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Arakan posted:You can look at a character and know the meaning but not know how to say it. I run into this problem a lot learning new words, I always end up learning the meaning first but the pronunciation later so it doesn't seem too far fetched that this might happen to native speakers as well when they are learning characters. I know this discussion is focused more on whether a switch to all Pinyin would benefit Chinese people, but I just wanted to make a point in favor of Hanzi related to the above statement. I have studied Japanese for over ten years and I feel I am near-native in my ability. I just started studying Mandarin this past year. Being able to rely on my knowledge of Hanzi that I have from Japanese has really helped me to learn Mandarin. I have an established set of knowledge (the visual images of the characters) that I can easily connect to my audially-new vocabulary. (Ok, "audially" isn't a word, but what I mean is, often times, the words I am learning are pronounced differently, but they are words I already know because they are used in Japanese too. So the only new part is the pronunciation. Though even when this is not the case, the knowledge of Japanese Kanji still helps me with Chinese.) This has got me thinking that we could drastically improve international communications if we all adopted Hanzi. That's right, not only should we not abandon Hanzi in Mandarin, but we should actually adopt them in other languages. The Japanese system gives us some hints for how to deal with languages that have verb endings, etc. Observe: 我去ent到學校而看aw我y朋友。 "I went to school and saw my friend." Isn't that beautiful? And think of how much easier it would be to learn a foreign language (the written part, anyway) if they all looked kind of like that?
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Feb 25, 2012 16:49
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Ronald Spiers posted:How do you communicate orally? All modern languages are pronouncing the Chinese characters incorrectly. How does one input it on a computer? I think you may be missing my point, though I'm not quite sure. It doesn't matter if you pronounce the characters differently from language to language. By using the same chinese characters in all languages, you have a visual connection that transcends those languages. 人 will be read "ren2" in Mandarin and "hito" or "jin" in Japanese, but have the same meaning regardless of the pronunciation. Why not use the character also in English and pronounce it "person"? As things currently are, someone literate in English can, for instance, look at a Spanish newspaper and guess at some of what it means because they use the same alphabet and have some shared vocabulary. However, neither someone literate in Chinese nor in Russian can do that. If we used Hanzi in all languages though, it would enable everyone the world over to guess at the meaning of a sign, or article or whatever, even if they knew none of the language, and even if their language was unrelated to, and shared no vocabulary with, the one they were looking at. Edit: I just started reading that link. So I'm not the first one with this idea, then? I'm not really surprised. Pretty cool. Inu fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Feb 26, 2012 |
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Feb 26, 2012 01:20
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Cream_Filling posted:Because if it takes 7-8 years to gain mastery of just the written language, you might as well just learn a whole 'nother language, both spoken and written, in the same amount of time. Simply using English grammar to write in Chinese would be absolutely unintelligible, and when you learn written Chinese you're also learning the Chinese language except that your efforts are useless for actual speaking. Just to be clear, I'm totally divorcing the characters from their Mandarin pronunciation. There would be no need to learn any spoken Chinese. An English speaker would learn their language's phonetic system first, in this case, roman letters, and then they would learn Chinese characters and apply them to the language that they already know. Little kids' books would have Chinese characters with the roman-letter pronunciation written our next to the Chinese character to show pronunciation, etc. This is just how Japanese works, and I'm saying that it could be done with other languages too, and that if it were done, it would improve international literacy in the sense of giving people all over the world a leg-up on languages they haven't studied. I've probably chosen a bad example with English though since our "phonetic" representation system is so bad that learning that AND learning Chinese does seem like a real pain, but see, that's not the fault of my idea so much as it is of the English language's horrible spelling system, and it's a whole separate issue. Imagine what I'm talking about with a language like Dutch where the spelling is very consistent if that makes it easier to picture. You are right that there is more work up front. This is not an idea that would make learning to read your native language easier necessarily. It's an idea that would mean that all written languages all over the world would share vocabulary, even if that vocabulary is not pronounced at all the same. Edit: I realize it's a really pie-in-the-sky idea. Like Esperanto or something. I'll drop it so as not to derail the thread totally.
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Feb 26, 2012 02:12
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