As has been pointed out, it’s using an alphabet with Chinese that’s unwieldy. The language is a ridiculous collection of homonyms. It got that way not too long ago after a series of cool guys tried to out-cool eachother till they eventually reduced almost every word to a puff of syllable. Now, you’re better off drawing a picture than a phonetic transcription of that puff.
You learned automatic first, by any chance?
Driving anything in heavy traffic is very annoying period; driving shift gives better control than automatic, control which by the way happens to be more noticeable at low speeds. The best of both worlds is shift with cruise control if you ask me. I’m reasonably sure that, same as many millions shift-drivers hate automatic and many millions automatic-drivers hate shift, someone who’s been typing Chinese or Japanese for as long as I’ve been typing Spanish finds his culture’s typing system as comfortable as I find mine.
Very interesting thread! I do have some comments. First, Sci-Fi writer Melissa Scott imagines a future in which alphabetic language has nearly disappeared. Few people can read “realprint” (her word). What has happened seems to be that people started to use pictographs (think emoticons) more and more until they standardized and then that is what most people learned. Interesting, but I don’t think it could happen.
When I was in Japan, I once went to a lecture given in Japanese and noticed that what the lecturer was writing on the blackboard seemd to go rather slowly. I asked him afterwards and he said he could write English faster than he could write Japanese. Then I noticed that in some of the notices posted on the notice board, there were tiny hiragana (one of the two "syllabariies they use) characters above some of the kanji. I asked my host and he explained that the administators liked to demonstrate their advanced knowledge of kanji, but many of the researchers didn’t so they had also written them in hiragana. Then my host mentioned that his daughter’s name, while an ancient and honorable one, was a kanji character that was not well known and he and his wife had had it recorded in hiragana. In addition, since Japanese is highly inflected, the inflections are added in hiragana. What I conclude from all this is that Japanese is not well served by kanji. Everything can be written in hiragana and it doesn’t take all of the school years to learn to write it. Maybe some time in the future, they will adopt that (but I am not holding my breath).
Chinese, however, is well served by the ideographic language. It is not inflected and the various Chinese languages are all mutually intelligible when written, although not when spoken, and that is an enormous advantage.
I do wonder if a “syllabary” (the characters do not really represent syllables but consonant/vowel pairs) is more or less efficient than a true alphabet. More characters to learn (hiragana has 96 characters) but each one represents twice as much information. Probably not a good fit for English with its many consonant clusters.
The hirigana written in smaller print above the kanji are referred to as furigana.
Ask any person who can read a Japanese newspaper - they will tell you that if it was all written in hiragana it would be nightmare to try to read it.
Not for writing Japanese, usually, unless it’s something like a company name on a sign.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t always apply. Take something like 手紙. In Japanese, it means “letter” (in the sense of a missive); in Chinese, it means “toilet paper.” So watch out! 
I roffled.
I’m confused by a few things you’ve written here. My general impression is that you are basing your opinion on some limited exposure to Japanese without having spent much time actually learning the language.
Verb *endings *are written in hirigana, but the *roots *are written with kanji. There are many verbs that would look exactly the same if written entirely in hirigana. As has been observed by several people in this thread, Japanese has a **lot **of words that are homonyms when written using only kana.
To use a classic example once given to me by one of my Japanese teachers:
ここで はきものをぬいでください。
Depending on how you parse that sentence, it has two very different meanings.
Well, I’m not using it to type this response, and I don’t know how to turn it on, so is it really that prevalent?
In the last two versions of MSWord you need to turn it off, the default is that it’s on.
Autocompletion isn’t the same thing as predictive text, though. Predictive text is like autocompletion that runs on every word and adjusts as you keep typing. Autocompletion in MS Word works for a very limited list of things (which you can then manually expand–e.g., my company uses an autocomplete such that when you type “close,” it will insert our normal letter closing).
Cute! But if you add a comma, the ambiguity is resolved, and you get a lot less naked people.
ここで は、きものをぬいでください。
Chinese is only homonymic if you ignore the tones. There’s no inherent reason that an alphabet cannot represent tones. See the Vietnamese alphabet, used to write the tonal Vietnamese language.
Don’t leave us gaijin hanging. Let’s see some transliterations and translations, please!
Ah, but if you write it with **that **comma, you’d end up with nothing but naked people. If you just want them to take their shoes off, that comma doesn’t work, so you’re left with the ambiguity. (You could put one after “Koko de,” I suppose, but I don’t think most native speakers would do that.)
The real solution, of course, is that you could just write it with kanji. Then it would clearly be either:
ここで は着物を脱いで下さい 。
or:
ここで 履物を脱いで下さい 。
**Pleonast **(I just caught your post on preview), the sentence can be pronounced two ways. The first way of writing it with kanji is “Koko de wa kimono o nuide kudasai” (“Please remove your clothing here”). The second is “Koko de hakimono o nuide kudasai” (“Please remove your shoes here”). The difference hinges on は–when it’s a particle that marks a topic, it’s pronounced “wa,” but when it’s part of a word, it’s pronounced “ha.”
So the question is, is it a “wa” that follows “koko de,” putting the emphasis on “here” (making the next word kimono, “clothing”) or is it the beginning of the next word, hakimono (“footwear”)?
Whoops! You’re right. Posting without thinking again. :smack: But I like the example, and I agree with your point that writing everything in kana would make it much harder for the reader to understand.
I think that the utility of a non-alphabet language is that written communication is possible, even though linguistic drift in the spoken language is such that the dialects, or, indeed the languages are incomprehensible. Although my Chinese is limited (and worse than I’d like), I still know enough hanzi to make sense of some kanji – including, in some cases, the meaning of names.
If the global insinuation of mass media increases, the understanding of “standard” dialects, will become common, and the utility of the non-alphabet languages will become less important.
A lot has been said about word processing of Chinese (and others - I recommend those not in the know to check out NJSTAR, which I used in school). Unfortunately, it necessitates the use of “standard” dialect.
Will they disappear? No doubt (unless the big one drops). For better or worse, it appears that English is becoming the global lingua franca (ha ha), with more people speaking English as a second language than a first language. This will progress, everywhere except North Korea and France. IMHO.
It may be a slight exaggeration, but I wouldn’t go as far in the other direction as you. Like I said, even reading the original Shakespeare, not modernized versions, is quite difficult for non-specialists, and that’s only going back about 400 years.
This is a cleaned up version of the Canterbury Tales with a modern typeface and standardized spelling. Without the comparison text on the left, would your average American high-school kid have a prayer of understanding what’s going on?
This is a 900 year old handwritten copy of a page from the Nihon Shoki, which was actually written in classical Chinese, not Japanese. I don’t speak or read Chinese, and I’ve never studied any of the classical texts, but even I know about half the characters on this page. I’m certain that if I showed it to any of my co-workers they’d be able to summarize it, though they would definitely not be able to get many of the details because they haven’t extensively studied it.
Since when is Shakespeare difficult? With a few annotations for vocabulary, it should be easily comprehensible for a high-school student. I know I didn’t have any problems with it, anyway.
Try reading it out loud. It’s really not that hard to figure out, especially once you get going and start more easily figuring out the vowel shifts. Again, with annotations for vocabulary, this should be readable definitely by college students and probably by high schoolers.
Knowing half the characters != comprehending. Just because you know the readings and potential meanings for a character doesn’t mean you’ll understand it in context. Try actually having a native speaker translate the page, and see how far they get.
That was how we read the Canterbury Tales in my high school (out of the Norton anthology). Straight, no chaser. It was easy.
Sorry, is this aimed at my OP? If so, you’re being a dick in the wrong forum. Nowhere did I say that people who use written Chinese are stupid and backwards (my girlfriend of 10 years is Chinese, and agrees with me about the relative difficulty of using computers for written Chinese). So why don’t you take your snark and bullshit assumptions to one of the many forums here not dedicated to providing factual answers?
:slow clap:
Oh, wait, you’re talking to me. Never mind.
You’ve obviously never read any raw Shakespeare. What you’ve been exposed to is edited, updated, and standardized. I was a Lit major, and I did read some copies of his original manuscripts. It was a pain in the ass.
I never said that they’d know how to pronounce it or describe what it said in detail, I said they could read for meaning. Try reading what I wrote.