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DaShi
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The Taste of Japan
Sep 2000
time: 05:20
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I have a friend who often text messages me in Chinese. This helps my reading and writing of Chinese, but is absolutely useless for speaking or listening to the language. When I advise my students on how to improve their spoken English, I encourage reading. The writing and speaking in English are very closely linked and improving one often aids the other.
My biggest problem with Chinese is that it a monosyllabic language with limited major sounds. To remedy this, there a tonal system, but it lacks clarity. Distinguishing tones is much more difficult than distinguishing differing vowel or consonant sounds. Fortunately, there are more words that require two or more sounds. They are easier to identify and generally sound better. Then there's the problem of how those few sounds are pronounced regardless of tones. Many Chinese pronounce words like fan and fang so similarily that some of them have complained to me that it is annoying to decipher. Even fen and fan are difficult as I discovered when trying determine a student's name today. Her peers could look at her written name to easily understand; but to someone who has not memorized so many characters, her written name is useless to me in Chinese (I don't need to know it's meaning, just how to pronounce it). While the pinyin system is a blessing to a learner of Chinese, the tones still remain a major obstacle as they are omitted from most pinyin spellings. Thus, I easily forget them because; one, there are so many similar sounding words it is easy to be confused; and two, without a written form describing them, I find it difficult to remember them.
Some of the foreign teachers have begun an interesting experiment here. We've found that if you try to speak clearly in proper Chinese, taxi driver won't understand you. However, if you deliberately slur your words, they know exactly where you want to go. So now, bao chu bei lu has become bah shu beh loo. I think its just the taxi cab drivers. Otherwise, everyone here should be able to understand my choppy mispronounced Chinese. 
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I am an American born Chinese and I think written English was easier than written Chinese but spoken Chinese was a bit easier than spoken English (however, spoken Chinese is pretty much impossible if you are tone deaf). |
I'm starting to think this is my problem. At least, judging from my singing. 
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That's speed reading. |
No, that's normal reading. Speed reading is being able to quickly digest a sentence by isolating the key words in it and forcing yourself to move on. This is also aided in English as many word forms have common spellings. Verbs are often the easiest to isolate and recognize by their prefixes. Proper punctuation also aids in creating a sentence map and allowing a reader to move more quickly.
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You do that by taking a phonetic system and hammer it into - you guess it - a ideographic system. Thus proving the advantage of ideographic systems. |
What? That in a phonetic system you can do both (sound out and see)? Saying that you 'hammer it into" an ideographic system is misleading. The visual component of a written phonetic language is already present to begin with. A reader is not altering it in anyway. That's the purpose of having a written language. Phonetic writing is advantageous by giving you more information than ideographic writing. How can you claim that ideographic systems are superior using this line of reasoning?
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1.2 billion Chinese can't be wrong |
Not all of them can read or write. 
As for Chinese having fewer words, I personally like having a larger palette to work with. Hence my dislike of monosyllablism. More sounds make for a livelier conversation.
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Tingkai
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To find the Northwest Passage
Aug 2001
time: 13:20
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quote:
Originally posted by Evil Knevil
The problem is that he's a mental sinophille and a miserable nippophobe. At every damn opportunity, he curses Japan. Even when we're talking about something else entirely.
His line of argument is basically this: the Japanese don't have a culture of their own. They stole their warrior ethics, food and art from ancient Chinese Dynasties. On and on he goes. |
Try using his attack against himself.
Evil: So you love Chinese culture
nippophobe: Yup, it's the only civilised culture in the world. Everything about it is great.
Evil: And you hate Japanese culture, right?
nippophobe: Yup, they stole everything from the Chinese.
Evil: If they stole everything from the Chinese then Japanese culture is just another regional Chinese culture, like Shanghainese or Cantonese culture. So if you love Chinese culture than you can't hate Japanese culture because to hate Japanese culture is to hate Chinese culture.
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Urban Ranger
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Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
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quote:
Originally posted by DaShi
No, that's normal reading. |
Not quite. Among all my friends I had when I was studying in the US, less than 5% read by looking at the word shape. More than 95% read by mentally pronouncing the words.
Just for reference, I went to a "highly competitive" college.
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Originally posted by DaShi
The visual component of a written phonetic language is already present to begin with. |
Not quite. Words like "through" and "thru", "light" and "lite" have different forms but the same meaning. The words in a phonetic language is based on sounds, not visual cues.
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Originally posted by DaShi
Phonetic writing is advantageous by giving you more information than ideographic writing. How can you claim that ideographic systems are superior using this line of reasoning? |
How? As I pointed out, Chinese translations of English books are always shorter than the originals.
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Originally posted by DaShi
As for Chinese having fewer words, I personally like having a larger palette to work with. Hence my dislike of monosyllablism. More sounds make for a livelier conversation. |
You don't quite know Chinese. The basic building block is not the character but the ci, similar to short phrases in English.
As for this "monosyllablism" bit, it does not apply in Chinese (and probably in any language, for that matter). For one thing, people don't speak one single word at a time, they speak sentences.
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Sikander
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Boulder, Colorado, United Snakes of America
Jan 2000
time: 22:20
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quote:
Originally posted by Urban Ranger
It's debatable that a logographic system is superior to a phonetic system. Instead of conveying sounds, it conveys meanings directly. Thus, it's more compact and has a higher information density. |
Which saves paper, but that's a pretty minor consideration.
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Originally posted by Snowflake
Actually Chinese characters are equivalent to English words. They are made up by limited number of "BiHua" which is correspondence to letters, only there are fewer BiHua than letters. To teach and learn a Chinese character for a Chinese is no more difficult than to teach and learn a English word for a westerner.
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Not even close. Seriously, I grew up on Okinawa and knew many people who were Chinese, Japanese, Okinawan, American or some combination of the above and most were multilingual. Learning characters was much more time consuming, without a doubt.
QUOTE] Originally posted by Snowflake
But are't western students required years of studying to learn all these English words? I'd almost guess a fifth grader in China knows a higher percentage of Chinese words then the percentage of English words a fifth grader here knows. [/QUOTE]
While there are more than twice as many words in English as there are in any other language, an enormous number of them are technical terms which aren't used in every day conversation to say the least. Consider for instance the language of medicine, which has a Greek name for just about every possible part of anatomy, or the use of Latin words in many technical languages like legalese. Many of these technical terms are even exported for the use of technical experts in other countries whose own language lacks a ready term for something.
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Originally posted by Urban Ranger
That's speed reading.
You do that by taking a phonetic system and hammer it into - you guess it - a ideographic system. Thus proving the advantage of ideographic systems.  |
No it's not. It is part and parcel to learning to read the language. In education a theory which seeks to skip the sounding out part of the process is called "whole language theory" and it rightly knows that people naturally learn to recognize words on sight and rarely have to actually sound them out, while wrongly assuming that we should skip the sounding out process in elementary education in order to hurry things along.
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Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Though a normal person doesn't need more than 3,000 Chinese characters to be literate. For English, you need to know 10,000 words. |
Are we counting word forms here (ie forms of verbs, adverbal forms of adjectives etc.)? If so then it's a somewhat unfair comparison, as Chinese uses seperate words to denote gramatical forms where English makes changes to the words directly. While Chinese has the better system in this regard, it doesn't mean that English is that much harder to learn simply because you have to learn a few forms of the same root word.
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Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Not quite. Among all my friends I had when I was studying in the US, less than 5% read by looking at the word shape. More than 95% read by mentally pronouncing the words. |
Were your friends native speakers? People who have to mentally "read outloud" to read are usually considered slow here in the U.S. If they move their lips they are made fun of after about 4th grade or so. Imagining the sounds of the words slows you down considerably. I'm not a really fast reader (though my comprehension is top notch), but if I had to imagine the sound of every word as I read it my reading rate would be cut at least in half. The only words people of normal reading ability have to sound out are words which they don't yet recognize on sight.
Finally you have neglected to mention the one real advantage of using an ideographic system of writing, particularly for a country like China. Simply put people of varying dialects can all understand the written word, as can to a lesser extent a fair number of foreigners like the Japanese who use your system to some extent as well.
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MRT144
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Seattle Washington
Oct 2002
time: 21:20
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the problem with japanese culture is everyone has a terrible characture of what japanese culture ie.
bukkake, tentacle rape, animation, technological innovation to the absurd, terrible fashion, and bukkake
for that impression we white people get though, i think we can only blame that on japan.
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Urban Ranger
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Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic
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quote:
Originally posted by Sikander
Which saves paper, but that's a pretty minor consideration. |
Also saves time, which is significant.
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Originally posted by Sikander
Are we counting word forms here (ie forms of verbs, adverbal forms of adjectives etc.)? If so then it's a somewhat unfair comparison, as Chinese uses seperate words to denote gramatical forms where English makes changes to the words directly. |
Most of the time Chinese characters ("words") can be used in various forms without change or designation. We didn't use concepts such as verbs and nouns until late 19th century IIRC.
You need to know a lot more words in English because large groups of words have similar but not identical meanings, and sometimes the difference is in the connotations, which is very difficult to grasp.
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Originally posted by Sikander
Were your friends native speakers? |
Born and bred in US of A.
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Originally posted by Sikander
People who have to mentally "read outloud" to read are usually considered slow here in the U.S. If they move their lips they are made fun of after about 4th grade or so. Imagining the sounds of the words slows you down considerably. |
That's what I used to do (still do this at times) reading English, and they weren't much faster than me.
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Originally posted by Sikander
Finally you have neglected to mention the one real advantage of using an ideographic system of writing, particularly for a country like China. Simply put people of varying dialects can all understand the written word, as can to a lesser extent a fair number of foreigners like the Japanese who use your system to some extent as well. |
Yeah, that's a good one. 
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DaShi
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The Taste of Japan
Sep 2000
time: 05:20
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quote:
Not quite. Among all my friends I had when I was studying in the US, less than 5% read by looking at the word shape. More than 95% read by mentally pronouncing the words.
Just for reference, I went to a "highly competitive" college. |
So you asked 100 friends from your college how they read? We have a foreign teacher here who uses this kind of reasoning to prove points. Though he doesn't claim to go to "highly competitive" colleges, because he uses this line to prove why college graduates aren't as intelligent as high school dropouts. He's generally laughed out of arguments. Sorry.
Even if you claim had some validity, many Chinese people may also read by mentally pronouncing the words. Perhaps you're part of the 5% who don't.
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Not quite. Words like "through" and "thru", "light" and "lite" have different forms but the same meaning. The words in a phonetic language is based on sounds, not visual cues. |
That doesn't disprove the visual component of words. Even your last comment admits that it's there.
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How? As I pointed out, Chinese translations of English books are always shorter than the originals. |
That is irrelevant. My response was to your claim to hammering English into a ideographic system make Chinese superior, which is a ridiculous claim as I stated originally.
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Also saves time, which is significant. |
Saves time how?
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You don't quite know Chinese. The basic building block is not the character but the ci, similar to short phrases in English. |
Again, that is not the point. There are limited sounds. Yes, Chinese combines sounds to form new words. I appreciate this as it makes it sound better, and occasionally the tones flow together. I've been criticized a bit for rearranging Chinese words to make them sounds better with their tones. But this is just a personal preference for me.
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As for this "monosyllablism" bit, it does not apply in Chinese (and probably in any language, for that matter). For one thing, people don't speak one single word at a time, they speak sentences. |
Actually, proper Chinese is spoken one word at a time. That's one of the first thing they teach you when you begin speaking it, and was one of the hardests habits for me to break. When I first came to China no one understood me because I spoke Chinese 'phrases' like English words and sentences: smoothly and connected. Instead I should have pronounced each sound individually. This is similar to Chinese writing, where a few characters together may represent one word or idea, but are not closer to eachother, marked by punctuation, or identifiable as such unless you have learned their combination and can idetinfy their relationship from context of the other characters.
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God reading that makes me so happy I'm dealing with Korean. Korean has really surreal pronounciation rules (consonants sound different depending on wether they're at the beginning or end of syllable and they can hop from the end of one syllable to the beginning of the next if the next syllable starts with a vowel thereby often changing its sound completely, and then there are the bizarre way vowels merge into dipthongs) but at least its phonetic... |
And this was chosen over an ideographic language.
Last edited by DaShi on 23-10-2004 at 09:00
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20-10-2004 21:12
) in all elements of English if that helps?
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