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Why does Chinese still use characters?
I have nothing against the Chinese or their culture. I like them. I just wonder why they still use logographs.
- There are 50,000 of them. 5000 are required just to read the newspaper.
- Each one of the characters must be learned at the time of learning the word, as opposed to the system for writing Spanish, which just requires you to learn the spelling rules, and then 99.9% of the time you can guess the spelling of a word, or the pronunciation of a written word.
- Multisyllable words are not separated with spaces.
- It is difficult to write foreign names. Usually instead of using loanwords the CHinese make new ones. Computer is "electric brain". But they are developing a computer that actually functions as a brain, so what will they call it?. Also, sometimes they use existing characters, like for "italy", but what if that means something else in Chinese? English is "english" in America, "inglés" in Spanish, "anglais" in French", "Englisch" in German, but "yîngyu" in Chinese? It is like you aretrying to express everything with the most limited sets of letters.
- they are so dense. I have seen them. when you are online, some of the characters look like black boxes. others are less clear. It is like you need a magnifying glass to read them, and even then, you also need a betterr resolution screen. I can only imagine what a Chinese medicine bottle looks like.
- Names. How will you spell a foreign name? Or come up with your own creative name? There has been a case in which a Chinese person had to change his name "because his characters were not supported". It is hard to believe that a country with 1B people only allows for several hundred names. Plus, there have been children who have cried over having to learn the characters for their own name. (And not being able to spell your own name is equal to stupidity in many cultures).
- It uses too much time to learn it. The Chinese are awesome people. They are very intelligent. That is good. But I have heard that the only reason why the Chinese use their script is because they feel that it shows off their intelligence (the ability to use it). Some have even suggested that the Simplified script is a peasant script, because having a complicated system is linked to class. But IMO, it is a waste of intelligence. If the Chinese did not have to spend all that time and effort learning their logography, we would have more room for math, grammar, science, and curing Cancer. Plus, would you rather be literate out of high school, or literate out of the 4th grade?
- It is unreasonable to have 50,000 computer keys, and the PinYin method of character input has proven unreliable. And the handwriting recognition requires you to memorise the exactt stroke order.
- Every time a new word is added to the lexicon, a character must be added to. There have been some new elements discovered in recent years, all of which now have their own characters, whereas in the Alphabetical languages we use all the same letters.
- It would be a pain to recognise different fonts.
- I believe that in a perfect society that everyone needs to be literate. Everyone needs the gift of literacy; I think that the two main things that get in the way are the English Spelling system (with the ough words) and Chinese characters. If we cant adjust the wind, then we should adjust our sails and use simpler writing.
BTW I am NOT a pinyin supporter. I suggest the creation of "Chinese letters". These would be based on the Chinese Characters, but be phonetic and less dense, allowing them to be written like an alphabet. And who says that the two systems cannot be used together? In Ancient egypt, you can spell all of the words using 24 basic glyphs, but tthousands of others were also used side-by-side. And then the phonetic script naturally started to take over, and gave rise to the Demotic and Greek alphabets. The same thing could happen with Chinese!
To the guy who answered below: They can come up withstandard spelling, in a way that would not prohibit dialects from using theirs. Like with English, the "proper pronunciation" of "water" is "wäh-tur", which is pretty predictable, but Americans say "wäh-dur" and British say "woh-tuh", but the standard spelling is a fair compromise.
I also agree that some areas of English need to be reformed. If you read my post, you would see how I said we need to simplify our spelling and pronunciation. And we are. "donut" is now more common than "doughnut", and "forehead" is now pronounced the way it is written (it was once like Horrid with an F).
I like Esperanto, except I wish it would get rid of the "kv" sound. I think that we need to adopt Esperanto, because language is what sets the world apart.
To MatthiasZ: I am with you. I have always been good at English spelling (which is complicated), and could spell "antidisestablishmentarianism" in the sixth grade, but not all people are like this. I support any effort to abolish ough (and I like words like "donut", "catalog", etc). I mentioned that there was a problem of restricting yourself to so many words, the name problem, plus the fact that it becomes awkward to use loan words. Monosyllabic? You seem to lack knowledge of your own language. There are LOTS of compounds in Chinese. Another problem is that they are not separated by spaces!!!! Homophones? There is the tonal system!! And we can use diacritics. And if there is so many homophones, then how is it possible to have a conversation in Chinese without writing anything?
I suggested using letters based on Chinese characters, plus several ones for the shape of the mouth, so in a way the characters will never really be lost. Also, one c
11 Answers
- MatthiasZLv 48 years ago
Well actually many of the 'facts' you mentioned are only partially true. For instance: 'Every time a new word is added to the lexicon, a character must be added to'. This only applies to the name of elements, other than that, people always use existing characters only to name new things.
Also, as an educated Mandarin speaker, I probably only know some 8,000 characters out of 50,000 (I have never counted) because you never use the rest. I managed to recognize 3,000 before the age of 3, and I don't even remember how I learned them: As soon as I started remembering things, the characters are already there in my brain. Well, I might be a little faster than average, but most grade school kids are able to reach a decent level of literacy by grade 4. I believe the rate of literacy depends much more on the education system than the language itself.
Of course, a lot of your points make sense, but obviously you are thinking from the perspective of a native speaker of an alphabet-based language. Who said that things are supposed to be that way?
We pick the best script to transcribe our own language. The monosyllabic and frequently homophonetic Chinese language is nothing like the European languages and an alphabet system would be very, very awkward for it.
I have to say I, just like you, hope to see a more unified world. However, doing so at the expense of language diversity would seem like a rather inappropriate idea.
Source(s): Native Speaker of Mandarin - Anonymous5 years ago
why should it? if you look at the background of the koreans and the vietnamese getting rid of the chinese characters, you will know it's national pride, and not evolution that prompted that. these two countries had been ruled or administrated over by china for vast periods of time in their history. And they wanted to erase those pasts as much as they can. The japanese have made attempts to do so as well, but without great efforts, largely because they're not as insecure as the koreans and the vietnamese, since they're have always been the conquerer and aggressor. furthermore, the chinese language, with it's current phonetic system, is quite efficient in modern applications. It's a lot more applicable than most NON-indoeuropean languages.
- Anonymous7 years ago
These days you can learn how to speak Chinese over the internet. Check out this online course, it's voted as the best Chinese online course of all time: http://www.rocketlearner.com/chinese The course is very easy to follow, I was able to learn Chinese in just 3 months.
I live in New York City, I wanted to go to a Chinese language teacher but that would have cost me over $800 per month. Good thing with this internet, $800 it's a lot of money for me.
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- Anonymous5 years ago
If you choose to discover Chinese then you should know that Chinese language is without a doubt one of the hardest languages for westerners to understand, and up until now learning to talk Chinese to a degree of proficiency outside of the classroom environment has been almost not possible but not if you select a course
- Anonymous8 years ago
The trouble is that Mandarin consists of some 400 monosyllables, whose different meanings are determined by context, the words they are used with, and of course the tone, which is not a feature of European languages. There is a system called Pinyin which romanises Chinese. But, it is hard to follow on paper. If I write fu 2, it could be 福 or 幅, happiness or a bat. In speech, I could work it out from what we talking about.
- JoeLv 68 years ago
Well there are 5000 or more words you need to understand to read an english newspaper we just have a different way of writing them down. I only read the top paragraph so I hope this answers the whole question in my defense that's like three pages.
- Anonymous5 years ago
china was the "SICK MAN OF ASIA """
turkey was the """ SICK MAN OF EUROPE""
CHINA NEEDS TO FOLLOW REPUBLIC OF TURKEY.
1. alphabet -based writing system . no people on earth needs to use such backward , ugly writing.
2. Two-House National Assembly. .Free vote for two -house national assembly
3, Move off the farms. US has 1 % or one percent in farming.
No one farms any longer. only one percent of workers now farm.
4. Future not. past the past belongs to the dead people. the past is where dead people in cemetary live.
FUTURE
LIVE THE FUTURE
INVENT THE FUTURE
INNOVATE THE FUTURE
DISCOVER THE FUTURE
FUTURE IN 2030 2050.
- mapperfavore!Lv 58 years ago
If Chinese don't want to give up their way of writing, who are you to disagree?
