That’s my point - an Egyptian or Mayan hieroglyph, like many Chinese characters, is a rebus.
On the subject of Chinese keyboards, I think there are several different approaches to inputting text. Some require the user to input a romanized version of a word, eg HUANG, then click on the specific ‘huang’ character you want. Others (like the one I’m using now) have all the radicals scattered round the place, through use of ‘shift’, ‘ctrl’ etc, and you build up characters from scratch, again clicking from a range of choices on the screen if necessary. (I might be wrong here - but that’s what it looks like when I see other people doing it. I use it as an English keyboard only.) Either way, it’s another point against this writing system.
Yet another is retention - people have a terrible time remembering how to write the less common words. Apparently, the short cuts provided by electronic inputting systems is making this worse - people are forgetting how to write with a pen.
Oh, I know how you feel. I’m currently studying Japanese, and learning the characters can be painful at best. The most frustrating parts for me are those characters that look almost exactly like each other, such as the kanji for “enter” and the kanji for “person”, or the kanji for “body” and the kanji for “vacation”. They all get mixed up for me, and sometimes it’s hard to immediately tell from context.
But I do love that it’s almost always “pronounce it how you write it”, is reasonably easy for an English speaker to pronounce (very few sound we don’t use), and has very few irregular verbs. So there are obvious trade-offs.
No, it’s not. Egyptian hieroglypic writing is a combination of ideograms (pictures that represent ideas) and phonograms (pictures that represent sounds). The words for “sun” and “mouth” for example, are written with the symbols that look like them. However, most often the signs are combined into words that have nothing to do with the objects the signs represent. The Egyptians indeed used an alphabet of 24 consonants in hieroglyphic. Because there no vowels in Egyptian script, often two words were spelled alike even though they had different meanings. In those cases an extra character called a “determinative,” was added to clarify the word’s meaning.
I refer the interested reader to check out Decoding Egyptian Hieroglyphs, by Bridgett McDermott, from which I got this information.
The characters are gorgeous. They’re what made me decide to study Chinese.
And have you ever actually read a long text in Pinyin? Even for a very elementary student like myself, it’s harder. Why? Because Chinese has so many homophones. There’s often 20 characters corresponding to a single sound, and you can use context in speech but it’s a lot harder when you’re reading. Plus, a literate speaker of any “dialect” has very little trouble reading something written by a speaker of any other dialect - the non-phonetic writing system makes the dialectual differences much smaller.
Just practice. And read. The Chinese manage to do it, you can too.
