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 speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. 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. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood.
As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds.
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.
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 distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not.
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.
Here in China, linguists consider the different Western "languages" to be dialects, and believe that the Western governments, for political reasons, make people think they speak different languages than their neighbors, so that they cannot unite.
I'm just joking, but what you say is as absurd as my joke. Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. Accept that there are different ways of thinking and the real world never has to submit to how you define concepts like "a language", and not everything China surprises you with has something to do with politics.
They are different languages in the sense that they are not mutually intelligible, but the prestige of Mandarin is not a CCP one. Mandarin as it evolved has always been the language of government and of the plains. Other Sinitic languages routinely borrow readings and terms from Mandarin. There's more that I want to say about the topic, but it's less relevant.
They're written the same, and have basically the same grammar. The characters have hugely different readings, but people can communicate easily in writing. You can call that different languages, but that's certainly a different kind of different than people would expect when you say different.
If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly the same way, would it be a different language? Would people who said that they were dialects of the same language have to be saying this for political reasons?
edit: I mean, Chinese is how you would expect it to be. How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? How would they have communicated those sounds 500 years ago? The wide variance in the pronunciation of words even in English is also due to our dogshit orthography (largely imposed by the French), which often fails to give a decent hint for how to say something. Chinese characters are symbols of concepts that usually have a hint of what it's meant to sound like in the northern dialect, 1500 years ago, by referring to another character that there's no reason one would know what it sounded like.
I'm not entirely certain that's a good explanation.
For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period at which Chinese characters essentially ossify into their modern form, it's not clear to me that there's a wide diversity of topolects that it has to approximate, almost certainly nothing to the degree of modern Chinese.
For another thing, mediating among linguistic diversity is something that all of our other scripts have had to do. Cuneiform was used to write the administrative languages of different language families (Semitic languages like Akkadian, Indo-European like Persian, and who-knows-what-language-family-these-are like Elamite), and yet it was a syllabary. Even Chinese script itself starts devolving into a syllabary when Japanese adapts it.
The reason I think Chinese resisted becoming a syllabary was because Chinese was poorly suited for such a transition: my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. Furthermore, reconstructions of Old Chinese also suggest a relatively complex phonotactic structure, which means a syllabary that largely covers a CV-syllable scheme is hard to adapt. In other words, Chinese may have been a rare language in that conversion from a logography to a syllabary would not have dramatically reduced the amount of characters one would have had to have learned. (Note also that the reduction of a syllabary to an alphabet, abjad, or abugida happened effectively twice, with Phoenician (or some ancestor) and Korean Hangul).
I don't see how your explanation and GP's explanations are mutually exclusive.
To add some detail to this point:
> my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones.
A syllabary would have had to represent phonetics as well as tones, which would have multiplied the required syllabary by n number of tones. For instance, Mandarin has 4 (or arguably 5) tones. The "ah" sound has four pronunciations: ā, á, ǎ, and à. Hong Kong Cantonese has at least 6 tones, having purportedly lost a few. Different dialects of Chinese have different numbers of tones, and some have been lost or gained within the same dialect throughout history.
> It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media
I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are fluent in Mandarin watching a Mandarin movie will never turn off the subtitles.
Talking to native-speaking friends I've pieced together that it seems Chinese is actively hard to make out (compared to English). Without the subtitles they will miss sections of dialogue in movies/tv-shows. Maybe because it's so tonal and contextual? I've asked people "Okay, but when you talk to people day-to-day, you don't have subtitles - so how are you dealing with it?" and the responses seem to boil down to "often we have to guess what the other person is saying"
I'd love to hear some thoughts from someone who is 100% biligual and able to make the comparison
This jives with my experience as well. Chinese has a ton of near homophones that are distinguished by tone. One interesting result of this is that Chinese speakers seem to hate hate hate accents, even just from other parts of China. I hear because it's just mentally taxing to listen to.
Though I'm certainly not 100% bilingual. I like to think it isn't just that I'm annoying to listen to. I have heard other speakers get put down as sounding like 'birds chirping' which seems to be a popular way to describe accents.
I’m not 100% bilingual, but my take is that there’s a lot more to be gained from the subtitles due to homophones, wordplay, and literary allusions. It’s like getting genius.com rap annotations in real time for any metaphors or references.
Not Chinese, but I might call myself trilingual and this is exactly something that has wondered me. Language "pair": ru>de>en
In very general terms, the longer you listen to a particular voice, the better you get at reconstructing the acoustically lost parts of the words. Imagine hearing low bitrate radio transmission for the first time. It's very hard to understand the words, but over time you'll get accustomed to the noise and the voice, it'll become intelligible to you. Quite literally training your neural net.
It's easy for me to read/listen to RU (native). I have no problem whatsoever listening to DE, but mentally it must be more taxing to also follow the text/train of thought (beyond very short-term memory) because I notice to be swaying away more often unless remain concentrated. So it's a little harder to memorize stuff in DE or read long thoughtful texts.
The walkie-talkie example from above is not arbitrary. I have experienced exactly that when learning DE and going to game servers with voice. Back then the microphones were all poor and noisy, it was much tougher to understand people. The adaptation took me about a week or two.
English is very specific to me. Remember what a radar chart is? That's it, one aspect is skilled to 100% and others are closer to zero. As you can ~see~ read, my writing is doing well. Listening to cleanly recorded and spoken content such as Youtube presents no issues. As with DE, I might not follow the content very well, but I can hear and understand all of it. Movies? Oh dear, subtitles please! Not only because the voice isn't recorded in a studio (sometimes whispering, sometimes mumbling etc.) but the variety of language (vocabulary, slang) and pronunciations overload me to the point of not understanding the spoken language. Yet because my general comprehension of English is good, I'd be mostly reading subtitles to not miss anything. As it stands, I would prefer either DE or RU in movies.
Years ago I had the pleasure to finally subscribe to AdoredTV on Youtube because of his content. Previously, I had skipped a video or two due to his Scottish accent. Slowly I have got used to it though. Admittedly, he had been trying to have an understandable pronunciation; some of the funny "Scottish English" videos I still can't understand. But when we had shown Adored's videos to friends, it was them who couldn't understand a word, because they were new to his accent.
Therefore I can second that subtitles are helpful, especially if you are distracted from listening or need assistance to understand spoken language (thus serves as a "gap filler"). Now knowing that the Chinese have THIS much trouble with their own tongue, I feel pity for them.
I'm nowhere close to being bilingual, and there are without doubt many factors involved in this, but I can think of a few fairly easily.
Chinese has relatively few possible syllable sounds compared to Western languages. There are about 400 possible initial-final combinations in Mandarin, and 4 tones they can be said in (5 if you include the neutral tone that can only appear at the end of a word), but not all combinations exist, and most estimates place it at about 1200 for Mandarin Chinese. This compares to about 15,000 odd for English, as a syllable has more flexibility in terms of initials, vowels and finals, and English does in fact have tones - even though we don't think of the tone as being syntactically significant, it is very hard to interpret someone if they deliberately change the pitch in unusual ways. But anyway, Chinese therefore has about 10% of the syllable range of English, but each syllable is in fact a "meaning unit" in its own right, whereas English will frequently use multiple syllables to express one concept, which makes it more redundant / less ambiguous. BTW, I say "meaning unit" because in older dialects of Chinese, each syllable was exactly a word and this was possible because there was more information in a syllable and so it was easier to disambiguate, but at some point things became confusing and Chinese began using pairs of "meaning units" to represent concepts - for instance "speech" in Mandarin is 说话 "shuo"+"hua" where the first word was an older verb for speaking and the second was an older noun for speech. Modern Chinese will still tend to revert back to the simpler forms if it's unambiguous and various grammar forms show that they still think of the words as being separate even if they are usually used together, e.g. in the positive+negative question form, 你喜不喜欢 were 喜欢 is normally considered a single word.
As a learner with a vocabulary of maybe 5000 words (compared to a native with maybe 10k+), I've already encountered a lot of homonyms and sometimes when you're watching a drama it's easier to look at the Chinese subtitles than trying to guess which word they meant. If you were having an actual conversation with someone, you could figure it out from context or ask for clarification, but that doesn't really work for one-way communication. One example: 这个合同是gong1zheng3的 "This contract is 'gongzheng'". Does this gongzheng mean 公正 (fair or equitable) or 公证 (notarised)? Just from speech alone, it's impossible to tell without further clarification or rewording, as both would be perfectly plausible.
In mainland China, there are a lot of people for whom Mandarin isn't their first language. Most people will speak it to varying levels of ability, sure, but regional dialects often have completely different words, pronunciations or even just different tones to Mandarin. In all those cases, being able to read along while listening helps comprehension. I'm not sure about Taiwan, but I'm sure there's a reasonable number of people who primarily speak Hokkien and only use Mandarin when they have to interact with people outside their community / town.
Finally, you also assume it's a choice... In most cases the subtitles are baked into the original broadcast (for TV). Back in the days of analogue TV when closed captions came along fairly late and required an expensive box, and so were only purchased by deaf people, subtitling on the broadcast was an easy way to ensure that everybody could get them, much as foreign TV shown in the West almost always has hard-coded subtitles. So for many people, it might not actually be an active choice - they might just only have sources that have hard-coded subtitles. I find it interesting that platforms where the content is intended for consumption by native Chinese speakers, e.g. TV dramas on youtube, the Chinese subs are usually hard-coded, but when they are sold to foreign platforms they usually don't have them. Personally, I find it quite frustrating that e.g. Viki doesn't often have Chinese subtitles and I want to know what exact phrase was just said, as then I usually have to find the show elsewhere e.g.on youtube.
There might also be the cases where the subtitles could be turned off, but they just don't bother. This might seem strange, I know I hate English subtitles on English shows, but many Chinese will watch TV shows with so many scrolling comments on top of the screen (often called "bullet text") that it's almost impossible to see what's underneath. Some of my Chinese friends actually watch most shows twice - once for the show, and once for all the comments. They probably aren't in the slightest bit concerned about the single line of subtitles at the bottom, especially if it makes watching a little bit easier.
When I was studying Mandarin Chinese at a school in Shanghai, borrowed a book on Shanghainese. The reason why everyone in shanghai aren’t writing “everything different” is because they are not writing in Shanghainese. They are writing in Mandarin.
I disagree on your assessment of Japanese. I would argue that Japanese is the most difficult written language in common usage / not artificial.
Moreover, one of the greatest literary achievements of Japan, “The Pillow Book” is written entirely in hiragana. Today you have so much text that leans into the resolve of ambiguity that kanji lends that you’d lose a lot of writings were everyone to unlearn kanji, but I disagree that it’s an aid, and had Japan developed its own writing system, it would have felt a lot more like hiragana than kanji.
The analogy to numerals is great to get a western-language speaker to grok the basic mechanism by which a symbol can be unrelated to a sound, reused across completely different languages, and even have different ‘readings’ in different contexts (2, 2nd, 12, 1/2…)
As someone who isn't even fluent in Japanese, I find it easier to read text with Kanji (in contexts where I am relatively fluent) than without.
Japanese without Kanji is like English (or any Latin alphabet language) without punctuation or spaces or capitalization. And also if English had a ton more homophones. You basically need to word-split and disambiguate as part of the reading processing; it's painful.
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.
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 to convey imo)
I think kanji can make more clear the meaning if it can be understood, but not for pronouncing. Kana is other way around. (In case it is difficult, it is also possible to add furigana.)
I think it is beneficial to have both in Japanese writing.
As far as I understand this, this is quite an oversimplification. The differences between different dialects of Chinese is huge, especially in terms of vocabulary. The writing system isn't as purely logographic as it is often touted. There are only ~4000 characters in common use (university level literacy), but many more common words. So, lots of words are written with multiple characters. In Standard Chinese (corresponding mostly to the dialect of Beijing), each of the characters in a word represents a syllable in that word. This correspondence doesn't hold for other dialects.
Overall, people speaking other dialects of Chinese than the standard essentially write in a different language then they speak, unless they also adapt a different variety of written Chinese and lose any mutual intelligibility (a lot of such varieties exist, though few are standardized). It is in some ways like writing English words with the latin spelling of their etymology, say writing the English phrase "Jules appreciates art" and the French phrase "Jules apprecie l'art" both as "Iulius appretio ars".
>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.
intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages
expert take: there is one Chinese language
There are also plenty of languages in China that are not Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese written language is used as a phonetic script for some minority languages (although many are based on uighur script is used a lot also, Uighur itself uses arabic).
If it is nearly impossible to switch the US from imperial to metric, I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect. I think the answer is measured in generations.
Americans use metric where it's required by law (e.g., food and drug packaging), it just takes government force. Government force can also change a population's language. See, e.g.,
> I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect
Ask French how they've managed to (almost) eradicate the Occitan and Breton and spread the Parisian dialect as the offical variant of French language throughout the country.
Eh, it’s “hard” for the U.S. to switch from customary to metric units because nobody really cares enough to do so. The forces causing language standardization (in many countries, not just China) are much more powerful.
The dialects of English (such as Scots) most certainly do not spell words the same as a general rule. The fact that there are slight pronunciation differences between different accents of standard English is not at all the same as writing entirely different words with the same sequence of characters.
For example, the word for "enemy" in Mandarin is "dírén", in Cantonese it is "dik6 jan4", in Shanghainese it is "dih nyin", and in Hakka it is "tit5 ngin11" (including different tone markers, I'm taking these translations from different sites). All of them would write it as "敵人". These words are far more different though than the difference in how an American and Englishman would pronounce "four".
It’s worth noting that the first emperor of China was the one that unified the language. The country was at war for about 250 years during the warring state period. One of the main pushes to maintain unification was standardized writing system throughout the country, increase of commerce, and unified monetary system.
Also somewhat disputed, but the first emperor of China killed all the scholars from every other nation they conquered to facilitate the language unification.
This explanation doesn't make any sense. Your example is two words which are barely different at all in their pronunciation, certainly not sufficiently to cause unintelligibility (i.e. [wirk] vs [wak]). Differences in pronunciation of this kind are everywhere in English.
I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019.
A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it.
A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.
English is also bad at this, ironically.
Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it's 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.
I'm not who you replied to, but I have such a story.
I was in southern China for a couple weeks, using Google Translate to try to talk to locals sometimes. The voice-to-voice feature seemed useful and more approachable than asking someone to type on my phone. I'd often start by saying "Talk into the phone and it will translate."
This did not go well. People seemed bewildered, utterly unwilling to try it out. Some people already knew what I was doing but the rest seemed to think I was crazy. One or two tried taking the phone and holding it to their ear like they were going to have a normal phone conversation with someone far away.
I later found out that Google had translated my phrase as something like "There is a phone call for you."
My next goal was Panzhihua, in Sichuan province. I hitched a ride (I can't remember where) with a group who invited me to a party. I was 21 and they were like late 20s. I graciously accepted their invitation, on the condition that they would take me back to the highway a few hours before sunset.
After a fun few hours in the car, we arrive at the party destination- a beautiful plantation of rice paddies and fruit trees. I see escalades and Porsches parked along the long, dirt driveway.
Rural China is often extremely poor, even without running water. This is what made me come back from China less confident in their ability to take over America as #1.
But this place was in the middle of nowhere and very well kept, with a pool and some nice cabins.
We drink a lot at this girl's birthday party. I was used to being the center of attention by now and was quite fluent in Chinese at this time. We drank a lot of baijiu ('white alcohol"), which you must spill on the ground a little before you yell "clean cup!" and then drink.
We go out picking lychees and mangos in the mountains. I pack a bunch in my backpack for later.
Then the group graciously brings me back to the highway so I can hitch a ride to my destination.
I get picked up by an old farmer and his son. I hop in the truck a little drunk. The old farmer starts talking to me about George Washington, so I fumble a quarter out of my pocket and give it to him. He takes me straight to the center of Panzhihua.
By this time, I'm hungry, drunk and tired. I wander around the center and find a place to eat. After finishing my meal at the restaurant, the owner sits next to me and shows me his phone. My face is on the screen, smiling alongside all the others at the party. I had travelled at least 100 miles, but small world anyways.
I left the restaurant, looking for a place to sleep and it was raining. Finding a hostel or just a place to stay is notoriously difficult for foreigners in China. This time I wasn't even gonna try to find a hostel.
I see an almost finished construction job. Prime location to sleep, protected from the rain. Just as I'm about to put down my sleeping bag, I hear a guard yell "HEY, what are you doing!". He runs at me with his flashlight. I grab my things and sneak off into the night.
I wander the city, unable to find even just an awning to sleep under. I'm soaked. I decide to sleep on some sidewalk steps under a few trees.
A couple out on a date talk enthusiastically until they see me in the fetal position on their sidewalk. They hush down the steps.
I hope to finally get some shut-eye. Just as I'm about to fall asleep, I feel a slight itch... then fire throughout my body.
I leap up and take off all my clothes. I find I'm covered in fire ants. They were after the lychees and mangoes I had in my bag.
So there I am, in the middle of Communist China, NAKED, on the side of the road, soaking wet and covered in ants.
I really did stand in the rain and contemplate my existence with my balls hanging out.
I swipe off the ants from my bag, put on my clothes and left those stairs.
I had enough. I walked right across the street and knocked on the door of a security guard's station.
"Hi, I just wanted to let you know I'm standing here under your awning"
The security guard gaped in amazement. After a few questions we just stared at each other. I wasn't going to take no for an answer.
Then he graciously invites me into his guard-station, and lets me sleep in his chair.
The next day, I bought him breakfast. I am eternally grateful to him.
This was just 24 hours in a 90 day trip. Crazy experiences immediately precede and follow this story.
Japanese is great for this also, at least for signage written in Katakana or Hiragana. If you learn those alphabets you will always know how to pronounce words written in them.
There are exceptions, certainly in colloquial speech variants, 雰囲気 and 原因 come to mind. Both have an annoying ん ("n") in the middle that makes them a pain to pronounce even for natives, so the first gets changed from ふんいき to ふいんき and the latter from げんいん to げいいん. So, if written properly in hiragana you'd know how to pronounce them "properly" but not necessarily as they're actually used by a significant amount of people when spoken. Even the auto-kanji-conversion of my keyboard respects the variants.
this was a big reason why Korean alphabet was invented because the literacy was so poor for the reasons you mentioned.
Lot of terms/loanwords from Chinese language can be found in all neighbouring countries but you'd have to be part of the artistocracy to get the schooling.
Japan still uses it but North Korea banned it out of the gate. South Korea slowly phased out use of traditional chinese characters. It was common to see Chinese characters up until late 00s but definitely used a lot more sparingly.
Curiously, French is also good at being "pronounced how its written", but horrible the other way around, writing down what you hear.
With only a few exceptions, you can always read out loud a written word. There is quite a lot of rules, but they are rather strict. Once you know them, you are good to go and read everything out loud.
But if you want to learn French by "listening and looking up the words in a dictionary" - good luck with that. There are multiple ways to write down the same sounds. You hear [ku] and it can be "coup", "cou", "coût"...
> Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.
Yeah, it's unfortunately not enough to sightread purely from radicals. My girlfriend has been trying to teach me and it's the biggest frustration. The discussion keeps going "this radical is how you know it's pronounced ___, oh, but not in this one, that's pronounced entirely differently".
If I don't know a character, the phonetic radicals might let me guess close but not correctly or it might not have anything in common. The semantic radicals are a little better IMO, but not enough to guess more than the category something might be in sometimes. I'm not sure if the rules are just full of exceptions or if it's simply change over the past millennia, but it means rote learning has been the only way for me to learn hanzi.
> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.
reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun, a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”
I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文.
Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unrelated to "Chinese" that are written with those characters.
The effort in that article goes in the direction of making something regular that works a lot like "writing Chinese in Chinese characters" but it seems to me more likely to go in the more complex direction of preserving Chinese semantics at the expense of phonetics that happens when you "write Japanese with Chinese characters".
Note that modern Chinese is heavily influenced by modern English. During the May Fourth Movement[1], prominent authors like Lu Xun diligently explored how to write modern Chinese with "westernized" style. The experiment largely failed, but modern Chinese did get influenced a lot, to the point that multiple authors wrote books or articles pleading people not to write "westernized" Chinese. A typical example is nounification of verbs, something that traditional Chinese never had. In contrast, younger generations love to say Chinese equivalent to something like "do improvement" instead of "improve" (进行改进，instead of 改进, even though it is still considered bad writing style.
I haven't seen any credible claims of how Chinese was actually "westernized" aside of Chinese writers seemingly randomly pointing fingers and blaming European influence for a change of style initiated by the younger generation.
Even your example shouldn't convince anyone, since in English we don't say "do improvement", and generally English doesn't overuse "do <noun>" much.
usually this effort happened in the opposite direction, where Japanese people adopted the writing system of China since they didn't have one yet and needed to communicate diplomatically with China.
The hanzi approach is the most historical one. The problem is that it is generally not intuitive for vernacular languages. Even non-Mandarin Sinitic languages like Cantonese look wildly different between the standard writing form (which is just Mandarin) vs. writing the spoken vernacular form. The closest Western equivalent would be everybody in the European Dark and Middle Ages using Latin.
> I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文.
I'm rather curious about this actually - do other bilinguals experience this? I first acquired French as a child and spent several years taking formal French lessons, and yet I simply call it French when I think, speak or write in English. A learner finding it hard to write "French" instead of "Le français" in an English sentence would come off as more than a little overzealous to me.
i'm bilingual and have absolutely not experienced this. that being said, i think being bilingual - rather than a learner - does make it a lot easier to code-switch instinctively between different languages.
It wouldn't sound like English if they did. Both Japanese and Korean share a huge amount of vocab with Chinese, and you can tell because all the words sound similar too. So, they didn't just take the characters, they also took and adapted version of how to pronounce those characters.
I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence and the “stem” of the verb is usually written in Chinese characters which often mean the same thing they would in Chinese, but a few kana are added at the end to specify the tense of the verb and similar attributes. I think a Chinese speaker would recognize many characters which basically mean the same thing as in Chinese but Japanese adds new characters which are important grammatically.
The character の for instance can be used in spelling out bigger words phonetically but it is usually used for the word “no” which roughly means “of”. (It’s good to know because any substantial Japanese text will use it so it’s an easy tell of what language you’re looking at)
Chinese does have its own characters that play a similar particle role though
the one that sticks out to me is 了 which is pronounced “le” and is used in sentences that are describing a change in a situation as opposed to describing an unchanged situation.
"Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language."
> Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
Same as in all other languages, with an extra step: first, sounds from the source language that are missing from the target language are mapped onto their closest phonetic counterparts in the target language according to the phonetic rules of the target language.
The extra step: a Chinese character is assigned to each syllable to convey the «it sounds like this character» principle, multiple characters are pieced together and then there is a new borrowed word is born into existence. The assigned Chinese characters bear no relevance to their semantic or well established meaning.
For example, 保羅 is the Chinese for the English name of «Paul» which is pronounced as:
Mandarin: Bǎoluó
Cantonese: bou2 lo4
Hakka: Pó-lò
Hokkien: Pó-lô
Teochew: bao2 lo5
Neither 保 (to defend; to protect; to keep; to guarantee; to ensure etc) nor 羅 (to collect; to gather; to catch etc) have anything to do with the actual pronunciation of the word, nor with the meaning of each character, nor the original Latin meaning of Paulus («small», «humble», «least» or «little»).
Just use the closest Chinese characters to represent a syllable / sound, and slightly modify it if they have to distinguish them. Actually this is not just for foregin languages. It was how Chinese itself evolved.
An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China.
The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms:
1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái
This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun').
2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó
This form approximates the sound of the Sanskrit word using Chinese characters. It's typical of Chinese phonetic translations, which still today largely just use characters, and thus often don't sound much like the word in the original language.
I guess it depends on whether Chinese speakers collectively like you or not.
E.g., Germany (Deutschland) => take the initial sound "De" => find a good character with that sound => Germany becomes "De Guo" ("De" nation), or 德国, which could also mean "virtuous nation."
But the once great nomadic tribe of Xiongnu, who rivaled the Han Empire, will be forever known as "Barbarian (匈) Slaves (奴)" - it doesn't help the first character contains 凶 (unlucky, horrible, evil).
Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language.
And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'.
The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.
The issue is the opposite. Chinese has a comparitively small phonetic pallette (depending on how you view tones). Chinese written completely phoenetically can easily become incomprehensible.
The functional load of tones (that is, the importance of a pronunciation difference for distinguishing words) in Chinese is comparable to that of vowels[1]
"Depending on how you view tones" dismisses the important phonemic value of tones. Writing Chinese completely phonetically includes writing the tones.
Curious to know how you think it's possible that Chinese people are able to speak with each other if you think writing their language phonetically would render it incomprehensible.
I find hard to believe every language in the planet can be successfully expressed using some sort of alphabetic system, except for Japanese/Chinese (and local variants)
Then you might be even more surprised to hear the Latin alphabet is the official way to write Chinese phonetically (in mainland China), and is used to write on computers and phones. It's called pinyin.
If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated.
Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.
Ah, I perhaps should have read all the comments before posting here, because it seems that you're answering my question, and confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development.
This idea seems to be foreign to all native Chinese speakers I've encountered, and this seems to be in contradiction with what I can grasp from research.
If I may, I've got another related question: Chinese speakers all parrot this idea that literary Chinese is to modern (let's set aside character simplification) Chinese what (ancient?) Greek is to English.
But it's not my impression, at all; my intuition is that they don't properly understand neither Greek nor literary Chinese. For example, a modern Chinese speaker can be expected to read literary Chinese and at least make some sense out of it, but a modern English speaker won't even be able to read (ancient?) Greek, let alone interpreting it.
>confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development.
As I understand it, this is a recent development as in the science of language is a recent development. We might not have known about it but it was always there.
I think the comparaison with Greek or Latin is a good one. I can read modern French and Chinese, and my understanding of Latin and Classical Chinese is about the same: virtually nonexistent, at most a word here and there. The reason why Chinese understand it is because they learn it at school.
There's no great analogy where the modern language is English, because English does not position itself as a successor of a long, linguistically-continuous literary tradition. That said, there is certainly an Anglo tradition of education in which well-educated schoolboys were expected to be able to puzzle through a smattering of horribly butchered Greek and Latin.
Readit News
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 speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. 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. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood.
As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-...
This is also how you get Portuguese as a distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.
I'm just joking, but what you say is as absurd as my joke. Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. Accept that there are different ways of thinking and the real world never has to submit to how you define concepts like "a language", and not everything China surprises you with has something to do with politics.
Edit: I realized that my joke was closer to reality than parent's comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian
Deleted Comment
If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly the same way, would it be a different language? Would people who said that they were dialects of the same language have to be saying this for political reasons?
edit: I mean, Chinese is how you would expect it to be. How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? How would they have communicated those sounds 500 years ago? The wide variance in the pronunciation of words even in English is also due to our dogshit orthography (largely imposed by the French), which often fails to give a decent hint for how to say something. Chinese characters are symbols of concepts that usually have a hint of what it's meant to sound like in the northern dialect, 1500 years ago, by referring to another character that there's no reason one would know what it sounded like.
For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period at which Chinese characters essentially ossify into their modern form, it's not clear to me that there's a wide diversity of topolects that it has to approximate, almost certainly nothing to the degree of modern Chinese.
For another thing, mediating among linguistic diversity is something that all of our other scripts have had to do. Cuneiform was used to write the administrative languages of different language families (Semitic languages like Akkadian, Indo-European like Persian, and who-knows-what-language-family-these-are like Elamite), and yet it was a syllabary. Even Chinese script itself starts devolving into a syllabary when Japanese adapts it.
The reason I think Chinese resisted becoming a syllabary was because Chinese was poorly suited for such a transition: my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. Furthermore, reconstructions of Old Chinese also suggest a relatively complex phonotactic structure, which means a syllabary that largely covers a CV-syllable scheme is hard to adapt. In other words, Chinese may have been a rare language in that conversion from a logography to a syllabary would not have dramatically reduced the amount of characters one would have had to have learned. (Note also that the reduction of a syllabary to an alphabet, abjad, or abugida happened effectively twice, with Phoenician (or some ancestor) and Korean Hangul).
To add some detail to this point:
> my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones.
A syllabary would have had to represent phonetics as well as tones, which would have multiplied the required syllabary by n number of tones. For instance, Mandarin has 4 (or arguably 5) tones. The "ah" sound has four pronunciations: ā, á, ǎ, and à. Hong Kong Cantonese has at least 6 tones, having purportedly lost a few. Different dialects of Chinese have different numbers of tones, and some have been lost or gained within the same dialect throughout history.
Here is a picture of a fish under water:
M
D
I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are fluent in Mandarin watching a Mandarin movie will never turn off the subtitles.
Talking to native-speaking friends I've pieced together that it seems Chinese is actively hard to make out (compared to English). Without the subtitles they will miss sections of dialogue in movies/tv-shows. Maybe because it's so tonal and contextual? I've asked people "Okay, but when you talk to people day-to-day, you don't have subtitles - so how are you dealing with it?" and the responses seem to boil down to "often we have to guess what the other person is saying"
I'd love to hear some thoughts from someone who is 100% biligual and able to make the comparison
Though I'm certainly not 100% bilingual. I like to think it isn't just that I'm annoying to listen to. I have heard other speakers get put down as sounding like 'birds chirping' which seems to be a popular way to describe accents.
In very general terms, the longer you listen to a particular voice, the better you get at reconstructing the acoustically lost parts of the words. Imagine hearing low bitrate radio transmission for the first time. It's very hard to understand the words, but over time you'll get accustomed to the noise and the voice, it'll become intelligible to you. Quite literally training your neural net.
It's easy for me to read/listen to RU (native). I have no problem whatsoever listening to DE, but mentally it must be more taxing to also follow the text/train of thought (beyond very short-term memory) because I notice to be swaying away more often unless remain concentrated. So it's a little harder to memorize stuff in DE or read long thoughtful texts.
The walkie-talkie example from above is not arbitrary. I have experienced exactly that when learning DE and going to game servers with voice. Back then the microphones were all poor and noisy, it was much tougher to understand people. The adaptation took me about a week or two.
English is very specific to me. Remember what a radar chart is? That's it, one aspect is skilled to 100% and others are closer to zero. As you can ~see~ read, my writing is doing well. Listening to cleanly recorded and spoken content such as Youtube presents no issues. As with DE, I might not follow the content very well, but I can hear and understand all of it. Movies? Oh dear, subtitles please! Not only because the voice isn't recorded in a studio (sometimes whispering, sometimes mumbling etc.) but the variety of language (vocabulary, slang) and pronunciations overload me to the point of not understanding the spoken language. Yet because my general comprehension of English is good, I'd be mostly reading subtitles to not miss anything. As it stands, I would prefer either DE or RU in movies.
Years ago I had the pleasure to finally subscribe to AdoredTV on Youtube because of his content. Previously, I had skipped a video or two due to his Scottish accent. Slowly I have got used to it though. Admittedly, he had been trying to have an understandable pronunciation; some of the funny "Scottish English" videos I still can't understand. But when we had shown Adored's videos to friends, it was them who couldn't understand a word, because they were new to his accent.
Therefore I can second that subtitles are helpful, especially if you are distracted from listening or need assistance to understand spoken language (thus serves as a "gap filler"). Now knowing that the Chinese have THIS much trouble with their own tongue, I feel pity for them.
Chinese has relatively few possible syllable sounds compared to Western languages. There are about 400 possible initial-final combinations in Mandarin, and 4 tones they can be said in (5 if you include the neutral tone that can only appear at the end of a word), but not all combinations exist, and most estimates place it at about 1200 for Mandarin Chinese. This compares to about 15,000 odd for English, as a syllable has more flexibility in terms of initials, vowels and finals, and English does in fact have tones - even though we don't think of the tone as being syntactically significant, it is very hard to interpret someone if they deliberately change the pitch in unusual ways. But anyway, Chinese therefore has about 10% of the syllable range of English, but each syllable is in fact a "meaning unit" in its own right, whereas English will frequently use multiple syllables to express one concept, which makes it more redundant / less ambiguous. BTW, I say "meaning unit" because in older dialects of Chinese, each syllable was exactly a word and this was possible because there was more information in a syllable and so it was easier to disambiguate, but at some point things became confusing and Chinese began using pairs of "meaning units" to represent concepts - for instance "speech" in Mandarin is 说话 "shuo"+"hua" where the first word was an older verb for speaking and the second was an older noun for speech. Modern Chinese will still tend to revert back to the simpler forms if it's unambiguous and various grammar forms show that they still think of the words as being separate even if they are usually used together, e.g. in the positive+negative question form, 你喜不喜欢 were 喜欢 is normally considered a single word.
As a learner with a vocabulary of maybe 5000 words (compared to a native with maybe 10k+), I've already encountered a lot of homonyms and sometimes when you're watching a drama it's easier to look at the Chinese subtitles than trying to guess which word they meant. If you were having an actual conversation with someone, you could figure it out from context or ask for clarification, but that doesn't really work for one-way communication. One example: 这个合同是gong1zheng3的 "This contract is 'gongzheng'". Does this gongzheng mean 公正 (fair or equitable) or 公证 (notarised)? Just from speech alone, it's impossible to tell without further clarification or rewording, as both would be perfectly plausible.
In mainland China, there are a lot of people for whom Mandarin isn't their first language. Most people will speak it to varying levels of ability, sure, but regional dialects often have completely different words, pronunciations or even just different tones to Mandarin. In all those cases, being able to read along while listening helps comprehension. I'm not sure about Taiwan, but I'm sure there's a reasonable number of people who primarily speak Hokkien and only use Mandarin when they have to interact with people outside their community / town.
Finally, you also assume it's a choice... In most cases the subtitles are baked into the original broadcast (for TV). Back in the days of analogue TV when closed captions came along fairly late and required an expensive box, and so were only purchased by deaf people, subtitling on the broadcast was an easy way to ensure that everybody could get them, much as foreign TV shown in the West almost always has hard-coded subtitles. So for many people, it might not actually be an active choice - they might just only have sources that have hard-coded subtitles. I find it interesting that platforms where the content is intended for consumption by native Chinese speakers, e.g. TV dramas on youtube, the Chinese subs are usually hard-coded, but when they are sold to foreign platforms they usually don't have them. Personally, I find it quite frustrating that e.g. Viki doesn't often have Chinese subtitles and I want to know what exact phrase was just said, as then I usually have to find the show elsewhere e.g.on youtube.
There might also be the cases where the subtitles could be turned off, but they just don't bother. This might seem strange, I know I hate English subtitles on English shows, but many Chinese will watch TV shows with so many scrolling comments on top of the screen (often called "bullet text") that it's almost impossible to see what's underneath. Some of my Chinese friends actually watch most shows twice - once for the show, and once for all the comments. They probably aren't in the slightest bit concerned about the single line of subtitles at the bottom, especially if it makes watching a little bit easier.
I disagree on your assessment of Japanese. I would argue that Japanese is the most difficult written language in common usage / not artificial.
Moreover, one of the greatest literary achievements of Japan, “The Pillow Book” is written entirely in hiragana. Today you have so much text that leans into the resolve of ambiguity that kanji lends that you’d lose a lot of writings were everyone to unlearn kanji, but I disagree that it’s an aid, and had Japan developed its own writing system, it would have felt a lot more like hiragana than kanji.
However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.
We don't have a distinct symbol for 35 just because English and French pronounce it differently.
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.
Japanese without Kanji is like English (or any Latin alphabet language) without punctuation or spaces or capitalization. And also if English had a ton more homophones. You basically need to word-split and disambiguate as part of the reading processing; it's painful.
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.
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 to convey imo)
I think it is beneficial to have both in Japanese writing.
Overall, people speaking other dialects of Chinese than the standard essentially write in a different language then they speak, unless they also adapt a different variety of written Chinese and lose any mutual intelligibility (a lot of such varieties exist, though few are standardized). It is in some ways like writing English words with the latin spelling of their etymology, say writing the English phrase "Jules appreciates art" and the French phrase "Jules apprecie l'art" both as "Iulius appretio ars".
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.
English? Do you mean the UK? US?
My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?
intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages
expert take: there is one Chinese language
There are also plenty of languages in China that are not Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese written language is used as a phonetic script for some minority languages (although many are based on uighur script is used a lot also, Uighur itself uses arabic).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization
Ask French how they've managed to (almost) eradicate the Occitan and Breton and spread the Parisian dialect as the offical variant of French language throughout the country.
They use their own unique set of units that are different to both Imperial and Metric.
You could write a word / morpheme as a string of standard strokes / radical characters, instead of as overlapping standard strokes.
For example, the word for "enemy" in Mandarin is "dírén", in Cantonese it is "dik6 jan4", in Shanghainese it is "dih nyin", and in Hakka it is "tit5 ngin11" (including different tone markers, I'm taking these translations from different sites). All of them would write it as "敵人". These words are far more different though than the difference in how an American and Englishman would pronounce "four".
Also somewhat disputed, but the first emperor of China killed all the scholars from every other nation they conquered to facilitate the language unification.
A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it.
A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.
English is also bad at this, ironically.
Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it's 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.
You owe us at least one fun story from mainland China in 2019.
I was in southern China for a couple weeks, using Google Translate to try to talk to locals sometimes. The voice-to-voice feature seemed useful and more approachable than asking someone to type on my phone. I'd often start by saying "Talk into the phone and it will translate."
This did not go well. People seemed bewildered, utterly unwilling to try it out. Some people already knew what I was doing but the rest seemed to think I was crazy. One or two tried taking the phone and holding it to their ear like they were going to have a normal phone conversation with someone far away.
I later found out that Google had translated my phrase as something like "There is a phone call for you."
After a fun few hours in the car, we arrive at the party destination- a beautiful plantation of rice paddies and fruit trees. I see escalades and Porsches parked along the long, dirt driveway.
Rural China is often extremely poor, even without running water. This is what made me come back from China less confident in their ability to take over America as #1.
But this place was in the middle of nowhere and very well kept, with a pool and some nice cabins.
We drink a lot at this girl's birthday party. I was used to being the center of attention by now and was quite fluent in Chinese at this time. We drank a lot of baijiu ('white alcohol"), which you must spill on the ground a little before you yell "clean cup!" and then drink.
We go out picking lychees and mangos in the mountains. I pack a bunch in my backpack for later.
Then the group graciously brings me back to the highway so I can hitch a ride to my destination.
I get picked up by an old farmer and his son. I hop in the truck a little drunk. The old farmer starts talking to me about George Washington, so I fumble a quarter out of my pocket and give it to him. He takes me straight to the center of Panzhihua.
By this time, I'm hungry, drunk and tired. I wander around the center and find a place to eat. After finishing my meal at the restaurant, the owner sits next to me and shows me his phone. My face is on the screen, smiling alongside all the others at the party. I had travelled at least 100 miles, but small world anyways.
I left the restaurant, looking for a place to sleep and it was raining. Finding a hostel or just a place to stay is notoriously difficult for foreigners in China. This time I wasn't even gonna try to find a hostel.
I see an almost finished construction job. Prime location to sleep, protected from the rain. Just as I'm about to put down my sleeping bag, I hear a guard yell "HEY, what are you doing!". He runs at me with his flashlight. I grab my things and sneak off into the night.
I wander the city, unable to find even just an awning to sleep under. I'm soaked. I decide to sleep on some sidewalk steps under a few trees.
A couple out on a date talk enthusiastically until they see me in the fetal position on their sidewalk. They hush down the steps.
I hope to finally get some shut-eye. Just as I'm about to fall asleep, I feel a slight itch... then fire throughout my body.
I leap up and take off all my clothes. I find I'm covered in fire ants. They were after the lychees and mangoes I had in my bag.
So there I am, in the middle of Communist China, NAKED, on the side of the road, soaking wet and covered in ants.
I really did stand in the rain and contemplate my existence with my balls hanging out.
I swipe off the ants from my bag, put on my clothes and left those stairs.
I had enough. I walked right across the street and knocked on the door of a security guard's station.
"Hi, I just wanted to let you know I'm standing here under your awning"
The security guard gaped in amazement. After a few questions we just stared at each other. I wasn't going to take no for an answer.
Then he graciously invites me into his guard-station, and lets me sleep in his chair.
The next day, I bought him breakfast. I am eternally grateful to him.
This was just 24 hours in a 90 day trip. Crazy experiences immediately precede and follow this story.
Pictures from that story (and different color) you can find here, as well as two other short stories: https://medium.com/the-ascent/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-china...
If you're reading this and you're reasonably young. You must hitchhike. Don't listen to the scared people that have never done it.
Kanji is a very different story of course.
Lot of terms/loanwords from Chinese language can be found in all neighbouring countries but you'd have to be part of the artistocracy to get the schooling.
Japan still uses it but North Korea banned it out of the gate. South Korea slowly phased out use of traditional chinese characters. It was common to see Chinese characters up until late 00s but definitely used a lot more sparingly.
With only a few exceptions, you can always read out loud a written word. There is quite a lot of rules, but they are rather strict. Once you know them, you are good to go and read everything out loud.
But if you want to learn French by "listening and looking up the words in a dictionary" - good luck with that. There are multiple ways to write down the same sounds. You hear [ku] and it can be "coup", "cou", "coût"...
Yes. English desperately needs spelling reform.
Yeah, it's unfortunately not enough to sightread purely from radicals. My girlfriend has been trying to teach me and it's the biggest frustration. The discussion keeps going "this radical is how you know it's pronounced ___, oh, but not in this one, that's pronounced entirely differently".
If I don't know a character, the phonetic radicals might let me guess close but not correctly or it might not have anything in common. The semantic radicals are a little better IMO, but not enough to guess more than the category something might be in sometimes. I'm not sure if the rules are just full of exceptions or if it's simply change over the past millennia, but it means rote learning has been the only way for me to learn hanzi.
reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun, a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmP0uAxz8Dc&t=59s
Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unrelated to "Chinese" that are written with those characters.
The effort in that article goes in the direction of making something regular that works a lot like "writing Chinese in Chinese characters" but it seems to me more likely to go in the more complex direction of preserving Chinese semantics at the expense of phonetics that happens when you "write Japanese with Chinese characters".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement
But...
I haven't seen any credible claims of how Chinese was actually "westernized" aside of Chinese writers seemingly randomly pointing fingers and blaming European influence for a change of style initiated by the younger generation.
Even your example shouldn't convince anyone, since in English we don't say "do improvement", and generally English doesn't overuse "do <noun>" much.
I've read an attempt to connect the dots here: https://news.mingpao.com/ins/%E6%96%87%E6%91%98/article/2017...
Which was ridiculous if you read carefully, and I've gleefully written an article shredding it apart -- https://hnfong.github.io/public-crap/writings/2020/%E7%A9%B6...
The hanzi approach is the most historical one. The problem is that it is generally not intuitive for vernacular languages. Even non-Mandarin Sinitic languages like Cantonese look wildly different between the standard writing form (which is just Mandarin) vs. writing the spoken vernacular form. The closest Western equivalent would be everybody in the European Dark and Middle Ages using Latin.
I'm rather curious about this actually - do other bilinguals experience this? I first acquired French as a child and spent several years taking formal French lessons, and yet I simply call it French when I think, speak or write in English. A learner finding it hard to write "French" instead of "Le français" in an English sentence would come off as more than a little overzealous to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence and the “stem” of the verb is usually written in Chinese characters which often mean the same thing they would in Chinese, but a few kana are added at the end to specify the tense of the verb and similar attributes. I think a Chinese speaker would recognize many characters which basically mean the same thing as in Chinese but Japanese adds new characters which are important grammatically.
The character の for instance can be used in spelling out bigger words phonetically but it is usually used for the word “no” which roughly means “of”. (It’s good to know because any substantial Japanese text will use it so it’s an easy tell of what language you’re looking at)
Chinese does have its own characters that play a similar particle role though
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles
the one that sticks out to me is 了 which is pronounced “le” and is used in sentences that are describing a change in a situation as opposed to describing an unchanged situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
"Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language."
"Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.
Same as in all other languages, with an extra step: first, sounds from the source language that are missing from the target language are mapped onto their closest phonetic counterparts in the target language according to the phonetic rules of the target language.
The extra step: a Chinese character is assigned to each syllable to convey the «it sounds like this character» principle, multiple characters are pieced together and then there is a new borrowed word is born into existence. The assigned Chinese characters bear no relevance to their semantic or well established meaning.
For example, 保羅 is the Chinese for the English name of «Paul» which is pronounced as:
Mandarin: Bǎoluó
Cantonese: bou2 lo4
Hakka: Pó-lò
Hokkien: Pó-lô
Teochew: bao2 lo5
Neither 保 (to defend; to protect; to keep; to guarantee; to ensure etc) nor 羅 (to collect; to gather; to catch etc) have anything to do with the actual pronunciation of the word, nor with the meaning of each character, nor the original Latin meaning of Paulus («small», «humble», «least» or «little»).
Search "borrowing" in this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China.
The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms:
1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái
This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun').
2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó
This form approximates the sound of the Sanskrit word using Chinese characters. It's typical of Chinese phonetic translations, which still today largely just use characters, and thus often don't sound much like the word in the original language.
E.g., Germany (Deutschland) => take the initial sound "De" => find a good character with that sound => Germany becomes "De Guo" ("De" nation), or 德国, which could also mean "virtuous nation."
But the once great nomadic tribe of Xiongnu, who rivaled the Han Empire, will be forever known as "Barbarian (匈) Slaves (奴)" - it doesn't help the first character contains 凶 (unlucky, horrible, evil).
If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30577536 - March 2022 (7 comments)
If English was Written Like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462118 - Feb 2009 (32 comments)
If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70855 - Oct 2007 (14 comments)
Pity the poor subjunctive. Sad and forgotten, its loss leaves our language barer and that bit more denuded.
And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'.
The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.
https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-...
"Depending on how you view tones" dismisses the important phonemic value of tones. Writing Chinese completely phonetically includes writing the tones.
[1]https://faculty.washington.edu/levow/papers/fltonemandarin.p...
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Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.
This idea seems to be foreign to all native Chinese speakers I've encountered, and this seems to be in contradiction with what I can grasp from research.
If I may, I've got another related question: Chinese speakers all parrot this idea that literary Chinese is to modern (let's set aside character simplification) Chinese what (ancient?) Greek is to English.
But it's not my impression, at all; my intuition is that they don't properly understand neither Greek nor literary Chinese. For example, a modern Chinese speaker can be expected to read literary Chinese and at least make some sense out of it, but a modern English speaker won't even be able to read (ancient?) Greek, let alone interpreting it.
As I understand it, this is a recent development as in the science of language is a recent development. We might not have known about it but it was always there.
I think the comparaison with Greek or Latin is a good one. I can read modern French and Chinese, and my understanding of Latin and Classical Chinese is about the same: virtually nonexistent, at most a word here and there. The reason why Chinese understand it is because they learn it at school.