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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#131

Post by jack1243star »

latentsea wrote: post #104
fenomas wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for beginners. But for fluent speakers, kanji are very necessary to distinguish all the homophones. E.g. 効果, 硬化, 降下.. are hard to learn, but they're clear. こうか is much easier to learn, but it could mean any of 10-15 unrelated things.

All of which native speakers have no trouble distinguishing between in conversation when there are no Kanji anywhere. It's the same with homophones in any language, usually the context makes it clear because the alternatives don't fit. The homophones in Japanese and Korean pretty much all come from the vocabulary they share with Chinese which makes up the bulk of the vocabulary for both those languages. One doesn't u…

> One doesn't use Kanji anymore, and no one seems to struggle to read it?

Chinese/Japanese has a level of written mutual intelligibility. Korean lost it.

> Japanese on the other hand I have seen even natives struggle to read.

It's like a native English speaker encountering new vocabulary. Happens quite often.

> Heck even the existence of furigana in novels is an admission of this.

I'd agree that manga use of furigana helps (perhaps school-aged readers) reading, but furigana in novels are standard tools in the language that authors can use to achieve some effects that is hard to describe to non-speakers.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#132

Post by Dalewyn »

noirdujour wrote: post #42

The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why. The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another spe…

>It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example.

I'd like to point out this isn't unique to CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean). Languages descending from or based on Latin can be understood, at least very generally, by each other because the equivalent words in each language usually have similar spellings or appearances.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#133

Post by lbotos »

latentsea wrote: post #97
lbotos wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t speak or read Korean but I am studying Japanese. I think GP was trying to say that kanji helps: たまねぎ 玉ねぎ いつつ 五つ In both of these examples the words are the same. I’m still early enough in my studies that I don’t know the rules of when someone might choose to write one way or the other, but I’ve seen examples of ads that “spell it out” with hiragana. (Which is harder for me to read, which is what GP was trying…

I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean. I understand the issues of Kanji vs no Kanji well. Korean successful ditched it, isn't painful to read, is far more accessible to read for beginners, and doesn't suffer from an extreme long-tail of ambiguous difficult readings like Japanese does. With Japanese no matter how many vocab you learn, you hit new words like 仲人, think…

Thanks for clarifying. I don't disagree that Korean does seem easier, but I still think you are slightly confusing what the GP is trying to say.

I've never seen "仲人" before but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of person.

https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%B2%E4%BA%BA

仲 go-between (which I never saw before but I knew the radicals as "person middle" but didn't know what they were combined, but this one made great logical sense)

人 person

So while I can't "read" it (in Japanese) I can know what it means pretty confidently as kanji very regularly mean the same thing in compound words.

If I saw "なこうど" I'd have no idea because those hiragana don't mean anything to me until I learn the meaning.

Am I making sense? Like the first time I saw 花火 I knew "flower fire" and was able to guess firework.

same with 大人 being adult.

I'm not saying you are wrong that Korean is easier -- I'm saying, learning kanji can make it easier to understand a lot of meaning with never actually being able to "read" the words. and the reading is absolutely hard because of kunyomi and onyomi etc etc.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#134

Post by jack1243star »

latentsea wrote: post #97
lbotos wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t speak or read Korean but I am studying Japanese. I think GP was trying to say that kanji helps: たまねぎ 玉ねぎ いつつ 五つ In both of these examples the words are the same. I’m still early enough in my studies that I don’t know the rules of when someone might choose to write one way or the other, but I’ve seen examples of ads that “spell it out” with hiragana. (Which is harder for me to read, which is what GP was trying…

I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean. I understand the issues of Kanji vs no Kanji well. Korean successful ditched it, isn't painful to read, is far more accessible to read for beginners, and doesn't suffer from an extreme long-tail of ambiguous difficult readings like Japanese does. With Japanese no matter how many vocab you learn, you hit new words like 仲人, think…

> I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean.

Me too! Nice to talk with someone with a similar background :)

> you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks.

Native speakers don't magically gain the ability to read correctly every new word. So it is fine to hit the dictionary every now and then!

In the case of 仲人, I can guessimate 仲 (naka) and 人 (hito), but recall that 素人 and 玄人 are pronouced ~uto. I would try to pronounce it as nakouto (the correct spelling is nakoudo). So people do gain a heuristic for reading.

Also Kanji provides a mnemonic device after learning the meaning of the word. (One who makes/improves 仲).

>So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.

Yes, unless you're Chinese or Japanese speaker ;)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#135

Post by russdill »

noirdujour wrote: post #42

The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why. The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another spe…

Pronouncing two identical sequences of characters differently depending on dialect doesn't appear to be a problem in English.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#136

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

arcticfox wrote: post #114
lolinder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distin…

I like the expression, but the example of Portuguese/Spanish is absurd IMO. As a Portuguese speaker, the amount of effort required to communicate with Spanish speakers is very, very high, to the point where I avoid trying at all costs. Here in Texas, it is almost always more effective for my family to communicate with Spanish speakers using very broken English and hand gestures on both sides than trying to get any Po…

a friend of mine who grew up in argentina went for an interview at a university in brasil.

they reported that on the first day, portugese was just gibberish. on the second day they realized they could read a solid chunk of a portugese newspaper. on the third day they felt they were beginning to understand what people were saying to them.

obviously, YMMV (and does).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#137

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

gerdesj wrote: post #65
gpvos wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.

On a recent holiday to to Hong Kong {sp}, I noted the Metro announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and then English. I also noted that apologies and other minor social skirmishes and interactions, eg after bumping into someone, were mostly delivered in English. When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.

Franco-Germanic, por favor.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#140

Post by ChainOfFools »

pezezin wrote: post #122
GreyMolecules wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load. In Korean, it works similarly as well though, most people nowadays are quite used to not incorporating Hanja in sentences over multiple decades, to the point where it would be impractical to mingle Hanja in Korean.

> Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load. Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", it is just a different layer, one that can be said to be much lighter or other languages would not have switched centuries/millenia ago. The…

> Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load",

Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji, and did not learn to visually parse (except very briefly as a young grade school child) nearly all of the words that you see regularly as logograms first, and groups of sounds second, the experience would be akin to reading English while afflicted with a strangely selective amnesia hole for entire words. Such that reading a word like 'shoe' would not instantly evoke an association with a piece of footwear but would have to be (admittedly very rapidly) sounded out letter for letter each time, instead of scanning the entire unit as a whole.

That's what reading a word normally represented by a familiar kanji character but "expanded" into hiragana feels like, and slightly more pronounced if it's, for some hipster reason, written in katakana.

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