| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] > | A majority of Chinese speakers today find it hard to write their mother tongue
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| | Al Zaid
United States
English to Spanish
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Henry Hinds wrote:
My language knowledge is restricted to languages using the Latin alphabet (English & Spanish), which is easy to handle. All the letters we need may be found on the keyboard and there are not very many. But I just cannot imagine having to deal with the ideographic characters found in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, just to mention a few. How do they handle that on a computer and in other areas? Even reading would not be easy for a lot of people as mentioned here. It must be very complicated. If people find it difficult to read and write their own language that could be extremely negative. Is the way their languages are written hindering their progress? I would really like to see some comments because surely here we have people who are very knowledgeable on the subject. It has always intrigued me and I am totally clueless.
I've had the opportunity of working with some Chinese people as an interpreter (from and to English, I don't speak Chinese). One day I could not resist my curiosity anymore and I asked one of them how they managed to write in Chinese on a computer.
He smiled (apparently I wasn't the only one who'd asked him that) and he explained that as part of their schooling they were tought how their characters are transcripted into the Latin alphabet. For instance, the ideographs for "Thank you" are rendedered as "ni hao" and when they type it their PC has a software that converts it into Chinese.
He also told me that for some people it was difficult to write in ideographs now because of the extensive use of keyboards.
Personally, ever since I graduated from college and most of the writing I do now is by typing, my handwriting has deteriorated a lot. I make a lot of mistakes, I skip letters or even full words, since it takes me now longer to write than to type. My penmanship has always been pretty lame, but now what I write by hand is practically unreadable by basically anyone but me.
[Editado a las 2013-08-14 15:36 GMT]
| | | | | What I think of all this discussion... | Aug 14, 2013 |
I will give my opinion as a foreign learner of Japanese (now proficient) and Chinese (I have a very basic knowledge of it)...
Some Japanese friends told me once that they find it really hard to remember how to write some ideograms or words when handwriting on paper their mother tongue. The number of official characters the Ministry of Education approved after WWII for schools to teach to children is near 2,000. Reading is not affected by this number, it is quite easy to remember the readi... See more I will give my opinion as a foreign learner of Japanese (now proficient) and Chinese (I have a very basic knowledge of it)...
Some Japanese friends told me once that they find it really hard to remember how to write some ideograms or words when handwriting on paper their mother tongue. The number of official characters the Ministry of Education approved after WWII for schools to teach to children is near 2,000. Reading is not affected by this number, it is quite easy to remember the reading of these 2 thousand characters, but the problem arises when it comes to handwriting on paper, it is quite frequent that you forget how to write one character in a word. Japanese people have an alternative when they forget how to write one of the 2 thousand: writing using the kana alphabets. The kana alphabets are an alphabet like ours, only they (there are two, the hiragana and the katakana, the latter for representing foreign words using a Japanese pronunciation) are a bit bigger than ours, as they represent syllables and not single sounds (for example, there are letters for syllables ka-ke-ki-ko-ku). For example, let's imagine a Japanese has to write a difficult word, for example zukan, 図鑑. As you can see, the first character is easier to represent and remember, but that is not the case with the second one. If a Japanese native forgets how to write this second character, he could write it using the hiragana syllable alphabet, thus:
ずかん
or even, writing the first ideogram, and the second one in hiragana (this is used to avoid misunderstanding: the reader thus knows that that one is that word and not another word that reads as zukan but has a different meaning). Thus, the Japanese native can also write thus:
図かん
Let's study the case with the Chinese language. They have not an alphabet, I remember having read once that the Chinese government created a phonetic alphabet, but if I remember correctly, it is not extensively used... Thus, Chinese have a problem there, they have to remember the Chinese ideograms. And the number of ideograms to learn is quite big, too. An approximate number could be 5 thousand for an average literacy (but there are many, many more, some dictionaries of hanzi/Chinese ideograms record up to 50 thousand ideograms). Now, Chinese people learn in school how to write their language on computers and smartphones... This would lead to they forgetting how to handwrite them. And there's no alternative to writing them with an alphabet or a syllable alphabet.
One last thing, the Chinese mainland government, the one in Communist China created a simplification of the whole body of Chinese ideograms, so as to make it easy for their people to learn and write their language (and remember them). That is not the case with the Chinese people in Taiwan, who write very complex characters, such as Chinese people wrote in the 19th century and before that... In computers, these versions of the Chinese ideograms are called simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese. Google it if you want to see the difference, you can clearly see traditional Chinese is far more complicated than simplified Chinese
[Edited at 2013-08-14 21:33 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Lincoln Hui 
Hong Kong
Local time: 23:53
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| Chinese =/= Kanji | Aug 15, 2013 |
The association between Kanji characters and Japanese is very different from that of Chinese.
| | | | Phil Hand
China
Local time: 23:53
Chinese to English
| How different? | Aug 15, 2013 |
Lincoln Hui wrote:
The association between Kanji characters and Japanese is very different from that of Chinese.
I don't think that's right, Lincoln. I know what you mean, historically. But in both languages, the characters are a conventional representation on paper of a word or words in the spoken language. When a Chinese person sees the character 一, they think "yi" or "jit" (where I live) or “jat" or whatever - it represents the word in their Chinese language. A Japanese person seeing that kanji thinks "ichi". There is no different mental reading process.
This was a key insight of Saussure, I think: that language signs are (1) conventional and (2) arbitrary. Even though you can trace the history of the signs along with the language in China, and in Japan they're imports, that doesn't make any difference to the individual learner. They don't know that history, and they can't intuit the history. A learner has to learn the spoken and written signs as conventional, arbitrary tokens whatever their background.
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Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 23:53
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| Sure it does | Aug 15, 2013 |
Chinese does not exist independent of Chinese characters - yes you can use romanization, but it is neither commonly practiced nor accepted. Differences between simplified and traditional not withstanding, there is usually one way to write one specific thing; as things currently stand there are very few shared characters where there is more than one way to write it.
Kanji is not inherent to Japanese and Japanese can exist without it, even if in practice it would be extremely difficul... See more Chinese does not exist independent of Chinese characters - yes you can use romanization, but it is neither commonly practiced nor accepted. Differences between simplified and traditional not withstanding, there is usually one way to write one specific thing; as things currently stand there are very few shared characters where there is more than one way to write it.
Kanji is not inherent to Japanese and Japanese can exist without it, even if in practice it would be extremely difficult to read. A piece of writing in hiragana or even katakana is still proper written Japanese and this is how Japanese children begin to learn the language, then learn to associate Kanji with specific pronounciations and -gana groupings. The distinction between kun-yomi and on-yomi alone indicates that there is no necessary relationship between Kanji and the process of how the reader understands the writing.「一」can be ichi, kazu, hito, and while they all mean "one", the relationship is completely different from that of Chinese. For example, "ichiban" is rendered into 一番, but nowadays it is also regularly left in hiragana as いちばん. Today, at least, there is no real rule on when to use Kanji and when not to, and it is perfectly possible that a moderately educated Japanese will know a word or a phrase perfectly well, yet be completely unaware of one of or all of its Kanji forms - e.g. うるさい, which can be 煩い or 五月蝿い, and not everyone will know both. Kanji is a part of the vocabulary but plays very little part in grammar in modern Japanese (connectives are almost always hiragana), and there is a reason why 漢字検定 exists as its own entity in Japan.
When writing, a normal Japanese person will often think of the pronounciation first, then try to find the fitting Kanji, which is why the gap between writing and typing Japanese can be very big. A normal Japanese might type さすがに, find out that the corresponding Kanji is 流石に through the IME suggestions, and choose to use that, something which simply would not have occurred to him while writing by hand. He may also be unable to recognize that 流石に equals さすがに in writing without checking a dictionary. If a Chinese person does something similiar - go by pronounciation and only able to find the appropriate character with computerized aid - he is effectively illiterate.
Basically, Japanese is not Kanji-based, while Chinese, by definition, is.
[Edited at 2013-08-15 06:50 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Phil Hand
China
Local time: 23:53
Chinese to English
| Language is spoken, writing is secondary | Aug 15, 2013 |
Lincoln Hui wrote:
Chinese does not exist independent of Chinese characters
Yes it does. Illiterate people can't write, but they still speak Chinese. If everyone chose to write English using the Greek alphabet, it would still be English. If everyone chose to write Chinese using pinyin or bopomofo, it would still be Chinese. Sure, there are strong conventions which say you should write this way or that way (and these conventions can affect the language); but they are just conventions. There are languages which really have changed their written form - think Mongolian, some Slavic languages. Changing the written form doesn't fundamentally change the language, because the written form is always secondary to and a representation of the spoken language.
| | | | Phil Hand
China
Local time: 23:53
Chinese to English
| Again, speaking precedes writing | Aug 15, 2013 |
Lincoln Hui wrote:
Basically, Japanese is not Kanji-based, while Chinese, by definition, is.
Nup, this is where you're conflating the written and spoken forms. Neither Japanese nor Chinese are based on their written forms. They are languages which preexist their written forms, and are in every way primary to their written forms. Historically, that's true, and for every speaker that's true - no-one learns to read and write before they can speak.
What's true is that Japanese has effectively two written forms, and Japanese people may learn one or both. That does written Japanese a bit different to written Chinese. But it's not such a massive difference. It's comparable, I think, to British and American spellings or to simplified/complex characters.
| | | | Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 23:53
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| Let me make it clear then | Aug 15, 2013 |
Written Chinese.
And spoken Chinese is still inextricably tied to its written form, one spoken word to one character, whether its speaker is aware of it or not. The genesis of a language may be spoken, but its systemization is based on writing. Today's languages are all inherently tied to their written form, whether it is an alphabetic or spoken language, usually in a 1:1 relationship; as a spoken Chinese word is equivalent to that character, so is a spoken English word. Conv... See more Written Chinese.
And spoken Chinese is still inextricably tied to its written form, one spoken word to one character, whether its speaker is aware of it or not. The genesis of a language may be spoken, but its systemization is based on writing. Today's languages are all inherently tied to their written form, whether it is an alphabetic or spoken language, usually in a 1:1 relationship; as a spoken Chinese word is equivalent to that character, so is a spoken English word. Conventions can change, but this relationship is constant at any point in time.
This relationship does not necessarily exist between spoken Japanese and written Kanji. The written equivalent of spoken Japanese is gana, and when are multiple ways to interpret a spoken word or phrase there are also multiple ways to write it in Kanji that mean different things, which is precisely the reason why Kanji continues to exist in Japanese today. ▲ Collapse
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Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 23:53
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
Phil Hand wrote: Lincoln Hui wrote:
Basically, Japanese is not Kanji-based, while Chinese, by definition, is. Nup, this is where you're conflating the written and spoken forms. Neither Japanese nor Chinese are based on their written forms. They are languages which preexist their written forms, and are in every way primary to their written forms. Historically, that's true, and for every speaker that's true - no-one learns to read and write before they can speak.
There is a consistent way to transcribe spoken Chinese and spoken English, and in fact that has not changed so much throughout the years. There is no consistent way to transcribe spoken Japanese, and it is very different today than it was 80 years ago.
What's true is that Japanese has effectively two written forms, and Japanese people may learn one or both. That does written Japanese a bit different to written Chinese. But it's not such a massive difference. It's comparable, I think, to British and American spellings or to simplified/complex characters.
That is a ridiculous example, because Japanese and Chinese are not mutually intelligible. It's not even the same thing as written Chinese and written Cantonese. You might find a more appropriate comparison to be Hanyu Pinyin vs Standard English, or English vs direct phonetic transliteration into Chinese.
| | | | Phil Hand
China
Local time: 23:53
Chinese to English
| You and Derrida | Aug 15, 2013 |
Lincoln Hui wrote:
Written Chinese.
And spoken Chinese is still inextricably tied to its written form
Not really. Like I said above, the written form is tied to Chinese, not the other way round. I mention Derrida to point out that these debates have been had before. I'm not just making this stuff up. Any linguistics textbook will back up what I'm saying here.
one spoken word to one character
Well this is obviously wrong. Chinese is famously phonetically impoverished, with lots of polysemy when you enforce one character words - think of the shi shi shi shi poem.
Today's languages are all inherently tied to their written form, whether it is an alphabetic or spoken language, usually in a 1:1 relationship
Yeah, careful with the generalisations. There are about 6000 extant languages, and only about half of them have written forms. As to this 1:1 relationship well, generally, yes. Written forms are designed (NB. spoken forms are not designed) to reflect the language reasonably well, so often there is a 1:1 relationship, but the exceptions are myriad in any language. Bow bough cough ghoti and all that. 是事市试氏世.
when are multiple ways to interpret a spoken word or phrase there are also multiple ways to write it in Kanji that mean different things, which is precisely the reason why Kanji continues to exist in Japanese today.
No, Japanese is not a highly ambiguous language. It is not the case that Japanese people were flailing about completely failing to understand each other because the spoken string "xyzpqr" can mean both stone lions and ten poems (sorry, don't know any Japanese so this example is stolen from Chinese), and then they saw how Chinese characters could differentiate between them and imported kanji. That's just not a true fact about Japanese or history. Spoken Japanese has no more or less ambiguity than any other language, and written Japanese does not "need" kanji to resolve ambiguity (though now they've got kanji, they may *use* kanji to resolve ambiguity because kanji are one of the tools to hand).
| | | | Phil Hand
China
Local time: 23:53
Chinese to English
Lincoln Hui wrote:
There is a consistent way to transcribe spoken Chinese and spoken English, and in fact that has not changed so much throughout the years. There is no consistent way to transcribe spoken Japanese, and it is very different today than it was 80 years ago.
Eh? There are two ways of transcribing both Chinese and English - simplified/complex and Brit/US spellings.
I do accept that the two ways of transcribing Japanese are more different than simplified is from complex or than US spellings are from Brit spellings, but it's a difference of degree.
What's true is that Japanese has effectively two written forms, and Japanese people may learn one or both. That does written Japanese a bit different to written Chinese. But it's not such a massive difference. It's comparable, I think, to British and American spellings or to simplified/complex characters. That is a ridiculous example, because Japanese and Chinese are not mutually intelligible. It's not even the same thing as written Chinese and written Cantonese. You might find a more appropriate comparison to be Hanyu Pinyin vs Standard English, or English vs direct phonetic transliteration into Chinese.
I don't understand what you mean here. I wasn't making a cross-linguistic comparison. Within each of the three languages mentioned (English, Japanese, Chinese) there exist two written forms. The two written Japanese forms are more divergent than the two written English forms or the two written Chinese forms. But I don't think that makes the situation fundamentally different. They are all just two forms of writing.
It's interesting that in Japanese more free variation between the two forms is allowed, whereas it's mostly frowned upon to mix UK/US spellings or simplified and complex characters. But still, I don't think that makes for any kind of fundamental difference. Any Japaneseists feel free to correct me!
[Edited at 2013-08-15 08:05 GMT]
| | | | Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 23:53
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| So you don't know Japanese, yet you're making generalizations about Japanese speakers? | Aug 15, 2013 |
Well this is obviously wrong. Chinese is famously phonetically impoverished, with lots of polysemy when you enforce one character words - think of the shi shi shi shi poem.
I am not talking about pure pronounciation. A transcription of someone saying「我家有三頭牛」, or "I have three cows" will come out exactly that in writing as long as the meaning is clear. But the same thing in Japanese can come out as 「うちにうしがさんびきいる」or「家に牛が三匹居る」or any combination of Kanji and hiragana in between, the most common one probably being 「うちに牛が三匹いる」. All of these are accurate and correct. I could even use katakana in「ウチニウシガサンビキイル」, and while it is in poor taste it is still accurate.
It is not the case that Japanese people were flailing about completely failing to understand each other because the spoken string "xyzpqr" can mean both stone lions and ten poems (sorry, don't know any Japanese so this example is stolen from Chinese), and then they saw how Chinese characters could differentiate between them and imported kanji. That's just not a true fact about Japanese or history. Spoken Japanese has no more or less ambiguity than any other language, and written Japanese does not "need" kanji to resolve ambiguity (though now they've got kanji, they may *use* kanji to resolve ambiguity because kanji are one of the tools to hand).
はなす。
話す。
離す。
放す。
離す and 放す are somewhat similiar yet different, and it is difficult to tell which one is intended without the Kanji. Some Japanese speakers may not know the latter.
Japanese speakers can often find the correct word in the spoken language and write it properly in gana. They will not necessarily know how to write it using Kanji, and often they will not know all the Kanji forms. This is true even for the very highly educated.
No, that is not why Japanese started using in Kanji in the first place. Yes, Japanese Kanji evolves along with the language itself. But it is certainly one of the reasons why Japanese continues to use Kanji. And if written Japanese does not "need" kanji to resolve ambiguity, this simply reinforces the point that the relationship between Japanese and Kanji is very different from that between Chinese and Chinese characters.
Eh? There are two ways of transcribing both Chinese and English - simplified/complex and Brit/US spellings.
- which will be consistent across transcriptions done in the same form and will more or less resemble the written language at all times for somewhat fluent speech. This is not necessarily true for Japanese.
I do accept that the two ways of transcribing Japanese are more different than simplified is from complex or than US spellings are from Brit spellings, but it's a difference of degree.
The fact that you are saying "two" ways of transcribing Japanese clearly indicates that you have no idea what you are talking about.
[Edited at 2013-08-15 08:36 GMT]
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| Touch screen is the most annoying thing that mankind has invented | Aug 15, 2013 |
if anyone were to use it for typing. I actually have a totally different experience --I hardly ever misspell words in English, or in any other language I can write in, including Russian which has a totally different alphabet. I misspell words more often when I type. Of course I try to correct them right away, but if I were to write them, I would know right away how to spell them.
| | | | Phil Hand
China
Local time: 23:53
Chinese to English
| All right, chill out! | Aug 15, 2013 |
No need to get offensive, Lincoln.
I'm making generalisations about language. Japanese is no great exception to the facts that are true about all other languages - that the spoken language is primary, that words are arbitrary, conventional signs, and that the written form is a representation of the spoken form.
I'm really not getting the point you're trying to make.
This relationship does not necessarily exist between spoken Japanese and written Kanji. The written equivalent of spoken Japanese is gana,
This is just not right. As you say, Japanese can be written down in more than one way (yes, I'm aware of the existence of two alphabets, when I said two ways I meant alphabetic/kanji).
To borrow examples from your post, because I don't know any Japanese:
「うちにうしがさんびきいる」
「家に牛が三匹居る」
「うちに牛が三匹いる」
In these three examples, the first word can be written in one of two ways, right? Either うちに or 家に? These are both conventional representations of the Japanese word.
As you say - and as I've agreed above - the Japanese is different to English or Chinese in that Japanese conventions allow for some free variation in which written representation you use for a word. English conventions don't allow for free variation between written forms, and neither do Chinese. Definitely a difference. I'm not disputing that.
But that doesn't alter the fundamental relationship between the language - spoken Japanese - and the kanji. The kanji are still arbitrary, conventional signs (signifiers, I think) representing the language. The existence of two sets of such signs, one alphabetic and one non-alphabetic, doesn't change what they are.
And if written Japanese does not "need" kanji to resolve ambiguity, this simply reinforces the point that the relationship between Japanese and Kanji is very different from that between Chinese and Chinese characters.
No, because just as Japanese doesn't "need" any of its written forms, Chinese doesn't "need" its written form. Speakers of the same Chinese language do not have trouble understanding each other without the support of characters, either.
[Edited at 2013-08-15 12:49 GMT]
| | | | Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 23:53
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| The whole topic has been about the written language | Aug 15, 2013 |
I am just saying that you are in the untenable position of trying to talk about Japanese when you know next to nothing about the langauge. I don't pretend to be an expert on either language, but I am at least a legitimate Japanese speaker who has learned the language, seen both Chinese and English native speakers learn it, and has a view from both sides of the fence. If I went and posted about how Russian grammar and Spanish grammar are essentially the same, I would be laughed out of the room. I... See more I am just saying that you are in the untenable position of trying to talk about Japanese when you know next to nothing about the langauge. I don't pretend to be an expert on either language, but I am at least a legitimate Japanese speaker who has learned the language, seen both Chinese and English native speakers learn it, and has a view from both sides of the fence. If I went and posted about how Russian grammar and Spanish grammar are essentially the same, I would be laughed out of the room. I find it hard to take seriously someone who makes a completely groundless claim on something that they have very little knowledge about.
There are few Chinese words that have multiple markedly different pronounciations. There are very few Japanese Kanji that don't correspond to multiple pronounciations - most have at least two, many have three, four, five or more depending on context. There are Kanji that cannot be properly pronounced on its own and one needs to see the full word/phrase to do so. There are words with several meanings that are in general similiar but not identical and the exact meaning is determined through the Kanji used. None of these exist in Chinese and very few equivalents exist outside Japanese. Some of these may have at one time existed in the areas influenced by Chinese culture, but with the exception of Japan most of them have purged Chinese characters from the everyday language.
The association process of spoken language to written language with regards to Chinese characters is very different from Japanese to Chinese, and so is the learning process. Kanji is in learned addition to and after the basic core Japanese, and association is made first with the speaking language against gana, then with gana against Kanji. Direct association is possible, but only for very commonly used Kanji, and because of the prevalance of multiple common pronounciations this is never very deep. In Chinese early reading and writing studies start with the characters themselves, learning which spoken words correspond to written characters. I don't know if this process for Japanese has an equivalent in any modern languages, with Vietnamese using the Latin alphabet and Chinese characters having been effectively removed from everyday use in Korean. It is certainly not the same as in Chinese. It may be similiar to a native Cantonese speaker learning Mandarin and reassociating the character set with a different set of pronounciation, and I can assure you that the mental process is very different.
[Edited at 2013-08-15 13:56 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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