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- I was wandering through an electronics/computer store a few days back and found several language-educational programs on the bargain rack. I couldn’t really decide, so I bought one of each I could find. I got German, Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, Japanese and Chinese. They are immersive-style, rather than academic-structured: they show you pictures of stuff with labels in English and the other language, and they pronounce the foreign word also, and then give you little tests. -So, the words/pictures aren’t organized alphabetically.
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- The German, Spanish, Italian, French and Russian I can see the correlation in: the characters representing pronounced sounds (tho’ French seems to drop a lot of sounds). I am thinking, if I play with these enough, I might remember some of this.
~ - The Japanese and Chinese are totally out the window. One of the tests the CD has is one in which an on-screen character pronounces a word, and you are supposed to select it from a short list of the printed sample words. I haven’t been trying long, but already I do remarkably worse with the Japanese and Chinese than with the others.
Coupla questions:
-Is there any relation to the parts of an ideogram and the sounds of the word?
-Whose idea was this anyway? Can this style of writing be said to be better or worse than the “other” (letter/word) types? I have heard the story about the Chinese typwriter with a bazillion keys, are there any advantages? - MC
>>Is there any relation to the parts of an ideogram and the sounds of the word?
Generally speaking, no. (Although some characters may be used for their phonetic value)
>>Whose idea was this anyway?
Mr. Lian Hua-San who lived about 3500 years ago in a cave in what is now Mongolia
>> Can this style of writing be said to be better or worse than the “other” (letter/word) types?
It is definitely “worse” than a phonetic alphabet as it needs more signs, is more complex to use and to learn.
Some past threads have covered some basic points about this
I have heard (although I have no evidence) that syllabaries (such as one of the three Japanese writing systems, or the invented Cherokee writing system) are even better than alphabets.
Alas, a syllabary would not work well with English, due to our large number of blended consonants and different vowels sounds.
“Those Crazy Orientals”? My, but that’s a loaded phrase. Oriental is considered a slur nowadays, I believe. Asian is more acceptable. Anyway.
My answers will relate mainly to Japanese, as that’s the language I’ve been studying.
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Is there any relation to the parts of an ideogram and the sounds of the word?
For the short answer, see sailor’s post.
As far as I’ve seen in my classes, kanji (the Japanese word for the ideograms, I’m not sure what the Chinese word is) is different from most Western written languages in that each ‘picture’ is not composed of characters, each with a distinctive sound. Each one represents a separate word, and while the pronounciation may change depending on how it’s used, the kanji always means the same thing. The symbol for ‘person’ may be pronounced ‘hito’, ‘nin’, or ‘jin’, but it always means ‘person’.
-*Can this style of writing be said to be better or worse than the “other” (letter/word) types? *
I can’t say whether it’s better or worse, simply different. It may be more difficult typing the words out, yes, because each kanji is individual, but then again typing machines haven’t existed for all that long compared to the language, and writing out the kanji is no harder than writing in English. In some cases, it’s easier. The kanji for ‘person’ is two lines, which is much easier to write than person. 
I would also note that the Japanese written language also uses two other styles of writing, called hiragana and katakana. Hiragana is similar to English and other phonetic languages in that each character represents a single syllable, and these syllables are strung together like English letters. The kanji for person can be written with the hiragana for ‘hi’ and ‘to’, for example. Katakana is the same as hiragana, only with different characters. It’s used in much the same way as italics are used in English writing - to specify foreign or emphasized words. Confusing? Maybe. But I was able to learn hiragana and katakana in my first semester of Japanese, and from there it’s fairly easy to learn kanji, just time-consuming.
Hey! Oriental is a rug . .
You have much to learn about Japanese. For example, go look up the word “hitome” which uses the kanji for “man.” It has nothing to do with the meaning “person,” it means “glance.”
FYI, most of the kanji used in Japanese have a “phonetic component” which means that the kanji contains a glyph used solely for its sound.
One advantage it has for the Chinese is that though they actually speak a number of different (though related) languages, they all can use the same writing system because the images are not connected to the sounds. This can be a significant unifying factor in a country that large.
This does not apply to Japanese, but their system is mostly phonetic, as has been pointed out.
You occidentals crack me up.
I went to my usual online dictionary to check this. The kanji combination for hitome is the kanji for person and the kanji for eye. Person + eye = glance/glimpse. Doesn’t seem too far of a stretch. What I explained were the basics.
But yes, I do have much to learn. I’ve only been studying Japanese for a year now, but I figured my current knowledge was sufficient to answer the OP’s questions, especially since we’d discussed this topic in class.
Sorry to carry this on further, but I like to be as detailed as possible.
‘Person’ + ‘eye’ actually means ‘glimpse/public gaze’, so it makes sense, in a way. ‘The eye of the people’, or something like that.
‘One’ + ‘eye’ means ‘glance/glimpse’. This makes sense as well. ‘One look’ or such.
You can see how kanji is more about communicating the meaning of a word rather than communicating its English counterpart.
Alright, I’ll quit letting my tongue flap, I need to study for tomorrow’s Japanese final exam.
I’m not sure what you mean by characters being used for their phonetic value, but actually there is a major class of characters that do have a phonetic component. These characters are combinations of two or more sub-characters or “radicals”, one of which gives a clue to the pronunciation of the character. I can often guess at a character’s pronunciation based on the way it’s written, even though I may never have seen it before. Took me a long time to reach that stage, however.
Here’s an article I found online that gives a decent explanation.
As for comparisons with a phonetic alphabet, well, the disadvantages are probably pretty obvious. On the other hand, it does say something in favor of the system when you consider that two people from different parts of China, effectively speaking two completely different languages, can still communicate with one another through writing. (I’ve heard that Cantonese and Mandarin are as far apart as, say, English and Italian.)
In addition, you can read poetry from the Tang dynasty–over a thousand years ago–by pronouncing the exact same characters that the author wrote down at that time. And the aesthetic component shouldn’t be underestimated, either; the art of Chinese calligraphy doesn’t really have any parallel in the West, as far as I know.
That reminds me of one other thing. I’m sure that traditional typesetting is a nightmare in Chinese, but typing Chinese by computer is very easy–probably easier than English, in fact. (I can do so myself, but haltingly.) I think that modern technology will tend to ensure the survival of character-based writing systems rather than suppress it.
I have an ICQ friend living in Hong Kong. Her computer is set up to type Chinese characters. She told me that she rarely uses it though; she chats online to her Chinese friends in English “because it’s faster” (Actually, they use a funky HK English slang with bits of Chinese in it. Now she’s even got me doing it, ar! 
).
>> typing Chinese by computer is very easy–probably easier than English, in fact
My Chinese friends dispute that. When they chat online they will chat in English even though their English is very limited but they find it much easier than using Chinese or even pinyin.
BTW, there have been several threads and s cecil column about all this. I am too lazy to look it up.
And you’ll hear a different explanation next year. After about the end of 2nd year, you’ll start to see more phonetic compound kanji. At this point, you aren’t really seeing ANY compound kanji. No, I don’t mean kanji compounds, I mean single kanji composed from two or more radicals. A large proportion of these compound kanji use a radical which is used solely for its sound. Once you get to a certain point in your studies, you can pretty much pronounce any word, even if you have no idea what it means, just by looking at the phonetic component of the kanji.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that Japanese children who have a learning order akin to dyslexia (trouble matching phonemes to written forms, IIRC) can still read using pictographic forms such as kanji as there is no phonetic component. Or something like that…
So in that respect, it can be considered to be better (for dyslexic people, at least), but that sure as heck doesn’t make it any easier for the rest of us…
I took Japanese, actually take japanese, and I have been for 3 years. It is a fantastic language, with fantastic culture. It makes English seem so ridiculous, with things like silent letters, and alternate pronunciations. Take this for example…
Photi
that says “fish”, because Ph = f, o = i (like in women), ti = sh (like in institution)
that is why so many foriegners have trouble with English, because they are used to languages that make a little bit of sense
oh, Doobieous, where aaaaaaaaarreee you?
— G. Raven
Most posters here seem to feel Asian characters are better. My wife is from PR China, and Mandarin is her native language. She tells me she thinks the English alphabet is far superior to Chinese script because in English, if you see a word you’ve never seen before, you can sound it out and try to figure out it’s meaning. But in Chinese, you have no clue at all. Plus, she says she’d rather learn 26 characters than 5,000.
I once asked my wife how computers worked in China. She wouldn’t really give me a straight answer about this (she insists most computers are in English), but the characters are made up of specific strokes, and you use key combinations to “spell” out the character by it’s strokes.
Slight hijack: Does anyone know some good computer software for learning Chinese?
IANC, but in the pre-Windows era, I asked a Chinese colleague how it was possible to write Chinese characters with computer. She said you just enter the Pinyin form and a menu appears with the characters corresponding to that Pinyin, and you select the one you need.
Perhaps the software developers included that feature where the menu is sorted with the most frequently used ones at the top. I imagine they must have come up with plenty of keyboard macros for the very frequent characters to bypass the menu selection.