Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Neural Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Converter

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–15 of 15 posts

Re: Neural Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Converter

#11

Post by leemailll »

sheepdestroyer wrote: post #7

Aren't these non phonetic writing systems a great time loss in general? Still wondering if Japan/China/similar would not get a great economical boost from ditching their non decipherable ideograms. Just thinking of the time those poor students spend remembering them instead of learning useful math/history/foreign_language just pains me.

And British is trying to use Chinese textbooks to boost math education. Non-phonetic doesn’t mean easier to grasp the words meanings. Try read a Taxonomy or anatomy book and tell us whether you need sometime to learn each words.

Re: Neural Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Converter

#12

Post by matthewrudy »

This is very interesting.

I tried to use swiftkey chinese beta many years ago, but couldn't accept it because it only allowed pinyin input with simplified characters.

Currently I use Google Zhuyin keyboard (which also has a pinyin mode) which does pretty accurate prediction and has a unified interface with my cantonese (yale) and korean keyboards.

Re: Neural Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Converter

#13

Post by thaumasiotes »

titanix2 wrote: post #9
sheepdestroyer wrote: post #7

Aren't these non phonetic writing systems a great time loss in general? Still wondering if Japan/China/similar would not get a great economical boost from ditching their non decipherable ideograms. Just thinking of the time those poor students spend remembering them instead of learning useful math/history/foreign_language just pains me.

Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one. The Chinese writing is also more resilient to language change, and given proper education, texts from millenia can still be read. If you look at the PISA scores[1] for example, the top 10 includes Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Macao and Honk-Kong. So the Chinese script and its derivativ…

> Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one.

This isn't some binary category where you have or haven't achieved holiness. Compared to Chinese, English is indistinguishable from a purely phonetic script.

Re: Neural Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Converter

#14

Post by titanix2 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #13
titanix2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one. The Chinese writing is also more resilient to language change, and given proper education, texts from millenia can still be read. If you look at the PISA scores[1] for example, the top 10 includes Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, Macao and Honk-Kong. So the Chinese script and its derivativ…

> Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one. This isn't some binary category where you have or haven't achieved holiness. Compared to Chinese, English is indistinguishable from a purely phonetic script.

This is still wrong. First, because English taken for itself is nowhere near a phonetic script. It uses a lot of graphemes to represent the phonemes of the language and there is no bijection between the two sets (as expected for a phonetic system). In the end, the number of combinations to memorize for reading perfectly is probably in the hundred or multiple hundreds.

French has the same problem. It takes years to train natives to write to perfection; and the non-phonetic nature of the script bites hard the foreign learners.

Second, at its core the Chinese writing evolved from a limited set of symbols to represent syllabes. The current system is still mainly based on it and the knowledge of around 400 components can help read and memorize of lot more characters. The phonetic nature of the Chinese script is not apparent to people who doesn't studied it, but it exists.

Re: Neural Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Converter

#15

Post by thaumasiotes »

titanix2 wrote: post #14
thaumasiotes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would these people change to a phonetic writing system when most of the world's isn't? English for example is a morpho-phonemic one. This isn't some binary category where you have or haven't achieved holiness. Compared to Chinese, English is indistinguishable from a purely phonetic script.

This is still wrong. First, because English taken for itself is nowhere near a phonetic script. It uses a lot of graphemes to represent the phonemes of the language and there is no bijection between the two sets (as expected for a phonetic system). In the end, the number of combinations to memorize for reading perfectly is probably in the hundred or multiple hundreds. French has the same problem. It takes years to tr…

The phonetic nature of the Chinese script is so weak that in the foreword to https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete-Text/dp/0691169314/ , the author observes that while he uses his own translations, he is forced to defer to existing scholarship as to what parts of the text rhyme, not being qualified to determine that for himself.
Post reply on HN