I am going to be moving to China shortly and have been reviewing my previous studies of Mandarin and was immediately reminded about why I get really annoyed learning it.
No, it’s not the 4 tones that makes any random syllable have a different meaning depending on who it is said. I actually think it’s kind of cool.
No, it’s not the different grammatical structure that just says “NO!” to conjugation and has funky modifiers and unique inversion rules. I like Mandarin grammar.
No, what I am pitting is the monstrosity that calls itself the Chinese written language. There are over 10,000 unique characters that are used in normal life, and there is very little way of figuring out their meaning and almost no way of figuring out the pronunciation from a character you don’t already know. There are a couple of tricks and connections; for example the character for “tree” is doubled for “wood” and tripled for “forest”. However there is virtually no pronunciation help at all. If you see a new character, there’s no “sounding it out”; sometimes a complex character may have the same syllablic pronunciation (with same or different tone) as one of its components, but good luck trying to figure out when it applies and what component it sounds like.
For the most part, you just have to memorize each and every character. It’s a fucking pain in the ass. Why oh why can’t this burgeoning and increasingly more important language have a freakin’ alphabet system?! My friend who occasionally goes on business trips to China has been studying the language for years and while he is verbally fluent, he is still only semi-literate. This really grates on me, since reading a wide variety of crap has been a very effective way for me in learning language. Now, my effective vocabulary for reading is about 1/20th that of my oral vocabulary (and will likely continue to be that way), and looking up a single character takes about 5 minutes for me. First, you have to calculate the # of strokes of the potential radicals (components that dictionaries have made into identifying features) in the character, then find the radical heading of the radical with the fewest number of strokes. For someone new to the language, figuring out the radical is the toughest part of the process. You then hunt for the character under that radical’s heading, sorted by # of strokes, and then you’ll have the pronunciation in latin alphabet terms, from which you can finally look up the definition, if you need it (often, all you need is the pronunciation, as you may know the word orally). Essentially, it would take me hours to be able to pronounce (not even understand) a single newspaper article.
Ah, jeez o’ pete. Say hello to your latest illiterate resident, Middle Kingdom.
Oh, puhleeze, it ain’t that hard. There’s only 216 radicals to memorize and you really only need to know maybe 50 of those by heart–the rest you can just look up.
If I figured out to use my handy Oxford Chinese-English dictionary, you can too. Plus you’ll have the advantage of being in China so you’ll absorb literacy quickly.
Well, good luck with that. At least with Chinese, most characters have only one reading, don’t they? The average for Japanese is at least two, and it’s a major pain in the butt.
It may look impossible at first, but believe me, once you learn a few dozen characters, the radicals start becoming familiar and the rest start coming more easily.
You probably won’t need to have 10,000 characters, or even 2,000, under your belt to survive. The basic 500-1,000 will most likely cover 95% of what you’ll encounter every day.
Oh I know it’s not the end of the world, and I am definitely improving on my response time to look up words. I just don’t like that the written system is not alphabet-based, which makes learning the written language take a lot more time than it would otherwise. And I have to imagine that it hurts the native population, too, since it’s harder to achieve literacy, so dropouts and adult-learners have an additional barrier to success. Also, inventing new characters must be very difficult, since no one would know how to pronounce it (whereas you can invent words in alphabet-based systems and know that people will at least have an idea of how it sounds). Overall, I just find the character-based system wasteful and inefficient, and that’s what I really mean to pit. Sure, diversity is great and all, but waaaaah, I want an alphabet!
Also, I realize that English is a fair target for pitting, esp. its non-phoeneticness (eh) and all the random exceptions in its rules (in all honesty, the subjunctive tense can bite me; I think it’s on its way out and I hope it dies within 50 years).
It’s worth pitting. It obviously made sense in the old days - draw a sheep to mean “sheep”. Then draw a sheep with water next to it to mean “ocean”, which is pronounced the same as “sheep”. Egyptian and Mayan heiroglyphs worked the same way. But they’ve been consigned to history.
Some Chinese radicals (no pun intended) thought seriously about Romanization during the 20th century. Works fine for Vietnamese - also tonal, and previously using Chinese characters. The communists were on the verge of enforcing it, then they had the bright idea of “simplifying” the characters. I don’t know of any evidence that this actually helps people learn characters. The etymological and phonetic elements are sometimes missing, and many memorable-looking and aesthetically pleasing symmetrical characters have been mutilated. But for face reasons, the simplification process goes on. Now, for nationalist reasons, they are trying to discourage the use of traditional characters in advertising (not here in HK of course).
The good news is that this writing system trashes any hopes they might have of making Mandarin a world language like English. Good. Pit away.
You also have to figure out which part of the character is the relevant radical - and sometimes there are two. I’m learning chinese at uni, and often my lecturer doesn’t know for sure the correct radical, and he’s native! :eek:
It’s very confusing. When I look up a character I just pick the radical that stands out the most, and this works most of the time. But this lecturer I have is making us learn the radicals, which is just another way of making it harder! sigh
Oh it’s quite fun. In Taiwan, they use keyboards that have the pronunciation components to them (as well as keys indicating tones), which they type. Then they get to choose from all the characters that have that particular sound (some syllable-tone combos have over a dozen characters possible). Some of the typists have it memorized so well that they remember exactly where the character is after typing the pronunciation (i.e. they type in what amounts to “shi, first tone”, and hit 5 for the fifth character of the possible choices). It’s a pain in the ass unless you’ve been doing it for a LONG time, and I’ve seen plenty of Taiwanese secrataries squinting at the screen hunting for characters for several seconds at a time. I’m not sure if there is a standardized system for how the characters appear when you type the pronunciation; it’d be annoying if the order changed between different software programs. In any case, I’d guess that the word/minute rate is abysmal compared to the alphabet languages for equal level typists.
This was about 5 years ago, so maybe there are improved interfaces available?
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’m tutoring a very intelligent young Chinese-American woman for whom English is a second language, and she’s having a hell of a time learning prepositions. Why “on the bus” and not “in the bus?” Why “on the phone” and not “With the phone”?
Why “he quit in disgrace,” and “She dances with grace and style?”
My answer to all her increasingly irate questions is “Uh, I dunno, it’s just like that.”
(Says Cromulent, who took five years of Spanish in high school and college and still can’t figure out what they’re talking about on Telemundo.)
For Japanese (and Chinese probably works the same), most of the good word processors now will remember what you’ve typed and bring that up as the first choice the next time you enter the same phonetics.
At one of the offices in the town hall where I work, they have one manual Kanji typewriter that they still use to type on official certificates and such. (Actually, I think they finally got rid of it last year.) It was interesting. It had a flat surface covered with the 2000 or so (Japanese) Joyo Kanji (daily-use Chinese Characters), and a sliding arrow/button thingy. Slide the indicator over the Kanji you want, push a button. It seemed pretty tedious.
I recall seeing a Chinese manual typewriter on 60 Minutes many years ago. It was the same mechanism as the Japanese one, but a heck of a lot bigger. (It was an Andy Rooney spot where he was showing ideas that didn’t work for the show. They took an English document, and had it translated through several languages and then back to English to see what came out. It didn’t work because they couldn’t translate it out of Chinese back to English.)
As for new words, do they actually create new characters, or just string characters together in new ways? In Japan, that’s what they used to do when foreign concepts were introduced, like “bank” (ginko, using the characters for silver and go) and “telephone” (denwa, electric speech). I think those two actually made it back into Chinese, if I recall correctly.
Dunno if this will help, but I just typed “chinese character recognition dictionary palm pilot” into Google and got quite a few hits. So it looks like you might be able to get a program for a Palm Pilot or similar hand-held device that will look up Chinese characters for you. Might be worth the investment if it’s notably faster than looking things up manually.
What I found really amusing when I was poking around my copy of Word 2003 was its built-in Japanese greetings toolbar. It’s got greetings for every single month of the year and several standard openings and closings but nowhere does it bother to tell you what any of it means. I think this wins the award for the weirdest feature I’ve found yet for a word processor.
Sorry, but I can’t let this one slip by. Egyptian hieroglyphs form a pronouncable alphabet, contrary to popular belief.
We have Thomas Young (of light wave vs. particle fame) to thank for the breakthrough, back when the Rosetta Stone was found, that eventually brought an end to the “hieroglyphs as picture writing” theory.
I don’t know a lot about Chinese, but I think it’s because, as awkward and difficult to learn as their writing system is, it’s pretty much the only thing linking the numerous “dialects” spoken in China. (I use the quote marks because they would likely be considered different languages were they spoken by people of different nations.) The use of a non-phonetic system allows people who say words in completely different ways to write them in one way. I wouldn’t expect to see a widely-adapted phonetic system in China until the government is successful in its plan to get everyone speaking Mandarin.
i’m not familiar with japanese, since it’s kanji and the characters are exactly the same as the chinese’s, i would assume that the japanese took them instead.
yinghang - ginko; dianhua - denwa; yanjiu she - kenkyusha; etc.
I can field this one, I think. “She does X with Y” means that her doing of X had Y, not that she had Y. In your example “grace and style” modifies her dancing, not her (though it’s implied, since we assume that no one can dance gracefully without being graceful).
In other words, “She dances with grace and style” can be rewritten “She dances gracefully and stylishly”.
By contrast, “He does X in Y” means that he was in Y when he did X. In your example, “in disgrace” modifies him, not his quitting, and the sentence can be rewritten “He was in disgrace when he quit”.
I can’t help with the “on the bus”/“in the bus” thing though.
