC's Hanyu pinyin system) has been used for primary reading instruction. But, yes, there has never been an extension of that use of alphabetical writing into a sufficiently large number of adult texts for the systems to become pervasive in Chinese-speaking countries.
3) Historical sound change has played havoc with the originally sound-indicating aspects of traditional Chinese writing, so, yes, one can't rely on pronunciation as a guide to what to write, nor can one reliably read aloud an unfamiliar written character in most cases.
4) The next objection only applies to native speakers of English (or another Indo-European language) learning a second Indo-European language. Or else it's a mere restatement of what is above. In fact, the many Chinese people who are not native speakers of Mandarin
(a number far larger than most Western observers guess) rely heavily on cognate features of their native Sinitic languages (Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.) to muddle through in speaking and even writing Mandarin.
5) Yes, dictionary look-up in Chinese is very messy. The best approach, and the approach taken by professional editors in Chinese-speaking countries, is to learn the alphabetic writing systems well enough for alphabetic look-up. (I have seen this done.) But one still has to be able to count strokes to look up an unfamiliar written character of unknown pronunciation.
6) A peculiarity of the modern Chinese written language is the preservation of many stock phrases and cliches from the ancient written language, which has quite different grammar and some significant semantic changes in the meaning of individual characters. A well-read reader of English can bluff through some French and some Latin, but a reader of Chinese has to deal with much more ancient language.
7) This is just a restatement of point 2 above. If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese), the official ones would be used for romanization. Hanyu pinyin is in fact very elegant, having been designed by a team of linguists from the Soviet Union and the Chinese communist movement, and I find it very easy to use.
8) Yes, that's very Anglo-centric. I know various speakers of various languages (Ibo is one example) who have thrived when learning Chinese because their native language has phonologically distinctive tones, so learning tones is no problem for them. I agree with most native speakers of English that learning Chinese tones is difficult, but I can manage to speak Chinese over the telephone. The late Y. R. Chao told a funny story of traveling to Sweden one time and failing to buy a train ticket to his destination because he pronounced Malmö with the wrong tone. (Swedish has tone, also.)
> China missed one chance, historically, to transition to a more user-friendly writing system along the lines of Japanese kana syllabaries more than 2,000 years ago.
Japan missed the chance too. You need to know those Chinese characters ("kanji" in Japanese) to be able to read, which is a shame since I never had the energy to learn them.
> If there were just one or two regularly used alphabets (a situation comparable to Japanese)
To be clear, I assume you mean the two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, which are used to support/supplement the Chinese characters in writing.
Sadly they did not give up the Chinese characters long ago.
This frustrates some Japanese people too, but most of all us foreigners, of course. They say that once you know kanji/hanzi, you'll appreciate their efficiency in conveying words and meanings though, but I wouldn't know anything about that.
Kanji aren't that bad; it just takes time to memorize them, and once you get over a certain threshold (probably around a thousand characters or so), you can generally understand most directions and signposts... anywhere in Japan, Taiwan, or China. Even though they all use different writing systems, a knowledge of any of the three is pretty valuable.
I'd never go as far as to say that I appreciate kanji/hanzi for its efficiency, because there isn't any, but there is a certain poetry to them that I do like.
> Kanji aren't that bad; it just takes time to memorize them
Yep, but I just didn't have the willpower/energy/interest.
I've heard from people who know kanji well, that when you read in kanji, you'll appreciate it how you can always quickly tell what something is roughly about, even before really reading it.
That's of course because the "pictures" convey meanings, and so on. I guess that can be called a certain kind of efficiency.
> 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.
> English spelling is only mildly complicated compared to the romance languages or arabic.
I can't talk of Arabic, but within Romance languages there's a wide range of difference over how phonetic they are. At one extreme there's Italian, wihch is spelt so regularly that there's no verb "to spell"; at the other extreme, in French, letters are often unprononounced. Spanish is somewhere between the two, because while there have been many sound shifts, the language is still spelt the way it was pronounced hundreds of years ago.
But there aren't a lot of differences in Spanish: sometimes "x" is "ks" and other times "j" (and which one can vary, for the same word, between regions); the "k" sound can be either "k" or "qu"/"c"; and outside of Spain, the "z"/"c" is indistinguishable from the "s". And there's the silent "h". And "ll" vs. "y", and occasionally "i" vs. "y". And then there are regular phonological shifts that vary by dialect, but those don't really pose a problem for spelling. But that's about the extent of the exceptions. It's very rare that I mispronounce a word after reading it, or misspell it after hearing it, the way I did as a child with "diarrhea" and "albeit" and "pe des tal" and no doubt dozens of others I can't even remember now.
> 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.
Thanks for using your very specific phrase in describing the research you recall. That helped me Google up a later study (I also had vague memories of the earlier study) that found that there is no particular difference in brain processing to the advantage of traditional Chinese script.
as a checklist of what to look for in experimental research.
Because everyone who is neurologically normal and with good hearing can speak, and understand speech, we can be reasonably confident that there are powerful brain short-cuts for dealing with phonological processing. Cross-cultural comparisons do show a variety of societally relevant efficiencies from writing systems being more rather than less user-friendly in representing speech sounds. The long argument on this point is given by John DeFrancis's book Visible Speech.
I narrowly escape embarrassment, because "phonetic activation" was a mistake. It's phonological activation, but I excuse myself if you were successful with that term :)
Now that I see this abstract, the "vaguely recalled" paper could have been on kana vs kanji processing. It's quite a no-brainer actually, because kanji stresses pattern recognition far more than kana, so it's only natural that phonological activation comes later, at which point semantic activation may have been activated.
Regarding the linked research, however, I can make a few observations. First, both as heavily-practiced scripts it isn't surprising that the same areas are recruited. We are looking at areas of phonological and semantic processing. Second, as these are heavily-practiced skills, pattern recognition is very efficient; you could probably get substantial differences if you compared bopomofo-trained readers vs. pinyin-trained readers, reading each others' scripts. In this case, you could predict, again, the same areas recruited for processing, but significant timing differences. Third, this is obviously not an RSVP paradigm. If it were, you'd be able to tweak how fast the subject needs to perceive the symbols, and it could be possible to get slightly different results between order of processing for the symbols. And under the RSVP paradigm, I would make the risky prediction that hanzi would win out in cognitive overload situations.
Just to clarify, I'm not commenting on the relative advantages in processing (nor do I think the bottleneck is in the script -- and hence it's silly to proclaim the superiority of semantic power of one script over another for the language trolls and apologists). It's more of a "language engineer's" look at scripts.
Efficiency above is in the context of me reading, not in the context of a nation or culture's literacy.
Here are two more tangible examples: consider a traffic light that has no colors, but flashes "stop" and "go" in text. The analogous "efficient" in my comment is the colored light, in which you don't think about the phonology of the words but understand its meaning.
Other example: a digital vs. an analog clock. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it is plausible that you can tell "oh, it's late!" by looking at the shape of the analog clock, whereas in the digital clock you'd have to parse the numbers. "Efficient" would be the analog clock. Again, this example is suspect; it doesn't apply to myself (I read digital much faster).
But in any case I'm not using "efficiency" to describe the writing system; I'm using it to describe a mechanism in reading comprehension.
Literacy rates and speaking proficiency are slightly different problems.
Speaking proficiency is a combination of existing dialects carrying social and linguistic prestige in addition to their historical existence. (Can you imagine forcing the entire United States to begin speaking some other romance language? It'd probably be a hideous transition.)
Also I imagine there are economic and practical factors related to China's literacy rate. Compare for example Japan which has a literacy rate that is probably the same as the United States (I'm having difficulty coming up with any good statistics for functional illiteracy). To say ideographic languages cause low literacy rates and limit speaking proficiency in the national language is probably a bit silly ;)
Also I imagine there are economic and practical factors related to China's literacy rate. Compare for example Japan
Japan is of course more prosperous than China, and long has been. But Japan also has pervasive use of syllabic writing (the katakana and hiragana syllabaries that are each capable of exhaustively writing anything a speaker of Japanese can speak, with very few written characters).
Prosperity may actually have more to do with effectiveness in spreading a standard national spoken language. The paradigmatic example here is Taiwan. When the Nationalist (KMT) regime from China fled to Taiwan (formerly occupied by Japan) after World War II, hardly anyone on Taiwan could speak Mandarin. Mandarin is about as cognate with Taiwanese (or Hakka, the other main language of Taiwan) as English is with German, or arguably even less cognate. But today anyone my age (fifty) or younger in Taiwan is conversant in Mandarin, even though the great majority of families living in Taiwan have older relatives who didn't speak that language at all. Prosperity brings telephone conversations and radio and TV broadcasting and travel and other human activities that converge language usage to a common standard. By contrast, the population of (mainland) China has long included a sizeable number of people whose native language is within the dialect category of 北方官話 (Mandarin) but that initial seed value hasn't resulted in a very impressive increase in the percentage of Mandarin speakers in China during the post-war years. That's a sign of the stark difference in prosperity between Taiwan and China.
China has a higher literacy rate than countries of similar economic development that use alphabets such as Brazil. In both Taiwan and Japan, literacy is very nearly 100%. The US doesn't fare as well.
Blaming China's "low levels of speaking proficiency in the national language" on characters doesn't make much sense either. Dozens of languages are spoken in China and Mandarin has only really been a standard for about a hundred years. You might as well be condemning the EU for having so many people who don't speak English well.
Three of my four grandparents were born (in the United States) in non-English-speaking homes. The huge degree of immigration that the United States has long experienced makes it quite remarkable that the United States today has such unity in using a national language (named after another country, no less) that we are all using here to communicate with one another. I possess the reading textbooks used by two of my grandparents' families (who spoke two different languages in that generation). Alphabetic writing was enormously helpful in making English the main generally understood language in the diverse population of the United States, and lack of it may be one thing that is holding back the always diligent people of China from even greater prosperity and unity in their spoken language.
I'd appreciate a source citation for the statement that China has a higher literacy rate than Brazil, as I'm quite sure that statement is based on a fallacy of equivocation: a different definition of "literacy" in the two countries.
After the turmoil of the Revolutionary War, there was a Great Lull remarkably similar to the one earlier this century. For nearly fifty years, there was practically no immigration at all. The U.S. grew rapidly through natural increase. But the make-up of the white population remained about what it had been in the 1790 Census: largely (60 per cent) English, heavily (80 per cent) British, and overwhelmingly (98 per cent) Protestant. This was the nation Alexis de Tocqueville described in Democracy in America (1835)
China has far, far more 2nd language speakers than the US does. Outside of Dongbei, it's a good bet that most over 50 speak Mandarin as a second language if at all. A lack of capitalism held China back, not its writing system. A fair comparison would be India, also a large country that's very divided linguistically. Three decades ago, the average Indian was significantly wealthier than the average Chinese. Both countries put a strong focus on education and both have been trying hard to modernize. Now, China is far wealthier and has far higher literacy.
Also, consider Taiwan and Hong Kong. Both went from being destitute to having higher per capita GDPs than Australia or many European states within the past generation or two. The idea that characters "hold" people back is ridiculous. Elementary school children here in Taiwan can read their native language as well if not better than their peers back in the states. It would take quite a bit of evidence to make a strong case against characters. Even MacArthur's misled experiment in Japan failed. Simplifications were forced through and kanji were reduced, but people never stopped using them. In fact, the Japanese have been using more kanji in general publication each decade since the end of the occupation.
“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.
Wait, to sinter is to roast something that's been tied with cooking twine? 焼 is used for roasting and barbecuing, and 結 gives the image of being tied together by a knot or thread, which is why it's part of 結婚 (marriage)
I'm being a little obtuse, I know, but while it is often possible to guess a general meaning by looking at the kanji for any given compound, there are just too many different ways for the meanings of each character to be combined. Add to that the sheer pile of words that derive their meaning from literature or poetry, and you're probably better off taking a peek at the dictionary when the meaning isn't obvious from context.
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.
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.
In an ideal world the Chinese and Japanese systems could be completely scrapped and replaced with purely phonetic systems.
In an ideal world, the American educational system would be plagued by problems so trivial as the English language being poorly designed.
[Edited to add: There is non-zero value in having the history, culture, and literature built up in one's national language. Japan would never stand for abandoning Japanese and thank goodness for it -- it would be like asking America to abandon every word committed to paper before 2008. You know, minor documents like the US Constitution, collected works of Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird, all that rot that our ideal world would dispense with.)
True, Chinese has no (?) conjugation, but to compensate, there's quite a strict word order.
I took a couple of courses of Chinese too, but gave up because of the nasty characters, difficult pronounciation, and the countless ways in which you can screw up even one word by mis-pronouncing the tones of the syllables :)
On the other hand, pronouncing Japanese is virtually like pronouncing Finnish, but I never bothered to learn those Chinese characters for Japanese either.
We're a Beijing startup and are changing the face of Chinese language instruction. If characters are causing problems just switch everything to pinyin. We've got a huge variety of shows and tests and speaking drills and are getting rave reviews.
There are lots of issues with traditional educational methods. In my personal opinion the biggest is that traditional classroom-based methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language.
Well, I took my beginner's course in Chinese in 2000..
I gave up on it around 2002, and have since moved on to learning Japanese up to daily conversation level, and now I'm considering taking a look
at Korean.
> methods of teaching languages fail spectacularly with Chinese because they end up focusing on the written text which has only a weak phonetic link to the spoken language.
From my experience, I'd say that this is a good point. Our teacher made us (try to) draw those Chinese characters quite a bit, and it didn't really help me at all. There was no way I was going to remember those scary things that soon.
My Chinese studies were spread out over two years and two courses, and I only remember a few simple sentences. Only one of them happens to be relevant now: "Wo you yi ge gongzi" (+tones) - I own a company. :P
A sole proprietorship, to be exact, but technically a company anyway!
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.
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.