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

China’s tyranny of characters

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–96 of 96 posts

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#91

Post by wyuenho »

wrp wrote: post #82
wyuenho wrote: post #47

David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics. Case in point: Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japa…

The above post repeats some widely believed but inaccurate statements about literacy in Japan. The frequently mentioned 9x% literacy rate is a myth. In the premodern period, it was much less than 1% of the population. In 1948, the rate of full literacy was reported to be 6.2% of the population. In 1955, a literacy census reported that functional illiteracy ran at 60% of the adult population. See Rubinger[1] for the p…

I find it extremely difficult to believe Japan was able to become a major technological, economical and military world power before WW2 with an essentially illiterate population. I'll keep these works in mind, thanks.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#92

Post by wyuenho »

pipio21 wrote: post #35

It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them. Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status. They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, c…

What is this "alphabetic system" you speak of and why are you comparing "Chinese", whatever it means, with Mongolian?

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#93

Post by Nadya »

spacehunt wrote: post #86
Nadya wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand corrected, thank you. I had Mandarin in mind, although that fact was unclear since I only mentioned it in my example. I'm unfamiliar with Cantonese and lack any knowledge at all of other Chinese dialects. So at least for that character - it has one reading in Mandarin. The two readings in Cantonese are a single (and similar) vowel apart, nothing like the differences between "nama" and "ki". So I'll change my…

I agree, the multiple readings in Cantonese/Mandarin are nowhere near as different as the different readings for the same Kanji in Japanese. I never meant to imply otherwise, sorry if I sounded I was. As someone trying to learn Japanese, it is one of the harder parts of the language for me to learn. Conjugations frustrate me more though. :)

I didn't take it as such - I took it as a correction to my misinformation and updated my argument to reflect the new information. My backing point was 'Japanese makes kanji more difficult than Chinese" but my information wasn't correct originally.

Might I ask what you find difficult about conjugations? I might be able to help. With the exception of U-Verbs (五段) I found that they are very consistent and very "mathematical". Nothing else gets as complicated as "house and houses but mouse and mice, goose and geese but moose and moose". While there are still exceptions due to etymology, they are relatively rare. The same 2 verbs are exceptions to most everything and there are only a few common words which are exceptions, such as いい conjugating as よい.

I concede that 五段活用 is a pain in the rear but it is something you get an "ear" for over time. So if that is were you get frustrated my only advice is chug-chug-chug along! Eventually if you conjugate one of the words incorrectly it sounds wrong to you, even if you aren't certain you were wrong or not.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#94

Post by jbooth »

wyuenho wrote: post #90
jbooth wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning the radicals does allow a certain amount of 'chunking' and makes things easier, but it's by no means a consistent system like an alphabet. Sometimes one radical is sound and another is meaning, sometimes neither, sometimes there's like 5 of them crammed in there, and every character has a different little mnemonic story. Alphabets with consistent rules are objectively much less work to learn. Anyways I certa…

Listening is very different from reading. When you are reading phonetic symbols, at least when you first learn the language, you have an extra step of mapping the symbols to the sounds, then the meaning. Familiarity of a language is achieved by removing the step that maps to sound, essentially by mapping the "shape" or the combination of letters in a word to a token of meaning. With pinyin, since the Han script has a…

That's a really interesting point, thanks :)

I'm tempted to try and argue for the sake of it but I'm not even conversational besides 'baby' and 'food' topics and nowhere close to literate. So thanks again for the comment.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#95

Post by dak1 »

komali2 wrote: post #69
dak1 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Taiwanese equivalent would be: Does he know how to speak Taiwanese? 他會曉講台語無? No, he doesn't. 他毋會。 The above is actually somewhat close to the Mandarin version, although many other phrases can vary much more significantly.

This is because we speak Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, using Traditional, rather than Simplified characters, whereas people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese using Traditional characters. It's a different language entirely. Similar to how you can use Chinese characters (traditional or simplified, whatever) to write Vietnamese and Korean and Japanese, as used to happen many years ago.

Taiwanese is as different from Mandarin as Cantonese is.

Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in Taiwan, partly because the Taiwanese language was more or less outlawed during Martial Law rule from 1949 to 1987. It's also the primary language for education.

Taiwanese is still commonly spoken as well though, especially in southern Taiwan, and is actually becoming increasingly common (partly for political reasons, which are a different topic).

For comparison:

他會曉講台語無？ (Taiwanese)

他會講台語嗎？ (Mandarin)

I also intentionally used 講 instead of 說 for the Mandarin version, since both are valid and it makes it more similar.

A bigger difference would be the standard greeting:

你好 (Mandarin)

你食飽未？ (Taiwanese)

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#96

Post by spacehunt »

Nadya wrote: post #93
spacehunt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the multiple readings in Cantonese/Mandarin are nowhere near as different as the different readings for the same Kanji in Japanese. I never meant to imply otherwise, sorry if I sounded I was. As someone trying to learn Japanese, it is one of the harder parts of the language for me to learn. Conjugations frustrate me more though. :)

I didn't take it as such - I took it as a correction to my misinformation and updated my argument to reflect the new information. My backing point was 'Japanese makes kanji more difficult than Chinese" but my information wasn't correct originally. Might I ask what you find difficult about conjugations? I might be able to help. With the exception of U-Verbs (五段) I found that they are very consistent and very "mathemat…

Yes, it is the verb conjugations that are tripping me up (the English Wikipedia page on this [1] has a complicated chart that looks slightly scary), but they are getting easier the more I use them. I do find many parts of Japanese grammar to be very consistent, like you said.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation

Post reply on HN