This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin <i>does</i> have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated meaning to either. So for those of you who don’t know Mandarin, please read a lot of this with a grain of salt.<p>Regarding the simple grammar, I’ll say that tenses and plurals are easy for an English speaker to pick up. But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words. Once you move beyond the “simple” grammar, things get complex fast.
> In some cases, characters are composed of two parts: a radical element and a pronunciation hint<p>Actually something like 80% of characters are phonetic-semantic. More info: <a href="https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-the-key-to-80-of-all-chinese-characters/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-th...</a>
Of note is that the current mainland govt wasn't the one to start the simplification of Chinese characters, it start with the original Republic of China but was abandoned by Taiwan because it was associated with the Leftist side of the Republic of China as left-leaning and liberal Chinese scholars saw traditional Chinese as inhibiting Chinese education for the masses and promoted simplification.<p>Singapore and Malaysian Chinese also uses Simplified Chinese.
As someone who learned English from Spanish, this strikes me as totally off:<p>> In English, if you can speak something, you can write it too<p>Compared to Spanish, Italian or Japanese hiragana/katakana, this is not true at all in English. It is _more true_ than in Chinese/Japanese (Kanji), but still not much. It is in fact one of the things that English Learners struggle with the most!
One recommendation: When learning Characters, write them out physically (or in an app)<p>The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes.<p>This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI).
Pretty good introduction! The one thing I found a little off was in the larger phrase constructions: the explanation of how larger "words" are formed from characters isn't quite right. For instance the example of "socialism", 社会主义, which he parses as "common production primary virtue", isn't really four words in a row, it's two "words" made of up two characters each: 社会 meaning society, 主义 typically used as an "-ism" suffix.<p>义 in isolation might mean "virtue", but most characters have a handful (or more) of meanings, and when it comes after 主, 义 takes on more of its "idea" meaning.<p>But all in all, pretty good!
"Perhaps you can spot an elephant in 象"<p>The animals:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File:Oracle_bone_graphs_rotated_90_degrees.svg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File...</a>
Mandarin does have words. Sometimes you can deduce a meaning of a compound word from the literal meanings of the characters it's made up of, but sometimes you cannot.<p>It also doesn't aid you in pronouncing it because it's not obvious which tone it is, unless you already know it.
[Shameless plug] My own take on the birth, evolution and Mao's simplification of Chinese writing: <a href="https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1" rel="nofollow">https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1</a>
Happy Chinese New Year!<p>I cannot stop helping myself to share a Chinese quiz to you for celebrating our new year - please use 20 different Chinese words to express “I” or “me”.
In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok.<p>(Funny but inappropriate comment self-censored.)