The Chinese character system is a brake on development

45 点作者 temp超过 9 年前

22 条评论

b6超过 9 年前

Wow. I am an intermediate speaker of Mandarin, and I think this article is pretty unfair.It's true that there are many tens of thousands of characters, but relatively few are actually used. To me it's very similar to there being a million someodd words in English. And nobody writes that biang character. It's notorious for being huge and weird. I could easily find some comparable ridiculous English word that we don't actually use.I spend a few hours a day practicing writing characters, and yes, it is difficult and time-consuming. But the information density of a language has to go somewhere. In English, I guess this is facilitated by a relatively granular sound system and complex grammar. Mandarin ended up with a relatively simple and inflexible sound system and simple grammar, so the complexity went into the characters.No, they can't just write pinyin instead of characters. Well, they could, but it would be profoundly annoying. It'd be like looking at a TV much too close, or looking at assembler instead of Ruby.Yes, it was a terrible mistake to "simplify" the characters. It did not simplify the process of learning the characters in any meaningful sense, and split the user base. But I find it very hard to understand why anyone would say it is necessary to know both simplified and traditional characters. In my experience, it's just not true.At the end of the day, we more or less choose to keep these anchors around our necks because they're fun and interesting playgrounds. I don't really need Mandarin for anything, but I still learn it, just because it's interesting, and because when I tell people that I really care about them and want to get along with them peacefully _in their own language_, I think it goes straight to their hearts and means a lot more to them. And it means a lot more to me, too. If that's stalling "development", I'm OK with that.

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infinity0超过 9 年前

I sympathise with his assessment but pinyin is really not suitable as a replacement. There are about 10-30 homophones for each pinyin "word". You can make the same argument for speech but there are other cues such as temporal spacing to help a listener parse that; none exist for pinyin.

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pouetpouet超过 9 年前

Recently on HN on vietnamese writing <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10888755</a> and how the population of Vietman grew rapidly literate with the romanisation of the written language.Another thing comes to mind: movable type printing could not take off without the small set of characters of an alphabet. The efforts to simplify chinese characters come from the realization that it held back the country's literacy.

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reuven超过 9 年前

I have been learning Chinese for about 18 months. Before I started my studies, I had similar opinions to the author of this article -- that Chinese characters are antiquated, hard or impossible to learn, and a hindrance to anyone who wants to learn or use Chinese.Since starting my Chinese studies, I've changed my mind entirely.First and foremost, the characters are far from random; the system is very different than an alphabetic one, but it works -- providing the reader (or even the learner) with hints as to the meaning and pronunciation. It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. But yes, it means that if I see a character I haven't learned before, I can be a bit stuck. And yes, Chinese children spend lots of time learning characters in school.Secondly, Chinese has a ridiculous number of homophones. Even if you take the tones into account, there are lots and lots and lots of characters that sound precisely the same when spoken. However, they look completely different. For example, the character 店 (for a shop) and 电 (electricity) look totally different, but sound precisely the same, diàn. This makes understanding the language difficult (as I'm learning), but a switch to Pinyin (the Latin-character transliteration) would make the written language as ambiguous and hard to read as the spoken language is to hear.Thirdly, there's a huge amount of national pride associated with characters. I can't imagine telling the Chinese people, or even a subset of them, that they'll be abandoning characters in favor of Pinyin.Now, does this mean that Chinese is unlikely to overtake English as the international language of business and academia? Yes; I think that English has firmly cemented itself in that position for a long time to come. (I say this one day after returning from teaching a course in Brussels, where my students were from Belgium, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and Serbia... and spoke English among themselves.) But there's a difference between saying that English will continue to dominate in business, and saying that Chinese characters have to be tossed out. The latter just isn't going to happen.

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laurent123456超过 9 年前

That "biang" character is not a good example since it's not commonly used and was possibly made up by a noodle shop (it doesn't appear in dictionaries). The most common Chinese characters are made of less than 9 or 10 strokes.

wodenokoto超过 9 年前

While the article might be too harsh, I think the general sentiment in the comments are way too lenient.hanzi is a particular difficult writing system.

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dangrover超过 9 年前

This seems kind of specious.Have been living/working in China for nearly 2 years and studied the language in that time.While individual characters can have many strokes (usually, like, 10 at the most), they're more like words or half-words.While it can be tricky for foreigners to gain confidence with characters and radicals, due to the way they work, you'll realize it is surprisingly easy to remember new words (or even guess the meaning of words when you see them). Much easier than English in that regard. Once you have a certain baseline level of competence (and ability to "chunk" things appropriately), the learning curve quickly softens out.

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legulere超过 9 年前

> Training yourself to recognize 3,000 discrete graphic symbolsThey're not discrete but composed of radicals that might hint at the meaning or pronunciation.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)</a>

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Nutmog超过 9 年前

It's funny that most of the arguments people make for retaining old languages and writing systems are "so we can read old literature or perpetuate old cultures". Surely if everyone used the same language, that would have the opposite effect and open up far more writing to more people - Chinese people could read Shakespeare. Translators would only have to convert from each old language to the lingua franca, so Hebrew speakers could read Confucius too. That's an O(n) task instead of the O(n^2) that we currently have.

arien超过 9 年前

Complex doesn't mean awful. Impractical and slow for our fast-paced life, sure. But the characters are beautiful and the etymology, shape and composition is fascinating.I'm currently learning Chinese (using Remembering Simplified Hanzi from Heisig [0] for characters and Iknow [1] for words/pronunciation) and I find it a lot easier than I initially thought it would be. It helps a great deal to know that all these characters that look so complicated are mostly made of the same 200-some radicals [2], suddenly it's a lot less daunting and the characters even make sense most of the time. And sure, one might forget characters with lack of use, but the same can be said about other languages. Grammar is a hot topic on the internet, isn't it?[0] <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning-Characters/dp/0824833236/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Remembering-Simplified-Hanzi-Meaning...</a>[1] <a href="http://iknow.jp/" rel="nofollow">http://iknow.jp/</a> (originally for Japanese, but Chinese course is excellent, too)[2] <a href="https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Radical_chart_highjpeg-e1435044530864.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://sensiblechinese.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Radic...</a>

ignord超过 9 年前

Lived in Taiwan 3 years - picked up Advanced spoken proficiency and intermediate reading / writing in Traditional Mandarin. Studied Simplified Mandarin @ Brigham Young University. While studying we became conversant in modern Mandarin and also Ancient text including The Dao De Jing, Mencius, Confucius etc.There is a beauty and depth to the language not available in the romance languages or German: may I recommend www.zhongwen.com as an introduction.With modern keyboard input methods producing Chinese text is not a difficult task although learning the writing system is not for the faint of heart. Not just due to the characters but also the syntax of the language. English generally is a head-first language where as Chinese is a head-last language. Combine this with careful character placement within the syntax and you have a minefield awaiting the non-native writer.What English lacks in concentrated depth and beauty it makes up for in flexibility and diversity.

DominikR超过 9 年前

Interestingly, Kemal Atatürk made similar reforms in Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire.He abolished the use of the Arabic script and introduced a new Turkish script based on the Latin alphabet.His reasoning was the same one used in this article. But there were other goals too, like promoting Turkish nationalism against a wider Muslim identity.

jensen123超过 9 年前

Guess I'm somewhat ignorant about history, so maybe this is a stupid question. But I've been wondering about this: Until about 500 years ago, I guess China was ahead of Europe culturally, economically, scientifically etc, but then Europe raced ahead. How much does this have to do with the printing press? How easy is it to use a traditional printing press with Chinese characters compared to the Latin alphabet?Obviously, access and spread of information must have a lot to do with a society's development. Did the traditional printing press cause information (i.e. books and newspapers) to become cheap and widespread in Europe, but not in China?Writing Chinese characters on a computer is relatively quick and easy. I wonder if this has something to do with the rapid development that we're seeing in China now?Some might say that embracing capitalism is why China is developing so fast now, and I guess that is partially true. However, wasn't China kinda capitalist before the Communist revolution? It didn't develop that much back then.Edit: I found a bit of info on this on the Wikipedia page for the printing press. According to that "a single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday, compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing prevalent in East Asia".<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press</a>

Xophmeister超过 9 年前

I generally find this article lacking in anything beyond personal opinion. However, I think the kernel of the problem is hinted at when he writes about chemical elements (and the article it links to is more suggestive of this): That is, synthesis of new terms must be very difficult in Chinese -- due to the large number of homophones -- which is compounded by the inflexibility of the writing system.If this is true -- I'm not a Chinese speaker, but I'm married to one and have had this discussion before! -- then that is a burden on development as it clearly makes communication of new ideas clumsy.

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TazeTSchnitzel超过 9 年前

If you're going to spoit nonsense about how writing systems hold people back, you might as well attack Japanese, since its use of the same characters is much more complicated. Chinese is pretty simple: one character, one syllable, one pronunciation. Japanese kanji? One character, many pronunciations, context-sensitive.

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ksec超过 9 年前

I am afraid I am not qualify to say whether the Chinese Character is, or not a brake on development of its language.But I do have a story to share, just one story, nothing more.When I was a kid studying in UK, during an Art Session we had to cut a black card and overlay on top of white paper to create some form of Art. I have absolutely no idea what to do! Compared to some of my classmate who start creating and cutting some beautiful images, I was starring in the air and didn't know what to do. I try cut a few things but they all look so dull, ugly and meaningless in my mind.After 30 mins of not going anywhere, my teacher came around and pat on my back, he said, "Beauty is in the eye of beholder. It doesn't really have to mean anything, it could just be some random cutting, some shape or even some words like your name. It doesn't matter. Try your best"At that moment i really needed some encouragement, So i thought, since everyone were doing something good and fancy, why dont I cut out a Chinese word? He did said some words. Since i am the only Chinese in the class, surely no one would be doing it and no one would understand it anyway.So in the remaining 15 min or so I drafted out the Chinese letter "愛", ( meaning love ), it is complex enough and easy to explain.In the end when everyone were presenting their work to our teacher, I still remember the look on his face when he saw mine, he was, awkwardly staring at it for 30 seconds, without making a single noise. The silence was quite intense I was thinking I make some crap..."What is this?" He asked. "A Chinese Letter" "What does it mean?" "Love" "This is beautiful! This is actually a letter?" "Yes"I thought all these were just some encouragement so i dont look too bad. When we left the classroom, I turn around and my teacher was still standing there staring at my form "art". Later on that Week my teacher asked me privately to make him a few more of these Chinese Characters, I wrote out a few so he could choose, he was truly fascinated at the act form of these Characters.I couldn't grasp the idea then. Because I never saw them as act, merely as what the article suggest as a painful tool to write. It was only as i grow older and older, did i start to appreciate this beautiful form of Chinese glyph.I hope you all too, would some day appreciate the beauty of these characters.

Houshalter超过 9 年前

I read an interview with Andrew Ng, a well known Chinese AI research that works for Baidu. He talked about his work on speech recognition. And how it's such a big deal in China. I guess they use it a lot more than in the US. That makes more sense in the context of this article.

gbog超过 9 年前

That's not really sensible to call a Horror-show the very writing system upon which one of the longest and most fertile culture on Earth has been built...But it is also right to say that the difficulties of learning Chinese makes it an unlikely candidate for a universal language.

happyindeed超过 9 年前

The past/perfect tenses, the infinitives and gerunds, the active/passive/possessive/nonpossessive, the he/she/his/her, of the English language is... a pain.Chinese is much simpler! :D

swang超过 9 年前

This guy is a linguist? And his best argument is that characters take long to write using the example of a word whose only real use is the answer to the trivia question, "what is the Chinese character containing the most strokes?"Also I would say a lot of Americans couldn't spell English words correctly to save their lives, does that mean English is a problem? (I would say in general, yes. It's a very hard language to learn)So to summarize, dude who speaks English doesn't want to learn other languages, says it should just be converted to English (pinyin) because English is _obviously_ a language with no faults at all and would be the best choice in this case. /sEdit: Also the author fails to recognize that even if a Chinese person doesn't recognize the word exactly, the radical and underlying pictograms in the word describe what that word means and sometimes the tone/pronunciation of the word. It is not just a bunch of random strokes on a paper.

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tokenadult超过 9 年前

沒錯。After reading the fine article kindly submitted here and all the previous comments, I think I should draw on my education and life experience to comment too. I have been studying the Chinese language since 1975, my undergraduate major subject in university was Chinese language, and have I lived after university graduation in the Chinese-speaking world for two three-year stints (mid-1980s and spanning the turn of the last century). I have worked for many years as a Chinese-English translator of written texts and as a Chinese-English interpreter for official visitors to the United States. Besides learning Mandarin well enough to work as an interpreter, I have also studied other Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka. My university studies acquainted me not only with Modern Standard Chinese but also with Literary Chinese.The blog post kindly submitted here is by a linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, who specializes in the English language and who co-edited the most definitive grammar of the English language.[1] Pullum is not a specialist in Chinese language but he cites the numerous writings of Victor Mair,[2] who does have deep professional knowledge of the Chinese language. Simply put, the author's comments are linguistically and sociologically correct. My nieces and nephews who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world were faced with a considerably more difficult task in learning to read and write than was strictly necessary, solely because of clinging to the tradition of writing Chinese in the traditional characters rather than the alphabetical writing systems that are used EVERYWHERE in the Chinese-speaking world for initial reading instruction.The late Y.R. Chao, an eminent Chinese linguist, made the simple point about alphabetical writing of Chinese: if one claims that alphabetical writing cannot be understood, that is equivalent to claiming that Chinese people cannot speak to one another over the telephone. But in fact Chinese people can speak to one another over the telephone just fine--I have seen it done, and I have been party of many international voice-only conversations in Chinese. See a whole book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by the late John DeFrancis,[3] a linguist who specialized in the study of the Chinese writing system, for more details.[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language...</a>[2] <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13" rel="nofollow">http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13</a>[3] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFrancis/dp/0824810686" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...</a>

dang超过 9 年前

It's an interesting article by a competent and well-known author, but that baity title is guaranteed to produce a flamewar, so (in accordance with the HN guidelines) we replaced it with more neutral language from the article. If someone suggests a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.