Aeschines is right, would this do you NattoGuy ? It’s not always necessary to re-invent the wheel. Shown together like thiat it looks complex and itimidating but when in use it is pretty clear - there are symbols for each sound unit and marks to show syllable stress, linking, tone and intonation. It’s like reading a musical score.
"the IPA provides the academic community world-wide with a notational standard for the phonetic representation of all languages "
Wikipedia is an easier read on the subject. IIRC the system was devised to record languages which had no tradition of being written down. Famously ‘Standard English’ has about twice as many ‘phonemes’ as it does ‘letters’ - good dictionaries (mono and bi-lingual) should include phonemic transcriptions of a word to enable even a non natiive speaker to pronounce it correctly.
(Phonemic symbols are used only sporadically in language teaching however with many trainers feeling that their leraners will be put off by having to learn ‘another alphabet’ which, IMHO, is a shame.) [/minor hijack]
Owed to a Spell in Checker…
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss steaks eye can knot sea.
Eye ran this poem threw it.
You sure reel glad two no
Its vary polished in it’s weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
A checker is a bless sing.
It freeze yew lodes of thymes.
It helps me right awl stiles two reeds,
And aides me when aye rime.
To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should be proud.
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaws are knot aloud.
And now bee cause my spelling
Is checked with such grate flare,
Their are know faults with in my cite.
Of none eye am a wear.
Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed to be a joule.
The checker poured oar every word
To cheque sum spelling rule.
That’s why aye brake in two averse
By righting wants two pleas.
Sow now ewe sea why aye dew prays
Such soft wear for pea seas!.
I’m struggling to find an analogy that fits the situation, because hazi script can be viewed as having a deeper, more subtle meaning that has no comparison in English. It is not literally the same as speaking in verse, but it does add a fullness and richness to the written language that can be appreciated in many contexts, if one takes the time.
For example, the traditional character for “love” (see here) has four horizontal dashes (short, long, short short) right in the middle of it, which represent the heart. (See the character to the top left of the screen.) The simplified version basically takes out the heart, and replaces the lower half of the character with one that means “friend.”
Now, imagine if that simplified character were replaced with the Romanization “ai4.” What is to distinguish it from “ai4” (character) that means “sun?” Putting a couple of letters together doesn’t impart any clue as to the meaning of a word, it only directs one to how to pronounce it. The problem is that in Chinese you’d end up with a large number of homophones, which really doesn’t fix anything.
I suppose one suggestion might be to change the sound of the language, too, which is apparently where the OP is leading, but then wouldn’t it be more logical to adopt an existing language rather than trying to entirely recreate one that has its roots in more than 5,000 years of history? Again, we’re heading down the path to Esperanto here, which is about as big a success as is the metric system in America.
Oh, and I completely agree about the emotion stuff. It’s malarkey. I could understand Chinese pop songs just fine before I stopped practicing the language, and if one can sing a song with a language and be understood, there is no problem conveying emotion.
Something everyone seems to have missed so far is that Chinese undoubtedly has many words that sound the same but use different characters. Ambiguity in speaking can be overcome pretty easily but ambiguity in writing can completely obscure meaning. I know that Japanese would be crippled if they dropped the Chinese writing system that they borrowed. You can write whole novels in hiragana or katakana --it’s been done-- but you’d run the risk of misinterpretations unless you were very careful in your word choice and used unusual words in place of common ones that sound too much alike.
Another consideration that someone touched on earlier is that by scrapping the writing system you render unreadable anything before the change. While various problems during the Communist years in China have destroyed a huge amount of cultural heritage, there still is a large body of works that remain. While writings that are truly ancient require scholorship to decipher, things that would be unreadably ancient in English (i.e. 1000 years plus) are often still readable by most literate Chinese. A change in the writing system would mean that works written only 50 years ago would be more unreadable to the average Chinese than Chaucer is to the average English speaker.
On a side note, Aeschines: You said earlier that Japanese has a writing system that is almost as difficult as Chinese. I’ve heard that the Japanese writing system is actually more complicated than Chinese due to the two syllabaries and the multiple different readings of many characters. Also, if I remember right, the official list of kanji for use in publications is bigger for Japan than China. I’d venture to say that Japanese has one of the most complicated writing systems ever devised, even more so than Chinese. On the other hand, I haven’t personally studied Chinese, so I may be missing something. What makes Chinese more complicated in your opinion than Japanese?
You can learn the two syllabaries in a week, so they don’t really add to the difficulty. The multiple readings for the kanji are annoying but, imo, aren’t so bad once you get used to it (you get to a point where you can guess a lot of the readings for characters you don’t know). There are 1,945 kanji on the official list for publication, plus a fair number on the list for names (I think they just bumped it up to almost 1,000 kanji). You’ll still want to know more than just those, though. I don’t know where the difficulty stacks up against Chinese, but I imagine that if you want to be well read you’d need to know many more characters than is necessary for Japanese (China Guy mentioned being able to write about 6,000 characters, double the kanji on the official Japanese lists).
I agree with cckerberos that the syllabaries are “no biggie”–not compared to the kanji memorization, and, in any case, I should think that, they are easier to learn than Russian, Arabic, or an Indic script.
You are on a super-right track with your point about the “multiple readings.” Chinese hanzi have multiple readings too, but usually they are close (differences in tone only). Japanese characters usually (but not always), have a kun-yomi and an on-yomi. Basically, the former reading is for the original Japanese words that existed before Chinese vocab entered the language, and the latter is for the Chinese vocab itself (there are exceptions–always exceptions). Hence, “ima” (?) means “now” as a kun-yomi but becomes kon in konnichi (??)–today, as in “konnichi ha.” But then you have the same character as ateji (kanji thrown together ad hoc to represent a phoneme, usually with the meaning more or less conveyed but not the sound; they have to be memorized one by one): ?? kyou means “today.” Kun-yomi and on-yomi can be mixed and matched as well.
To explain it well, and I am not, I would really have to sit down and systematize the thing for you. But perhaps I am conveying the complexity that exists and the memorization that is required. I would say that, in becoming fully literate, learning hiragana and katakana is 1% of the task and learning the kanji is 99%. And of that latter 99% perhaps 60% is the brute force memorization of the characters and how to write them (while attaching basic readings to them), and 39% is getting all the readings and ateji down. Obviously, this breakdown is not scientific. Others might perceive it differently.
I’m not literate in Chinese, but I studied the language enough, I think, to get an idea of relative difficulty. Chinese is essentially the easier language overall. I even think, all told, that for a native-born English speaker the pronunciation is easier (Japanese, despite its “simple” sounds, requires a lot of breath control and I still find it fatiguing. With Chinese you get to spit it all out vigorously). What makes Chinese harder overall is the higher number of hanzi. You have to learn hanzi for every plant and animal, and usually these are not compounds or, if they are, one character in the compound is unique and obscure. In Japanese you wouldn’t be expected to know these, and if you’re reading 9 times out of 10 you will be given furigana to guide you (depending on the medium, of course). One other bitch about the Chinese language is that foreign place names, etc., are not converted into easy-to-read katakana. No, you have to remember the hanzi for Mexico (moshigu, or something like that) and, in theory, every town in Mexico and every street name in Mexico, etc. (the same hanzi tend to get recycled for things like that, but it’s still a bastard of a thing to memorize).
If you want to become hyper-literate and read ancient texts, Japanese gets proportionately harder and may end up being the harder language overall with that add-on. The reason being that ancient Chinese is just the same hanzi with, yes, some study required to understand slightly different grammar and thought processes, but the basic tools are already yours. Pre 20th-century Japanese has a bunch of different writing systems: kanji as kana, plain katakana, kanbun, etc. Kanbun involves writing Japanese as Chinese without kana and with or without special markings–you’ve just got to project how it would be said in Japanese onto the text! Oddly, the hardest Japanese to read isn’t the oldest, since that uses plain vocab and some fairly rational writing systems. I can’t imagine there are more than a few hundred (if that) people in Japan who can read mid-19th-century kanbun fluently. In Kyoto they sell these bookworm-eaten (literally) old 19th-century kanbun books for a couple hundred yen apiece. It is unbelievable that anyone could ever have understood them.
So, I would say that if you’re going for basic modern native-level literacy, Chinese would be roughly 1.4 times more difficult than Japanese. Again, there’s really nothing scientific about that estimate; it’s just an impression.
No joke. I hate to say it, but if someone is sweating and groaning over learning the kana, s/he needs immediately to quit studying the language, as it will definitely be a waste of time.
The trouble is that one’s knowledge is never complete. Take for example the character ?. OK, it means life. You learn pretty quick that it can be ikiru, to live, and ikasu, to make live, and ikeru, as in ikebana. Nama meaning raw or unadulterated/unprocessed comes quickly too. Hmm, in the on-yomi region you have sei and shou, and it takes a while to get those all down. But then there is the reading “ki” as in “kigusuri,” meaning Chinese medicine or kanpou. I didn’t learn that one until I’d studied Japanese over a decade, and when I showed it to my wife she didn’t know it either (remember that being Japanese doesn’t convey omnicience over the language).
So it just keeps opening up presenting more goodies. It doesn’t just take an incredible memory, it takes a certain kind of incredible memory. (My best friend, totally crappy at languages, can memorize song lyrics like you would not believe. I’m very poor at that, but for some reason my mind was like a steel trap when it came to memorizing kanji and the readings. I still sometimes don’t know where I learned them all. It’s a matter of luck to have that ability and then have the foolhardiness to spend the time to input it all into the brain. I don’t know if I would do it over again.)
Just so people don’t get confused, there really is no “official list.” There was at one time (1930s IIRC) when the government tried to ban the use of kanji except for ones on the list–to increase literacy or whatever. Those were called touyoukanji–“use these kanji.” Later this became jyouyoukanji–“regular use kanji.” The jyouyou list is a list, to be sure, and the government I guess tacks this list up somewhere, but what it is supposed to mean is hard to tell. It has characters that no one ever uses such as “monme” (an old unit of weight) and “chin” (an obsolete personal pronoun of the emperor) while missing such schoolboy basics as “dare” (who) and “ore” (a rough male pronoun for “I”). Certainly most of the kanji on the list are basics that all must know, but there are many, many not on the list required for basic literacy.
I’m sure you knew all that, but just so people don’t get confused…
I read a stat somewhere that the upper limit of kanji usage in Japan is in the 6000s (including obscure place names, personal names, and tech/medical kanji). Average college graduates know somewhere in the 3000s.
Chinese is harder to gauge because a small number is used a lot of the time and a very large number is used only rarely. Hence, one person might know twice the hanzi of another person yet manifest only a modest increase in apparent literacy. This effect is muted in Japanese because the sheer volume of potential kanji to learn is absolutely less, plus there are built in crutches like furigana. In any case, the number of kanji to learn in Chinese would seem to be at least double for basic literacy.
Yeah, that one’s a pain. sei and shou weren’t too bad because of 一生懸命 and 学生. I think the most compounds for ki are 生地 (kiji) and 生糸 (kiito). The ones that get me are the kun-yomi o and ha. But you’re right… the on-yomi become somewhat predictable, but the kun-yomi never do.
You’re right that the importance of the list should not be exaggerated; it was compiled 60 years ago and shows it. That was one of the reasons for the controversial additions to the name list (which already contains characters like ureshii that any Japanese knows and commonly uses.) But the jouyou kanji list is not completely without importance. It defines what characters have to be taught in the 16 years of compulsory education.
Just so I don’t sound stupid to those who know the language, I knew the ki in kiji but not ki in kigusuri for the longest time. More specificially, I probably though of kiji as ateji and didn’t know until much later that more than one word uses that reading.
But still words regularly pop up that I ought to know but do not know. Japanese is nothing if not humbling.
