Chinese script, It's characters Options

[fujisan_8]

The Chinese script ISNT really logical in a sense that it doesnt represent anything that the avg Joe can use intuition to "guess" or "make sense" of the word.

PLus the tones, can anyone hear give me some valid reasons as why they would be better than a toneless language?

the chinese language is not for the average joe. it was never meant to be easy to learn. the script does make sense and it follows a logical pattern. for example, characters w/ the 金 radical would most likely have something to do w/ money or metals for the character means "gold." the 忄radical would accompay most characters that have to deal w/ ones emotions, and the 女 radical would be found with characters that have anything to do w/ women...almost all characters follow such patterns, everything makes sense after a while...

you can't simply get rid of the tones. if so, it's like telling english users to change the spelling of all their words, nothing will make sense. there's really no point in complaining cuz that's how the language is structured, and nothing can be done to change it.

Well, I suppose Chinese will remain a localised language and not attain the level of international recognition or be as widespread as English or French.

Sad, but I seriously think tones (along with a lot of others) is one of the most unncessary things in a language.

[caolucai]

The Chinese script ISNT really logical in a sense that it doesnt represent anything that the avg Joe can use intuition to "guess" or "make sense" of the word.

PLus the tones, can anyone hear give me some valid reasons as why they would be better than a toneless language?

the chinese language is not for the average joe. it was never meant to be easy to learn. the script does make sense and it follows a logical pattern. for example, characters w/ the 金 radical would most likely have something to do w/ money or metals for the character means "gold." the 忄radical would accompay most characters that have to deal w/ ones emotions, and the 女 radical would be found with characters that have anything to do w/ women...almost all characters follow such patterns, everything makes sense after a while...

you can't simply get rid of the tones. if so, it's like telling english users to change the spelling of all their words, nothing will make sense. there's really no point in complaining cuz that's how the language is structured, and nothing can be done to change it.

Well, I suppose Chinese will remain a localised language and not attain the level of international recognition or be as widespread as English or French.

Sad, but I seriously think tones (along with a lot of others) is one of the most unncessary things in a language.

?? chinese is already the most widespread/commonly used language in the world

[Yuje]

I think a lot of you missed the point. I'm not talking about some skilled person inputting the words rather, an average Joe.

Why dont I tell Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese and Thais to modify or abolish their writing system? Simply because its a mapping of the phoentic sounds of their language, an efficienct system. Whilst Chinese is a language that has a long history, it remains just that, an archiac kind of language. Btw, TONES SOUND UGLY *its a general rule that the more tones a language has, the less its pleasing to the ear*. This is why there is always a preference amongst AFers for Japanese or Korean (no tones) over Mandarin (4) and Mandarin over Cantonese or Vietnamese which has 5 to 9.

Why isnt Vietnamese popular amongst Westerners? Simply because its not as economically useful as Chinese is, hardly ANY WESTERNER was interested in Chinese say 10 years ago.

The Chinese script ISNT really logical in a sense that it doesnt represent anything that the avg Joe can use intuition to "guess" or "make sense" of the word.

PLus the tones, can anyone hear give me some valid reasons as why they would be better than a toneless language?

An unskilled typist at English can't type jack, either. Of course a Chinese typist needs experience to be able to type fast, but once he has it, he can type rapid-speed.

Japanese and Korean aren't monotonal, they have pitch patterns to them. For example, most westerners pronounce Korea as ko-REE-a, but Koreans pronounce it KO-ree-a. Manna (meeting) is pronounced man-NA, not MAN-na.

Tones help a listener distinguish between two words that are otherwise homophones and sound the same. Mandarin, unlike English needs it, because there are far more homophones in Mandarin than in English. Without tones, the words for "buy" and "sell" would sound the same. English doens't need tones because it has a far more complex phonemic structure than Mandarin. For example

1)Consonant clusters: sphere, spring, black

2)Ending sounds: Mandarin only has -n and -ng, otherwise they end with vowels, English can end with any letter of the English alphabet.

3)Multi-syllabism: English is a very multi-syllabic language, while Mandarin isn't. Words in Mandarin rarely exceed two syllables in length. Shi can mean: yes, poet, lion, city, world, ten, etc, baozi can mean bun or newspaper, and of course pronounce da feiji wrong and you'll say "masterbate" when they meant "board an airplane")...........which brings me to another point

4)Non-phonetic spelling: English distinguishes homophones through irregular spelling: lead vs led, to vs too vs two, do vs due, leek vs leak, for vs four, etc. The problem is much higher in Mandarin because of the much increased amount of homones, and you either have a problem of an alphabet that corresponds with sounds but leads to much confusion, or an alphabet with tons of irregularities that require memorization thus no longer easy to learn.

5)Grammatical features: Plurals are indicated with "-s" or "-es", tenses in verbs are indicated by suffixing "-ing", "-ed", thus lessening the ambiguation and making it impossible to mistake one part of speech for another. Thus, because of grammar, you won't mistake "fishing" for "fish" or "to ram" with the animal "ram". Chinese has a different grammar system, where words aren't modified in context. Thus the problem of homophony remains, and tones are used to distinguish different words.

6)Besides which, research has shown that children who grew up with tonal languages are more likely to achieve musical aptitude, because their ability to distinguish tones gives them pick out tones and relative and absolute pitch in music.

How exactly do you plan on modifying Chinese to the extent that it doesn't need to be tonal? Do a drastic overhual of the sound system, makeover the entire vocabulary, add in lots of new sounds, consonants, dipthongs, clusters, and ending sounds and get people to learn them all, adopt irregular spelling, change to a new grammar system. Hell, might as well just abandon the language and start over again.

Let me ask you a question. Do you actually know how to speak, read, write, or type Chinese? Hell, are you even Chinese?

This post has been edited by Yuje: Dec 17 2004, 06:33 AM

[raverxgp]

I think we need to come up with some like the japanese with the hirgana and katana... and i find learning with them helps alot... after you know the grammar and vocab you get the jist of it... with chinese i find myself having to guess sometimes which character it is...

[z3fyrus]

Btw, TONES SOUND UGLY *its a general rule that the more tones a language has, the less its pleasing to the ear*. This is why there is always a preference amongst AFers for Japanese or Korean (no tones) over Mandarin (4) and Mandarin over Cantonese or Vietnamese which has 5 to 9.
PLus the tones, can anyone hear give me some valid reasons as why they would be better than a toneless language?

I'm a westerner and I really enjoy the different tones of mandarin, though they are hard to master at the start. The preference amonst AFers is quite subjective, especially since a lot of Vietnam people really hate the chinese (language) so do some Japanese.
I can't say tones are better, but they aren't bad either : it's just different.

Do not be influenced by the neo-imperialistic policies of the United States who try to refrain from learning other languages, and try to keep English the number 1 official language (i KNOW there are more NATIVE mandarin speakers, I'm talking here about knowledge of english).

Pinyin is adequate to learn Mandarin (I speak out of experience) , many foreigners just have difficulties because they don't hear/see a lot of mandarin in their daily lives (unlike English).

[華夏無產]

hahahaha..it's cuz the CCP likes to mess things up. always like to throw away the old (e.g. KMT's ZhuYin system) and come up w/ some new stuff. yeah, besides how it's systematic, pinyin really doesn't make much sense, cuz their reasoning is, "we're only borrowing the alphabet, not its pronunciations, therefore, letters like X, Q, ZH, should be pronounced like, ㄒ,ㄑ,ㄓ respectively." i don't see how foreigners can NOT get confused

Actually, in a few European languages, "x" is represented by the IPA "sh" [postalvelar fricatve] (that's not the way it's actually written, but i don't know how to show it in this computer). Also, not all languages that use the latin alphabet pronounce them similarly. For example, english "j" is /dz,/ (alveolar plosive + alveolo-palatal fricative ligature). Spanish vowel sounds like english "h" Voiceless_velar_fricative, and in slavic languages like english "y". Thus, the fact that some letters are not identical in Pinyin aren't really a problem, linguistically speaking. And don't forget, Russian speakers have to distinguish Ш and Щ from each other.

[MasteroD]

2)Ending sounds: Mandarin only has -n and -ng, otherwise they end with vowels, English can end with any letter of the English alphabet.

i just had to respond to this. only mandarin is limited to it's syllables ending with either a vowel or n, ng.

almost every other chinese language has syllables that can end in either a vowel, or n, ng, m, p, k, t

so in this sense, mandarin is the most inferior of all the chinese dialects. this is just my opinion, of course.

[fujisan_8]

The Chinese script ISNT really logical in a sense that it doesnt represent anything that the avg Joe can use intuition to "guess" or "make sense" of the word.

PLus the tones, can anyone hear give me some valid reasons as why they would be better than a toneless language?

the chinese language is not for the average joe. it was never meant to be easy to learn. the script does make sense and it follows a logical pattern. for example, characters w/ the 金 radical would most likely have something to do w/ money or metals for the character means "gold." the 忄radical would accompay most characters that have to deal w/ ones emotions, and the 女 radical would be found with characters that have anything to do w/ women...almost all characters follow such patterns, everything makes sense after a while...

you can't simply get rid of the tones. if so, it's like telling english users to change the spelling of all their words, nothing will make sense. there's really no point in complaining cuz that's how the language is structured, and nothing can be done to change it.

Well, I suppose Chinese will remain a localised language and not attain the level of international recognition or be as widespread as English or French.

Sad, but I seriously think tones (along with a lot of others) is one of the most unncessary things in a language.

?? chinese is already the most widespread/commonly used language in the world

Err NO. Chinese is NOT the most WIDESPREAD language in teh world, it has the MOST NUMBER OF SPEAKERS in the world, but this is due to sheer size and not how widespread it is. Please, before you write anything, distinguish BETWEEN the words WIDESPREAD and COMMON. Even if you consider the overseas Chinese, its not as widespread (because its still only used amongst the Chinese community at large). English and to a latter extent, French us WIDESPREAD due to colonialism, for example, you can really only use Chinese within a Chinese community in say American or France. However, with English, it can be used in nearly every big city all over the world.

Yuje,

I havent been formally trained to read/write/speak Chinese and No, I'm not Chinese. I've mostly used the Internet/NJSTAR and watched a hella lot of HK movies and just learnt Chinese off that.

I DO realise all of your 6 points, but I am just pointing out that Chinese as you have pointed out isnt a really flexible language. If I had any control, I'd radically change it, just to make it easier for people to learn it. I'm very much in favour of the phoentic system (alphabets) simply because it provides a very good guide into what the sound of the word is (even though it isnt perfect - knife is an example).

Another important point I have to raise: someone metioned it's faster to input Chinese - well isn't it true this is purely because Chinese is a much more meaningful language than English? It takes nearly three times the length to express something in English than Chinese, this may perhaps explain WHY typists would type Chinese quicker than in English, but if it's a 1-1 comparision, I doubt it so.

I don't know if its because I've been raised speaking English and the only schools I attended taught in English, but to me, Chinese seems like a unstructured language. Firstly, it has no alphabet and well, it's grammar is quite straight forward, so I suppose there wouldnt be many "rules" so to speak in structuring Chinese.

To me, and I suppose a lot of ABCs, the thing that turns us off about Chinese is the sheer complexity and how ridged it is. In a way, you can't really "teach" yourself Chinese without too many references or guidance material. With English for example - as I metioned you get a rough idea of the sound (ok, again, some words are misleading as well) but most people would get your gist if you spoke it even in the worse accent possible.

A final thing about the tones, well honestly, it makes a language sound feminine (usually because high sounding tones sound like a girl's voice and low deep voices - low tones sound like a guy's). It's no surprise really that a lot of tonal languages (you know the list) are often referred to by most foreigners as the most annoying and harsh sounding languages on Earth.

A final q's - is tones really that important in Chinese? I'm no expert, but from what I hear fluent speakers tell me that it really isnt that important speech wise because they pick up the idea of the word in the sentence, not by word by word.

This post has been edited by fujisan_8: Dec 18 2004, 06:16 AM

[supernovasp]

You can't just abolish the tones. It's the essential of Chinese languages.

[fujisan_8]

You can't just abolish the tones. It's the essential of Chinese languages.

Well that is the sad bit.

Most tonal languages sounds like they are singing opera.

A few more gripes to end the night:

What exactly is the relevance of the ideas represented on Chinese characters in todays world? Most people for starters can't relate or make out what the hell the character represents anyway and secondly, much of it has been "straightened" from the original squiggly script anyway.

The current Chinese script or system might be adequete for the ancient world (prior to any computerisation as such) but in today's age, it's kind of inefficient. I wonder if the rigidness of Chinese had any effects on China's failure to develop science and technology. I can't imagine how the hell one would write scientific formulas or develop computer programming languages without some sorta alphabet.

Furthermore, in English, if I ever forgot (how to spell) a word, I can rely on the alphabet to get a rough idea of how to spell it by sounding it out at least and use a dictionary to make any amendments if required. With Chinese, if you've forgotten the character, that's it, there is no fall back option, at least with characters that you have totally forgotten and have no such idea of remembering.

There are also numerous articles that have suggested even Chinese journalists today rely on computers to remidn them of a lot of words and plus, a lot of Chinese can barely write Chinese script without the aid of a computer.

This post has been edited by fujisan_8: Dec 18 2004, 08:53 AM

[caolucai]

remembering the characters isn't that much trouble. as i mentioned before, you can rely on the radicals. if you forget, all you have to do is think about the character's meaning and then work backwards. despite the richness of the chinese script, there are actually only a few thousand commonly used characters, and through constant exposure from one's surrounding, most are able to memorize them by heart. the journalists' reliance on the computer isn't surprising. since they write so much, they're bound to get confused by themselves. plus, they often include proverbs and ancient sayings in their articles, which makes it all the harder to write w/out any reference material; it's like how most of us are spoiled by Word's spell-check.

This post has been edited by caolucai: Dec 18 2004, 11:43 AM

[直隸總督]

I think for one to criticize the usefulness of a language, he must master the language himself. Obviously, a certain member does not have this ability, as shown in his signature.

This post has been edited by 直隸總督: Dec 18 2004, 12:30 PM

[anlong7931]

Ya, basically trying to abolish tones is like telling english to change its vocabulary.
I also think its a good idea to create a phoenetic alphabet like what the koreans did. Do you guys think korean is worth learning or will it not be as useful as mandarin? Im not sure what language to learn but I am interested in korean and mandarin and learning both would be hard. I also like the korean alphabet and its writing system. Its so much easier than sitting there trying to figure out chinese characters in chinese languages and kanji in the japanese language.

This post has been edited by anlong7931: Dec 18 2004, 03:35 PM

[z3fyrus]

After Mandarin i'm taking some basic courses in Korean, just out of interest.

[Yuje]

Yuje,

I havent been formally trained to read/write/speak Chinese and No, I'm not Chinese. I've mostly used the Internet/NJSTAR and watched a hella lot of HK movies and just learnt Chinese off that.

I DO realise all of your 6 points, but I am just pointing out that Chinese as you have pointed out isnt a really flexible language. If I had any control, I'd radically change it, just to make it easier for people to learn it. I'm very much in favour of the phoentic system (alphabets) simply because it provides a very good guide into what the sound of the word is (even though it isnt perfect - knife is an example).

Another important point I have to raise: someone metioned it's faster to input Chinese - well isn't it true this is purely because Chinese is a much more meaningful language than English? It takes nearly three times the length to express something in English than Chinese, this may perhaps explain WHY typists would type Chinese quicker than in English, but if it's a 1-1 comparision, I doubt it so.

I don't know if its because I've been raised speaking English and the only schools I attended taught in English, but to me, Chinese seems like a unstructured language. Firstly, it has no alphabet and well, it's grammar is quite straight forward, so I suppose there wouldnt be many "rules" so to speak in structuring Chinese.

To me, and I suppose a lot of ABCs, the thing that turns us off about Chinese is the sheer complexity and how ridged it is. In a way, you can't really "teach" yourself Chinese without too many references or guidance material. With English for example - as I metioned you get a rough idea of the sound (ok, again, some words are misleading as well) but most people would get your gist if you spoke it even in the worse accent possible.

A final thing about the tones, well honestly, it makes a language sound feminine (usually because high sounding tones sound like a girl's voice and low deep voices - low tones sound like a guy's). It's no surprise really that a lot of tonal languages (you know the list) are often referred to by most foreigners as the most annoying and harsh sounding languages on Earth.

A final q's - is tones really that important in Chinese? I'm no expert, but from what I hear fluent speakers tell me that it really isnt that important speech wise because they pick up the idea of the word in the sentence, not by word by word.

To answer you, I'm an ABC, and I've taught myself Chinese characters, using the internet and a Chinese dictionary. I learned Mandarin as a result of learning pinyin in order to type Chinese, and simply asking and practicing with my mom and some Taiwanese friends occasionally. And no, tones don't make a language sound femine. Different languages have different pitch patterns. Mandarin tends to go drastically up and down in tones, resulting in its sing-song quality. Cantonese on the other hand, tends to be more flat, with more gradual and subtle changes in tones, and tones tend to be lower in general, too. Plenty of languages are regarded as loud, harsh, and annoying without being tonal. Ever heard Arabic spoken loudly, preferably by a vendor trying to haggle? Sounds like you're being yelled at and spit on at the same time.

And yes, Chinese does have a grammar. It's an isolating langauge, so it doesn't have the same kind of grammar as the Romance languages do, and doesn't conjugate verbs or decline nouns, but there are plenty of other grammatical features to pay attention to, like word order, sentence structure, measure words, and the different uses of a zillion particles.

As for tones, yes, they're damn important. Like I said, difference between tones can mean the difference between "I'm boarding an airplane" and "I'm masturbating". Just be glad Mandarin isn't a language with extensive tone sandhis, like Taiwanese or some of the Indian languages. That basically means there are tones, AND the tones for the words change depending on grammar, context, and part of speech.

I think for one to criticize the usefulness of a language, he must master the language himself. Obviously, a certain member does not have this ability, as shown in his signature.

LOL! I always thought that his previous Hanzi signature rather sharp left turn from reality. IIRC, it stated that the Daiyutai islands, located south of Japan, belong to Vietnam.

This post has been edited by Yuje: Dec 19 2004, 07:53 AM

[MikeTheLinguist]

It seems there are two separate, unrelated questions here: tones and characters.

As for the first one, abolishing chinese tones (because they're supposedly difficult to learn) would be next to impossible. How do you tell over one billion people to stop using tones, when a large portion of them wouldn't even know what a tone is. Even some educated people, though aware of the four tones in Mandarin, are completely unaware of the fact that the other Chinese languages have tones. A friend of mine from Guangzhou grew up speaking Cantonese, but learned Mandarin in school (and from his mother who's from near Beijing), he can tell you the tone number (1-4) of any Mandarin word, but is clueless about the tones in Cantonese - his native language. Even if you could communicate to all speakers of Chinese languages to stop using tones - they won't do it. One English sound that is difficult for ESLers to learn is the 'th' sound as in 'the' and its voiceless counterpart as in 'think'. Imagine trying to tell all English speakers to stop using this sound and to use something different instead. No one would do it. Extremely few people would have the mental wherewithall to be able to consistently do it day in and day out.

BTW - the comment about Chinese languages sounding like opera is interesting! When I hear the old men in the cheap restaurants in China town speaking Toisan...it definitely doesn't sound like any opera I've ever been to.

As for the characters, the usual first argument about abolishing them is the loss of a rich part of humanity, which of course is true. The Chinese system of orthography is highly evolved, and there are dozens of publications out there that discuss this. A good intro to writing systems in general is Henry Rogers "Writing Systems: A linguistic introduction" published by Blackwell.

There have been several studies on the processing of reading Chinese writing as opposed to alphabetic writing. Interestingly, people who suffer from dyslexia and have trouble reading alphabetic systems have no trouble reading symbolic systems such as Chinese because the two types of systems are processed in different areas of the brain - Dyslexia doesn't affect the part of the brain where the reading of Chinese characters is processed.

Furthermore, Chinese, as with all languages with a written system, is written differently than it is spoken. In fact, fewer characters are often used when writing than when speaking. We've seen that there are many homophones in Chinese. To see this, try the following website:

www.mandarintools.com

Go to the character dictionary and type in a syllable in pinyin (with or without tone number) and see how many characters there are for a given syllable. The written system distinguishes all of these of course, but when speaking, usually context distinguishes it, or the speaker uses extra words. Writing Chinese poetry in pinyin (or any other romanized system) would destroy the nature of the poetry. (Note, this site has Cantonese, too, and uses the Yale romanization system - unfortunately, it doesn't have very many Cantonese-specific characters).

These are just a few random thoughts....if you consult any good text book on orthography or book on Chinese writing, they will surely present more arguments against the abolishment of characters.

[z3fyrus]

I couldn't agree more with Mike

[MasteroD]

chinese is mainly use by chinese.. not u vietnamese...

i thought fujisan was a person of chinese descent from vietnam??

[fujisan_8]

Ya, basically trying to abolish tones is like telling english to change its vocabulary.
I also think its a good idea to create a phoenetic alphabet like what the koreans did. Do you guys think korean is worth learning or will it not be as useful as mandarin? Im not sure what language to learn but I am interested in korean and mandarin and learning both would be hard. I also like the korean alphabet and its writing system. Its so much easier than sitting there trying to figure out chinese characters in chinese languages and kanji in the japanese language.

This is what I'm trying to get at. The problem with Chinese though is that it's not easy to establish an accruate alphabet to map all the sounds *due to the language being monosyllabic and tonal*.

Korean - well, it's probably not going to be used as widely as say Chinese due to the much smaller population size and the lack of overseas Koreans. However, I'd say logically, it would be much easier for the foreigner to start learning Korean since they are use to using an alphabet system.

The last bit highlights my original point exactly, it's a b!tch trying to figure and "memorise" the hanzi (chinese characters) and I suppose to even get a decent grasp of it requires a lot of time. This is what puts off a lot of foreigners and ABCs/BBCs/CBCs. Furthermore, do we need to "memorise" extra $hit when we already have to remember a lot of things already. A bit off topic, but perhaps this is why Chinese lack creativity, children are forced to "memorise" a lot of chracters - my friend from HK tells me he hated to "bui shu" (memorising and regurgutating various pieces of Chinese material) because apparently this was the only way Chinese was taught and thought to be the most effective method.

[Keymaker]

Ya, basically trying to abolish tones is like telling english to change its vocabulary.
I also think its a good idea to create a phoenetic alphabet like what the koreans did. Do you guys think korean is worth learning or will it not be as useful as mandarin? Im not sure what language to learn but I am interested in korean and mandarin and learning both would be hard. I also like the korean alphabet and its writing system. Its so much easier than sitting there trying to figure out chinese characters in chinese languages and kanji in the japanese language.

This is what I'm trying to get at. The problem with Chinese though is that it's not easy to establish an accruate alphabet to map all the sounds *due to the language being monosyllabic and tonal*.

Korean - well, it's probably not going to be used as widely as say Chinese due to the much smaller population size and the lack of overseas Koreans. However, I'd say logically, it would be much easier for the foreigner to start learning Korean since they are use to using an alphabet system.

The last bit highlights my original point exactly, it's a b!tch trying to figure and "memorise" the hanzi (chinese characters) and I suppose to even get a decent grasp of it requires a lot of time. This is what puts off a lot of foreigners and ABCs/BBCs/CBCs. Furthermore, do we need to "memorise" extra $hit when we already have to remember a lot of things already. A bit off topic, but perhaps this is why Chinese lack creativity, children are forced to "memorise" a lot of chracters - my friend from HK tells me he hated to "bui shu" (memorising and regurgutating various pieces of Chinese material) because apparently this was the only way Chinese was taught and thought to be the most effective method.

Are you sure you're not overgeneralizing, fujisan_8? Those assumptions seem a bit unfounded. MikeTheLinguist has brought up a lot of points, which you countered with creativity and rote memorization. Elementary cognitive science would counter the arguments you made above.

I do agree that Chinese has its faults and will reiterate that I'm not the fan of the language. It's also true that based on language studies, the time it takes for comprehension of Chinese can tackle two Romantic languages. But empirically, over a billion people seem to be fine speaking it, many of them also speaking at least one other Chinese dialect. Also, most Europeans are at least bilingual, so while the Chinese has its faults, from a linguistic view, the argument of the language is kind of moot. (IMG:http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/icon_confused.gif) Is English your first language? I know it's mine and after finishing off half my advanced Chinese language studies classes, I find English to have major faults in itself. We take conjugation and the like for granted, but this is extremely difficult for non-Romantic language speakers to master the English language. English is a mutt language, which gives the pros of being versatile but the cons of very difficult grammar complexity.

It sounds like you've already established your bias against the Chinese language, so the thing to do now would be to establish our stances of the Chinese language and move on. Debating about it more with each side adamant would only serve to repeat these arguments.