Why I think the Chinese writing system is TERRIBLE
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- čas přidán 17. 11. 2022
- No, it really is. I have come to the conclusion that Chinese characters aren't just difficult for English speakers to learn. They're difficult to learn on an ABSOLUTE SCALE. For lovers of Chinese though, this doesn't have to change anything. We can still admire the beauty in Chinese characters while recognizing that it's truly an inefficient and illogical system of writing... or I may be wrong.
说实话。我发现汉字不仅仅对外国人非常难，而是绝对的难。不过对于中文语言爱好者，这种事实也不必改变我们对中文的态度。在欣赏汉字之美的同时，我们也可以认同中文文字是一个低效率和缺逻辑的文字系统。。。要不然我的观点或许有错误。
Check out this video for the opposite argument!
▶️ The BIGGEST Advantage of Mandarin Chinese: • The BIGGEST Advantage ...
NOTE: I also forgot to mention in the video, but another argument for why alphabetic writing is superior is that ALL computer languages are alphabetical. I'm not a coder, but from what I understand, Chinese coders tend to code in English because Chinese writing and computer languages are incompatible.
编注：视频里面忘记提到，另一个支持字母文字的论点就是所有电脑语言都以字母为主。我个人不会编程，但是依我所理解，由于兼容的问题，中文母语的程序员经常使用英语编程。
Research videos on Chinese writing and reforms:
▶️ History of Pinyin (1/3): • Why Chinese Created an...
▶️ Simplification of Chinese (2/3): • When They Nearly KILLE...
▶️ The Truth About Simplified Chinese (3/3): • The TRUE Origins of Si...
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There are a lot of mistakes and misunderstanding of the Chinese Hanzi writing system in this video. The main issue here is that you and many English article writers try to analyze the Chinese hanzi from an English speaker's perspective, instead of the perspectives of those who actually use the system in daily life:
1. Chinese writing is a highly practical system, due to the fact that Mandarin and other dialects use a significant amount of homonyms. Many characters share the exact same sound. As a native Chinese speaker myself, pinyon and romanization are actually difficult and inefficient to read, because you have to figure out the context first.
2. The make-up of Hanzi character are NOT random at all! A traditional method of character categorization known as liu-shui (六书), has existed since ancient time. This categorization system highlights the six main types of characters. In fact, a significant amount characters (probably 80%+) follow the pattern of phonetic-semantic compound.
3. The order of strokes is actually a fundamental, beginner-level knowledge that every Chinese writer need to learn first. There is even a song that describes how the strokes are written correctly, which we learned in elementary school. There is a correct way and pattern of writing the characters!
3. Pinyin is NOT the only common input method; in fact, handwriting, wubi (a shape based input system) are still commonly used. Handwriting system actually recognizes cursive or quick handwriting, and it is popular among people because the users don't need to select the correct characters from a list, which actually saves time.
4. In the pinyin system, you actually require to select the correct characters or words from a long list. The reason why the computer can guessing the words is basically the same as the English auto-correct or word-suggestion AI, as you mentioned.
5. Chinese characters DO have phonetic compounds. The idea of Hanzi characters being non-phonetic is actually a misunderstanding and misinformation which has been proven to be incorrect.
6. In history, the fan-qie (反切） system was used for a very long time. The fan-qie system used common characters to indicate the pronunciation of less common characters, for both Mandarin and dialects. This historic system is actually very similar to modern pinyin, with regards to how initials and finals work.
7. From a bilingual Chinese speaking person: Yes! You can indeed remember how to write a character based on its sound, if you actually understand how Hanzi character works. As mentioned in 5, many characters follow the phonetic-semantic compound pattern, which helps users to remember how to write them or to look them up in a dictionary. Sometimes, you can even guess the sound or meaning of an unknown character based on context.
8. The reason some scholars from the Republican era tried to get rid of the Chinese system was NOT based on a careful analysis of practicality, but more influenced by ideology. This is what eventually led to the fundamentalist ideology during The Culture Revolution.
I tried my best to not hate on this video, but the amount of misinformation and lack of common sense or historical knowledge presented here is huge!
When you want to analyze something, please make sure you do the proper and correct homework!
PS. A recommended reading: «国学常识» by 曹伯韩.
Edited on Nov 21, 2022 to fix grammar mistakes.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll go read it! I do understand your points, and my opinion is the same despite them.
1) I'm only judging the writing system, and this point only proves that the spoken language (Mandarin) has a problem. Some Cantonese speakers have talked about homonyms as a reason why they think Cantonese is better than Mandarin!
2) Yes, I know about both stroke order and 六书. I think I should have specified what I meant by "completely random." The context is I was talking about inputing the language to a computer. Phonetic-semantic structure doesn't help you input the character. There are no rules on where components in characters can go in the imaginary "square" they take up. 尔，你，您 all have the “尔” component but they all take up different areas of the "square." If I tell you the strokes of a characters are 横，竖，横 (horizontal, vert., horz.) there are at least 3 different characters you can make with that, and 2 of them even account for the stroke length to differentiate! (工，土，士）
3) Last I checked, 五笔 input only accounts for 3% of users, not sure about handwriting.
5) There are people in the comments who think I'm wrong to call English "phonetic." Well, if English is only 50% phonetic, then Chinese is only 5% phonetic. You can guess with phonetic compounds, but they are not reliable at all and your chances of guessing correctly are extremely low.
7) I respect your opinion, but for me at least, I don't remember Chinese characters based on sound well because radically different components can have the same sound (qian -> 钱，千，签). Maybe English is just as bad, but there are only 26 letters to work with, so it's much easier to figure out (hard A sound -> a, ai, eigh, ay).
8) You're probably right on this and I'll admit that's a flaw with my reasoning that "you wouldn't reform a language unless there's something wrong with it."
I'm gunna pin this because I feel like you covered a lot of the other comments I read.
@@ABChinese I would like to add a few things:
4. When you input Pinyin (which I think doesn't accurately represent how the language is pronounced, ke is not pronounced *k-e*, but *k-uh*), you are given a list of words that share the same pinyin, and if it's a longer word or a sentence, the AI will roughly or entirely know what you mean.
I do hate homophones (learning Japanese), but I understand that Chinese and Japanese have tones, and pitch accent respectively to mitigate this; not to mention context (takes time to learn).
If I were to say *cow*, you would immiedately know what I mean. However, if I say *kou*, what character am I talking about?
It's not the ability to recognize characters that's the problem, it's the ability to reproduce them from memory to write (like someone else said). Take English for example: you write a word through a combination of 26 letters (they don't have to be exact) making it easier to reproduce. Take Hanzi unlike kanji, which has 1000s of characters you need to memorize vs 2136 joyo kanji. Recognition comes a lot easier than reproduction in writing (unless you have a computer to help you play needle in a haystack finding the right one). I'm not sure it would be fair to say if when putting multiple kanji together by hand, you have 1000s to put together (like an alphabet) if you don't remember how to write them.
That, and this person's reply is just trying to mask their contempt.
@@ABChinese 1. How does a writing system that's able to accommodate multiple spoken language be terrible? What kind of twisted logic is this, not a single other writing system is able to do that and rather than appreciate the uniqueness and capability of the system you instead try to drag it down to the level of the rest of the alphabetical languages? Do you think it's more practical for cantonese, shanghainese, and so on to have each different writing systems, hence not being able to communicate with each other at all, like in India for example?
Furthermore as OP mentioned the "problem" that you mentioned literally don't exist as the chinese language and its users doesn't rely on pinyin/phonetic in the first place. Yes, we do just simply read the characters. No, it's not hard, "git gud" at it, at least to the level of average chinese speakers, which being the most spoken native language there are billions of them, so it's not a lot of ask. Stop using the "it's hard/differ greatly to english" card to judge how good/terrible a language it is, it doesn't make sense logically and only shows your ignorant/deracinated behavior.
2. Just so you know, those snobbish canto speakers (a "HKer" as well?) is actually the one using the stroke order method of typing, as they dont have anything equivalent to the pinyin-AI typing. And yes they do type a lot slower.
Good points. I’m now learning Vietnamese, and while I have to admit I’m grateful not to have to learn Chinese (and Chinese-derived and entirely original) characters, the homonym issue is a huge one, especially as a foreign learner. So many entirely different meanings depend entirely on context. Add to that, that pronunciation, and thus which words are and aren’t homonyms, differs according to dialect. It would be so helpful to have a clearer indication of which word we’re reading.
In this sense the often complained about, somewhat confusing English spelling system has similar advantages. Rights; rites, writes, wrights… certainly a challenge to learn, but it also avoid a lot of ambiguity.
Point 1 - Context is one of those things you kind of immediately pick up when reading, kind of like knowing how hot or cold it is when you're outside. Point 2 - Let's take a basic word, 他。他= 人+也。You can sort of guess out the meaning if you've just started learning Chinese, but there's nothing intuitive about ta1 = ren2 + ye2. There's no way anyone is going to figure out how the character sounds just based on the character itself. Points 3,4,5,6 - I agree with you there. Point 7 - Refer back to point 2. Point 8 - I agree with you there.
Chinese is actually graphical for native speakers. When we recognize characters, it is actually like looking at graphs. But in turn, when we write, we will be entangled in the internal structure of the font. It's like you can recognize the painting of Mona Lisa at a glance, but you can't draw Mona Lisa in reverse.
I dont read/speak chinese. But the way I see it is like reading a sentence that is constructed with emojis, in a way
@@asgacc8789 囧 do you like this, a famous Chinese characters, means "embarrassment".
囧
@@user-nl2js1bk1p
😳
The way you explained it is great. I´m going to steal it from you and not give you any credit for it.
@@asgacc8789 like "python" not need to speak it, just understand it
I've had the same opinion for a long time. But recently I've started to notice that surprisingly chinese characters help me remember words. When Chinese words are written in pinyin, they all look so similar that it actually makes it harder to remember and distinguish them. But the characters all look quite unique and therefore it's much easier to learn new ones.
I'm studying Chinese primarily by reading. And when I speak, I often find myself in a situation when I need to recall how to say a word, at first I remember how to write it and then I guess the pronunciation thanks to the phonetics.
So my point is, without hanzi I think it would be much harder to remember all of those dozens of "ji" and "shi" and their meanings, and it would be harder to guess the meanings of compounds too.
Same. I like Chinese characters because they’re pictorial. Once you learn the character, it’s hard to forget the meaning because I tend to recognize pictures and symbols faster than I process text (and I’m actually a fantastic reader, I think-though I might be mistaken-that our brains just do images faster) . I don’t think I would be able to learn mandarin without the characters, it’s so important to me remembering words.
I found the same thing with japanese. Its easier and faster for me to read 元気 than it is to read げんき. In this case tho japanese has a advantage over chinese in that its kana alphabets allow it to not be dependant on a romanized alphabet. All the pronunciation can be spelled out with hiragana, and the pronunciation is sometimes displayed with the chinese characters but smaller and above them as a sort of pronunciation guide (this is called furigana).
that is exactly why you need the characters, there are way too many homonyms in Chinese, when I started to study Chinese I skipped the characters because I thought why to go through this mess when you have an elegant roman-type system but I soon figured out that you are completely lost with only pinying.
Great point. I was thinking about the same thing. Everything has pros and cons, so does the chinese writing system.
I completely agree. Chinese Characters are just way easier to read on repeat tries than alphabetical stuff. And it has the amazing advantage of solving the homonym problem, even in Japanese, since most of their Hanzi have the same Homonym problems because Ancient Chinese also had that issue.
They don't code "in english", they code in a programming language. Programming languages are, pretty much in every case, heavily influenced by the english language, i.e. use many english words, but that's the same for everyone on earth. You can't code in Chinese, but you can't code in Korean or Greek or Italian either, having an alphabetic writing system doesn't help you there.
idk where he said that they code in english
Good point....how do the Russians code, for example?
我们有中文编程语言--易语言。尽管我不喜欢使用它，我更喜欢C plusplus
@@LeoFreemanAUST same as anyone else. there is no other option or there is not necessary to have more than one option because any programming language is a new language anyway.
@@COX2NSAIDBut it must be harder for people who don't know English use the Latin alphabet, even a non-programmer who speaks English can guess what "print("Hello") means, but what about 输出("你好") ?
Small correction: A lot of the world's languages don't utilize systems we'd necessarily call alphabets. They're often abugidas or syllabaries like the scripts of India and Indochina where each consonant/vowel pair is given their own separate character or feature consonants as core symbols that are modified through differing vowel qualities. Or they're abjads like in the Islamosphere where only consonants are written and vowels are either implied are reserved as diacritical marks.
I think he meant phonemic scripts in general and just wasn't aware of the correct terminology.
The word "alphabet" includes abugidas and abjads (but not syllaberies). Some linguists have proposed limiting the definition of "alphabet", and only in some contexts is this the assumed default meaning. So all phonemic writing systems are types of alphabet, depending on who is speaking and where, and ABChinese wasn't too wrong to sum them and syllaberies up as "alphabets"
Alphabet, Chinese 二
Using 二 加笔画↣ 云 ，↣土，去↣ 走 ，开，天 关 元， 无，from 去 draw 丢 .Using voice input. Speak phrases or sentence
土+云↣去↣
云 ↣运动 云 ↣会
云↣ 尝 层 屋
土+云↣至↣到↣倒↣屋
Alphabet, Chinese 人
Using drawing method
Starting 人 add stroke change 火大 灭 天头 买卖 天犬夭 达(到)尖，如果人 分开变成八，儿 入 几 add stroke 凡风凤
@@edwardlim4553 what..?
One thing I’ve always wondered about Chinese is- can you do crossword puzzles and word searches, and stuff like that? I really enjoy those types of things, but I’ve always thought about how difficult that would be to employ in Chinese. Yes, the writing system is flawed but of course it’s also super interesting and I enjoy it for all the reasons you mentioned ❤
There's "guess the idiom"... (猝 ? ? 防 -> 猝不及防) That's kind of close
That's an interesting point. Obviously letter-by-letter games, like crosswords and palindromes ("Able was I ere I saw Elba"), are just not possible in Chinese. In an alphabetic language wildcard word searches are useful to find the spelling of a word whose spelling you are uncertain of: e.g. "b*tiful". I can't see how that would work in Chinese either.
I think that it would be something like phrases with the same characters
I've tried making one with radicals instead of letters. It's actually kind of fun
@@robert-skibelo Chinese Mandarin is syllabic so you could use a wildcard, for example *们 could be 我们， 你们， 他们， 她们, 它们 and all of those are plural personal pronouns.
There are hundreds of dialects in China, many of which are mutually unintelligible. The pronunciations of Ancient and Middle literati Chinese changed drastically over thousands of years as well and were based for a long time on different southern dialects and sound nothing like modern Mandarin Chinese. The reason that the Chinese have the longest continuous civilisation and have a body of great Chinese classics which have been able to be preserved and passed on in written form over thousands of years, and are still accessible to whoever educated in the 21st century willing to study them, regardless of which regions they are from and what dialects they speak, is because of the existence of the Chinese writing system, which comprises of unique symbols, many of which have meaning based components independent of phonetics. It ensured that the written words were not phased out or obliterated whenever pronunciation of the spoken language changed, and made it possible for modern scholars to plausibly reconstruct Ancient and Middle Chinese, despite many of the sounds having been completely lost by now.
The writing system does not need to cater to hundreds of dialects, and it is not its business to do so. We don’t change our English vowel spelling every time we write because someone from a different region pronounces it differently. Chinese characters can be used to transliterate dialectical differences if needed, however. It has been done in the study and preservation of many dialects. The writing system is the unifying force of all literate Chinese people regardless of their regional or ethnic differences. If you know Chinese characters, you can communicate and partake of the Chinese written cultural heritage wherever you are from and whatever dialects/languages you speak.
There have been attempts in Chinese history to get rid of the characters, but they failed, because the nature of the language would not allow it. The spoken language was in existence first, the writing system followed. Chinese words are composed of monosyllabic morphemes and the possible ways to pronounce the syllables have reduced to a relatively small number in standard Mandarin, resulting in a large number of homophones. You cannot map tens of thousands of meaningful words onto the 400 plus only available syllables without tones and characters to help distinguish them. The pinyin sound “shi” for example, depending on tones, can mean to be, to give, wet, solid, vision, room, to begin, to lose, history, to drive, oath, flea, food, to pick up, the number 10, stone, pig, arrow, scholar, time, market, to try, to know, thing, poem, teacher, style, lion, force, corpse, to explain, to devour, and many more. Good luck to the language learners trying to memorise all the different meanings with just “shi” as a reference point. Those who dismiss characters and think pinyin could simply replace characters are those who know too little about the Chinese language to be making proposals for language reform.
The purpose of Chinese logographic writing system is to convey the meanings of the written words instead the pronunciations as in phonetic or alphabetical writing system. It is analogous to modern numeral system where it is understood regardless of languages spoken. Most writing languages use phonetic writing system as it is much simpler and much easier to use as it only requires the arranged of letters to form a word. Spoken languages change and evolves overtime as new words, terms and pronunciations are adopted while discarding old ones. Languages spoken a century ago has some differences with contemporary ones. The longer the time frame the more differences emerged. Because phonetic writing systems convey the pronunciations of words, books often before unreadable after several centuries due to linguistic changes. A contemporary English speaker will have great difficulties in reading and understand English books from the 1600. Chinese books from an even much earlier time frame on the other are still readable and understood by contemporary Chinese speakers. Han Chinese or ethnic Chinese speak many languages that are often mutual unintelligible with each other but are able to communicate and understand each through the written words. Had the Chinese developed an alphabetical writing system, they will be divided into linguistic based ethnic groups.
The continuity of Chinese spelling via the use of characters presents its own problem in that the sound of the original works is lost. If spelling doesn't change with time, then contemporary pronunciation gets back-read onto older texts that would have sounded better in their original pronunciation.
When spelling is non-phonetic there is also an obscuring of sonic etymology, so it is harder to see how Chinese fits into surrounding languages that don't use Hanzi.
@@MrLantean That is not true. Chinese is more phonetic than the alphabetical system. Most Chinese word are constructed with a symbolic part plus a part that gives the pronunciation of the word. As long as you know the basic character and understand the rule, it is quite easy to guess the meaning and pronunciation of a character that you have not seen before.
@@sneedle252 It doesn't need to fits into the surrounding. Chinese character is most effective language in information preservation and delivery and that marks its continuity over thousands of years. There's not much change in Chinese character in the past 2000 years. You do not need to know the pronunciation to understand the meaning and that solves the problem of having different dialect. In alphabetic system, words change with pronunciation and that created a huge geographic boundary for communication.
i know and study Japanese but i just watch your content because i love languages, and i feel like one of the benefits to Kanji/Hanzi/whatever you wanna call it is that when you see a character you INSTANTLY know the meaning, like even if i didn’t know 頭痛 pronunciation i still could work out the meaning instantly just based off the kanji
A japanese content creator I watch brought up a related point as well. In english you can often tell what a word is by its "shape" without reading each individual letter. At least for me this makes sense bc I read entire words at a time rather than letter by letter and (I think) most english speakers do as well.
But in japanese its basically impossible to do the same. Japanese doesnt have spaces, and its characters dont have distinct stems that poke above and below the letters to give words a distinct shape. わたしのなまえはブランクです is a *lot* harder to read than 私の名前はブランクです. The kanji allow me to read japanese word by word like I would read english, they give the words recognizable shapes.
@@hexlart8481 It's not really true that Japanese doesn't have spaces. Plenty of media, like books for kids, or old games that couldn't fit kanji in them due to technical limitations, will employ spaces to separate the words apart. Is it the norm? Not really, but it absolutely exists when they want to make text easier to read, especially in media aimed for children.
Hell, I've been playing Pokemon Violet and that game has kanji with furigana and it STILL has spaces.
Headache right?
But how do I pronounce it?
@@FishyAshB i suppose what they were saying really is that spaces aren’t really *required* in that 私は学生です and 私は 学生 です are equally as intelligible vs “I am a student” and “Iamastudent” in English
@@jonathanmikefrenky2639 yes, it’s pronounced ずつう
When I was studying Korean, I leaned Hangul like in a couple of hours. I could read any word in Korean but I have no idea what they meant. Then when I started to study Chinese I thought that characters would be hell, but the hell were the tones. Characters help a lot when reading because they convey meaning, and also sound, of course. But even though I don't know how to pronounce a word, sometimes I still can understand what it means. Characters may seem difficult to write by hand, but they are pretty easy to read.
By the way, at least for native Spanish speakers, English phonetics usually are also hell.
French native here, I'm gonna second you on saying "ꟻuck english phonetics !" 😂
@@PierreMiniggio Native English speaker here. Spanish is very phonetic. French is not bad. English is not a phonetic language.
@@veloboy I agree.
@@veloboy It's not the language that is phonetic. It is the *writing system* or the *script* that the language uses that is phonetic. English is a Germanic language with 24% Germanic vocabulary, 26% Norman/French vocabulary, and 26% Latin vocabulary. Unlike other Germanic and Romance languages, English spelling was never reformed. That is why there are so many exceptions in pronouncing the sounds of the phonetic alphabet. For an example, see czcams.com/video/YvABHCJm3aA/video.html for the reason why there is a silent _B_ in the word _doubt_ . The word _doubt_ comes from the Latin word _dubitare_ .
@@RaymondHng Of course you are right. I was just being economical with my words.
文字存在的目的是什么？
1）以【沟通】为目的
通过使用汉字，汉字文化圈的不同语言即使发音不同，也可以理解同一个汉字的意思。
例如：“雪”，中文读xue3、日文读yuki，但只要写出“雪”，就可以成为语言之间的桥梁。
而表音类文字只代表发音，写在书面之后，不同语言之间没有任何沟通层面的提升，不知道一个东西的读音也不会知道它的意思。因此在专有名词方面，表意文字比表音文字更容易普及知识。
例如：“anemia”，如果没有人解释词义，不查字典，面对新词时英文使用者永远猜不到这个词的意思。而对应中文的“贫血”，中文使用者即使第一次见到，也可以通过单个文字的意思猜到大概含义。
2）以【记录】为目的
一方面使用汉字可以用更有效率的记录信息，在相同空间记录更多的信息。大部分书籍只要翻译成中文都会变薄。
另一个层面，因为汉字的形成是漫长而且相对稳定的，大部分汉字上千年来的含义基本没有变化，所以当研究古文时要容易得多，古代的文化思想也更容易传承。 不管当年的发音是什么样，表达的意思都一样。
而表音文字的古文，一旦语言发生变迁，古文对现代人就变得很难理解。如果一个发音写成的词脱离使用环境，甚至可能永远不被后人解读。
例如：“欲穷千里目，更上一层楼” 这句唐诗，上千年前的原文对学习汉字的人也很容易理解。但如果从同一个时期的古英语诗《贝奥武夫》里拿出来一句话，你感受一下：“Hƿæt! ƿē Gār-Dena in ġeār-dagum,þēod-cyninga, þrym ġefrūnon,”
3）以【表达】为目的
因为有着庞大的文字基础，就像绘画的时候有更多的颜料。文学创作时可以用各种不同的词汇来表达同一个含义的微妙区别，也可以随心所欲的用文字生造词，即使读出来显得陌生，看到文字也可以理解意思。让写文章，不是为了发音而创作，而是为了文字而创作。
而表音文字里的生造词只能用有限的词根组合才能让别人略微明白，如果想用与众不同的读音创造一个新名词，就成了没人明白什么意思的胡言乱语。
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另外关于视频里提到的，有电脑输入法后，人们反而提笔忘字的情况。
你认为这证明了汉字不宜学习的缺点，会随着科技进步而淘汰。
与你的想法正好相反，我认为正因为科技进步，让汉字输入不再是难题，人们不需要手工书写，反而有助于提高汉字的使用率，发挥自身的优势。
你说的很好👍👍👍✌️😄😊
我在这也加上一点好了，博主用的modern society 是西方的modernization，还有电脑的应用与普及也是起源于美国军工后由比尔盖茨发扬光大，这种电脑输入的构造没有其他表意语言使用者的参与，未来有中国领头的科技发展和应用也会多多改善。
其實有個輸入法叫“筆畫輸入法”，基本上是把筆畫分成5類再按照筆畫順序輸入再選字，它大概是在按鍵為主的手機的時侯出現的中文輸入法，現在比較方便的是Gboard 可以輸入簡體輸出繁體，不然繁體的筆畫有些真的很麻煩
(=′ー`)
Ps.我也是書法愛好者
❤❤❤❤
English is not phonetic in the way you tried to describe I'm afraid.
Some of my reasons to say this are:
1. Same word pronounced differently in many cases.
For example, the sentence: I was reading during my trip to Reading, has 2 different pronunciations for "reading" and "Reading"
2. F and ph have the same pronunciation
3. There are words than when pronounced in singular and plural their pronunciation changes despite having identical writing excepting its final s.
4. Some words are pronounced differently when they are adjectivised than when they are verbs.
5. Some words - e.g. desert - mean different things depending on where the entonation goes.
6. The same letters have different pronunciation depending on which letters go around. Sometimes the exact sequence is pronounced differently in two similar words
7. Vowels can represent more than one sound. For example: 'a' has 6 different sounds
8. There are words, for example the surname Menzies, that do not represent the real letters that should be there, not the real sounds that are articulated when pronounced.
Etc.
As an American you maybe do not realise it, and it is understandable, but in my experience English is very chaotic in comparison to all the other languages I speak (Spanish, German and Dutch) so I would not say it is easier than Chinese in the sense that when you see a word you never saw before you always can have the pronunciation wrong regardless of the "hints" from your knowledge of previous words that are similar or contain the same letters together
It's not the language that is phonetic. It is the *writing system* or the *script* that the language uses that is phonetic. English is a Germanic language with 24% Germanic vocabulary, 26% Norman/French vocabulary, and 26% Latin vocabulary. Unlike other Germanic and Romance languages, English spelling was never reformed. That is why there are so many exceptions in pronouncing the sounds of the phonetic alphabet. For an example, see czcams.com/video/YvABHCJm3aA/video.html for the reason why there is a silent _B_ in the word _doubt_ .
English writing is phonetic. It might be imperfectly phonetic, but it's phonetic.
@@dansanger5340 Then, so is Chinese.
Good observation 👍
I can only think of two disadvantages characters have over phonetic scripts: it is slightly more difficult to learn (not nearly as difficult as people make it out to be) and it is more difficult to look up unknown characters in a dictionary (but much easier with modern technology). I don't consider it a disadvantage that people forget how to hand write some characters, as that is only because they don't write by hand often enough. That is a flaw of modern society, not the system itself. The less people need to write by hand, the more likely they will forget how to, and thus the less of a problem it is to forget. It's basically a non-issue. Typing with pinyin, zhuyin, cangjie, wubi, etc. are all faster than typing in English, because of how well the computer is able to guess what you want to write. Unless there are some rare characters you want to type, you can oftentimes type entire sentences with just a few key strokes. The first example that just came to my head is if you want to type: Where do you want to go to eat?, that is 30 key strokes (including spaces). In Chinese pinyin, you just type 7 strokes: nyqnlcf (你要去那裏吃飯). Having to use pinyin to type doesn't make characters fundamentally flawed. That is absurd. It was just necessary to adapt to modern technology. And it has adapted well. I don't know anything about the coding thing you mentioned. I suppose that could be considered another disadvantage, but not a major one.
I also don't see characters not being fully phonetic as a disadvantage. Once you've learned the character, you know how it's pronounced, so you don't need phonetics. Sure, in languages with phonetic scripts, you might be able to pronounce a word you've never seen before, but you probably won't know what it means (although you can sometimes guess, especially if you know Latin and Greek), so just knowing the pronunciation doesn't help you much. Either way, you still need to look up the word. In Chinese, you can sometimes guess the approximate meaning and pronunciation based on the components within the character, especially the more characters you already know.
The advantages FAR outweigh the disadvantages. The video already mentioned that the system can be used for multiple languages, which contributed to the ability of Chinese culture to flourish for thousands of years. It is FAR easier than English in higher stages of learning. It is possible to read ancient texts without having to basically learn a foreign language (as Old English is to Modern English). It is much faster to read than phonetic scripts. And on and on.
The point about simplified characters being more intuitive is frankly ridiculous. They have only one advantage over traditional characters, and that is being slightly faster to write by hand. There may be a few very isolated cases where the simplified version is more intuitive, but that is rare. There are also some where they are equally intuitive, that is, when only the sound component was changed for another with the same sound. I don't know why people always bring up the example of the character for love, as there are many better examples, but your argument about it is also ridiculous. Nobody ever said you can't know what love is if you write it in simplified. The point people are making is that the character is less meaningful without that component.
@@anon_148 Most of the traditional characters have the same meaning across the dialects and even between Japanese and Chinese when it comes to the Chinese characters that meaning doesn't change much. Yes, Cantonese and other dialects may have some characters that are different, but the vast majority have the same meaning they are just pronounced differently. Unlike the Roman (or Latin) alphabets that used by many languages. Even across time in the same language a word can be spelled drastically different even though it has the same meaning.
@@anon_148 You should learn spoken Chinese first and then learn Chinese characters, that way it will be easier.Many characters in Chinese characters are related, that is, the radicals of Chinese characters.
For example, those related to water all have 氵, like 洗、涤、法、游、泳、江、河、湖、海.
everything related to fire all have 灬, like 热、烈、煎、熟、照、煮、熬.
everything related to hands all have 扌, like 打、把、拼、抄、抬、摇、摸、扫、插、持、揪、拒.
everything related to mouth all have 口 , like 吐、吁、味、呕、呼、吸、叹、吃、咯、噔、啖、吮、唤、呐、喊、咬、嚼、嚎、啕、咆、哮、吠.
everything related to the sun has 日, like 春、明、昨、星、晚、早、日、时、是、量、晒、晶、旦、晴、晨.
everything related to eyes has 目, like 盯、盲、看、相、省、眉、盾、盼、眨、盹、眈、眇、眠、眩、眬、着、眼、睁、眸、眷、眯、眶、眺、眦、睑、睡.
everything related to human body has 亻, like 作、侯、们、住、你、什、他、候、僧、倒、修、保、佛、仿、使、俩、假、值、借.
there are many more examples, I won’t give them any more.Obviously you don't have a good Chinese teacher, or you are just self-study randomly and start memorizing Chinese characters when you can't find any rules, which leads you to this idea.
@@anon_148 You should learn spoken Chinese first and then learn Chinese characters, that way it will be easier.Many characters in Chinese characters are related, that is, the radicals of Chinese characters.
For example, those related to water all have 氵, like 洗、涤、法、游、泳、江、河、湖、海.
everything related to fire all have 灬, like 热、烈、煎、熟、照、煮、熬.
everything related to hands all have 扌, like 打、把、拼、抄、抬、摇、摸、扫、插、持、揪、拒.
everything related to mouth all have 口 , like 吐、吁、味、呕、呼、吸、叹、吃、咯、噔、啖、吮、唤、呐、喊、咬、嚼、嚎、啕、咆、哮、吠.
everything related to the sun has 日, like 春、明、昨、星、晚、早、日、时、是、量、晒、晶、旦、晴、晨.
everything related to eyes has 目, like 盯、盲、看、相、省、眉、盾、盼、眨、盹、眈、眇、眠、眩、眬、着、眼、睁、眸、眷、眯、眶、眺、眦、睑、睡.
everything related to human body has 亻, like 作、侯、们、住、你、什、他、候、僧、倒、修、保、佛、仿、使、俩、假、值、借.
there are many more examples, I won’t give them any more.Obviously you don't have a good Chinese teacher, or you are just self-study randomly and start memorizing Chinese characters when you can't find any rules, which leads you to this idea.
I like that he says English is a phonetic language which most (non native english speakers) people would disagree on. Imagine his joy if he learns a language with more consistent spelling.
I think Indonesian is arguably the most phonetic language
I think native English speakers would disagree as well. English is a sort of hybrid phonetic logographic language where units of meaning are stored in pseudo-phonetic script… but we tend to also have multiple logographs for every small unit of meaning because of non-native influence. Like “book” and “liter” from “literacy” or “literature”.
Native English speakers read much faster than native speakers of "phonetically spelled" languages like German or Italian. We learn to see the word as a whole and don't bother so much with the letters that make it up. More difficult to learn at first but more efficient in the long run. Things like "photo" "photographic" "photography" would be a complete mess if we spelled them phonetically. This becomes more like the characters that have meaning in themselves - "photo" is like a character that can be pronounced many ways depending on what other letters are around it but retains it's meaning as a concept.
@@danielgrey5754 That is not Unique to the English language. Everyone that reaches a certain level of proficiency in a language reads whole words. That's just how reading works in general.
Even native speakers objected
Thanks for the video. It’s interesting seeing so many different perspectives on this subject. I think it’s mainly the homophones that make using a typical writing system more difficult for Chinese than with other languages.
Based on other languages I’m familiar with, I don’t know if any language is 100% practical, but that’s sometimes what makes each one fun and unique lol
but the meaning of each each basic character is so beautiful, this is one of the most elegant, meaningful language i ve ever learn
tbh leaning chinese is way easier in with characters, it would be a nightmare to learn everything in pinyin. The characters also help to guess the meaning of a word, while if it was written in pinyin I couldnt guess the meaning. ig japanese as the best of both worlds, characters and 2 phonetic kana "alphabets", I spend most of my time learning and reading in japanese and if there wasnt any kanji it would be so much harder to udnerstand. The only downside I can possible think for hanzi in chinese and kanji in japanese is rememmbering how to write them, cuz recognizing the characters isnt that dificult, but writing it from memory is way harder. unless you are a writer and you have to handwrite a lot, maybe that way you wont forget. on the writing part I agree and alphabet is really good because you just have to write what you hear so it is easy but for reading characters are great, specially when japanese and chinese are languages with a lot of homophones so you would need a way to diferenciate words if they appear out of context or even in contex if 2 words fit well you would need something to tell which one is being used.
Japanese really is sorta a good middle ground, with furigana to help learn kanji and stuff.
Isn't it worse since characters have different readings? That is a 100 times worse. At least in Chinese languages, you don't have to know which reading it is. There is just ONE pronunciation of a character
@@03e-210a The numerous pronunciations can be difficult, but there is a simple rule that works most of the time - if the word has multiple kanji characters it is likely using the Chinese derived On’yomi pronunciation, while characters used with hiragana tend to be native Japanese Kun’yomi pronunciation.
But a kanji may have three or four Onyomi pronunciations and more than a dozen Kunyomi pronunciations lol@@mckendrick7672
Who even writes nowadays? It's all about typing 😎
can't agree, as a native user, the fact that Chinese characters pack phonetics and meaning into graphic components makes it incredibly efficient to display and read. As someone with enough exposure to the system, it's also very easy to learn or even create new words as character components naturally come with meaning to be used as roots. Not to mention it could represent meaning across completely different languages and allow people to communicate without any phonetic exchange.
However yes, the system by itself is fundamentally flawed by the difficulty of initial acquisition and input, but with the supplementation of Pinyin or other input methods, it has adapted to the digital world as well if not better than other scripts. For example, while forgetting how to write is a problem, this doesn't mean you easily forget what a character means, which makes it quite effective in reading, and with the assistance of input, digital use is also incredibly convenient.
Another advantage of Chinese is its use in technology and science, Chinese characters form short, compact, and easily understood roots for scientific vocabulary, so more often than not regular learners are able to somewhat guess the meaning of a new word. This is simply not the case in most other languages, which rely on the phonetic transliteration of foreign words or roots (Latin, Greek, English, French, etc...) easily creating barriers for people who had not the privilege of education or exposure. Chinese jargon is just hands down elegant, efficient, and relatively democratic.
At the end of the day, I think it's a great system for its time and for today, despite the various struggles it had to experience in the middle, and it is well-geared for the future.
The point about the use in science and technology seems kind of weak to me. Some languages chose to borrow foreign words and that is regardless of writing system. Perhaps the chinese writing system presents a barrier to loanwords which can be seen as an advantage, but most modern concepts globally are thought of in English and thus, in English, they tend to be somewhat straightforward like "internet" and "venture capifal" or "computer", even if in languages that borrow those terms they seem rather meaningless.
@@FOLIPE Phonetic transliterations of foreign words could only be learned with memory as they have little connection with native roots and terms, such are the challenges most other languages face by loaning words. However Chinese uses calque translations by virtue of the characters themselves containing meaning thus serving as roots, this means anyone can guess translated words with their knowledge of native Chinese roots or by the meaning component of characters used.
It is very possible to input Chinese writing using ANSI or ISO keyboards based on the structure of each characters that are based on 1 or more basic radicals. Each Chinese character is based the combination of radicals, of which there are 214 radicals, although there about 30-60 or so basic radicals that can be used to build more complex radicals. So, an ANSI keyboard simply need to contain about 30 radicals each correspond with a key, and this can be doubled by the use of the shift key, and even triple when the Control key is used also. So, we can pack as much as 90 basic radicals onto the ANSI keyboard to type out the Chinese characters. The computer will detect the sequence of basic radicals typed in...and will know how to construct the characters, and will give the writer choices if there are more than 1 character with the same sequence of radicals.
This will further speed up learning of Hanzi that is now based on an alphabet system that made up of the combination of the radicals as the letters and each character is a syllable.
@@FOLIPE it's not weak. As a teacher whose moved between the different contexts most students in English speaking places struggle with the Latin and Greek terms in science because they're not connected to other English words (mostly). But in Chinese most high level science vocabulary is made of simple or middle difficulty every day Chinese characters. There's no need to learn a "new" language to understand it.
Take photosynthesis in English. For children learning this at ages 10 or 11 most of them won't know that photo is light and synthesis means to make or create. These are very high level components with no real corollary except in other high level words. In Chinese it's 光合作用 - light - put together - effect/action. All those characters are low level every day things. Much easier to learn for a native speaker of Chinese.
@@trungson6604 Good points, there are so many ways to input Chinese.
Fantastic video as usual. I love some of the comments below, very enlightening.
Yes, very enlightening -- and as much about human psychology, I'd say, as about (Chinese) writing systems.
This being said, there is at least one advantage to the Chinese writing system: at times, you can infer the general meaning of new words in dependence on its characters.
In english, as well as in romance languages (and probably also the same for some other languages families I'm not educated on),
you can do the same thing by knowing the roots of the words (which quite often also are words by themselves) and prefixes' meaning (that you could study thoroughly if you want to, but you'll also acquire most of them just by learning words).
English also juxtaposes words to create set meanings.
For example "come back" usually is a single word in most romance languages (example for french : "revenir")
In english, if you know "come", and you know "back", you'll understand what "come back" means.
In french, if you know "venir" (which means "come") and the "re" prefix (which means "again"), you'll understand what "revenir" means.
Just like in chinese that if you know "回" and "來", you'll understand "回來".
So I don't think discovery of new words and their meanings is that different.
@@PierreMiniggio It's true and at no point did I mean it is unique to Chinese. However, I'm not sure your remark regards the writing system itself.
In addition, the phenomenon might be more "widespread" in Chinese. Consider the following, for instance: 橡木, 蘋果樹, 楓, 柏, 芒果树, 泡桐. You wouldn't know that oak/chêne, maple/érable, cypress/cyprès, etc. are trees.
@@ffederel Yeah I agree
not to mention japanese kanji can have so many different readings! you can know the reading of a kanji but then still make a mistake because it has some other reading you didn’t know! like 行 can be pronounced “i-” “yu-” “gyou” “kou” or “okona-“. it’s like the issue you described but compounded by the long history of chinese characters in japan 😂
Yeah I always thought that was really cool too!
It comes from the native japanese word for the thing the Character was conveying, like mizu(水) and the original pronunciation in the language from which it came (usually one of the Western Chineses) like "sui（水）, which are both the same word 😅
Another funny thing is that the meaning of the character also changes according to the reading. In 楽、 らく means easy (not hard), がく means musical and たの means fun.
As a lover of language, I actually love the Chinese writing system. Particularly for poetry and creative writing, it is fascinating to see how you can combine different characters with similar sounds to add an extra layer or two of depth to poetry not possible in other languages with phonetic writing systems.
You've got the meaning of the vocab word (combination of characters), the meaning of the individual characters all on their own, and the sounds, which although pronounced the same can mean something completely different. This makes for some very unique rhyme schemes and plays on words. I've studied some Chinese song lyrics with profound depth due to creative use of the language, and the only way to understand that creativity is the combination of written and spoken Chinese.
I'm a Finnish native, and in my language, you literally pronounce the written words as they are represented by letters. There is maybe one instance where this isn't exactly true (the -nk- and -ng- sounds, think of the English word king for example), but otherwise, a is a, e is e, h is h regardless of what surrounds them in a word. I've always found that to be simply the most rational way to write. 😄 I enjoy learning Chinese and other languages for fun and I appreciate the culture behind them, but when I think from the practical point of view, I can't help wondering who thought it was a good idea to spell a word like this or construct a character like that - and yes, I say this with love. 😂
I enjoyed this video. I studied calligraphy as a teenager and in college, I learned some brush calligraphy and in doing so we used Chinese and Japanese examples to copy. So, even if I don't understand Chinese at all, I appreciate the skill behind Chinese calligraphy.
Actually, I tend to use much more the handwriting keyboard instead the alphabetical keyboard, and I think it's help me not forget how write mandarin and Japanese... 😬
So true! I gotta start doing that more. It's so easy to forget how to write them 😪
I think you may not be looking at the complete picture. The needs and necessity are what matters for the development of a writing system.
If one saw a English word, you would know the letters to later search it up. So too if one saw a chinese character, say 灭 you would most likely know the character for one (一) and the chacter for fire (火). So in terms of meaning, Han characters are best for inter community communication. You can map sounds from any language to it.
The Latin characters may also be adapted to have "non-standard" pronunciations by different languages. Take "Nguyen" for example, would be completely butchered by Native English speakers.
The point of reform for the language system, is not a red flag necessarily because even Countries that use the Latin alphabet have initiated a language reform because the language has shifted too much from the written form. Look at French spelling's excesses. No one would argue to reform it because it is a matter of style and prestige at this point. Language and writing is more than just communication, it is the most important aspect of culture. Now I think the simplification was understandable but may have gone further than I would have gone.
I speak as someone who is fascinated by the Chinese language and writing system and not a native speaker.
OMG ur videos are soso inspiring, the content u filmed is always making me reconsider the language I m using every day, thx a lot
Replying to your note in the description you could code something like variable declarations, method names, comments and so on in another language different than English. I don't how it works for other people but since the programming languages are in English I type everything in English because otherwise imo looks messy and also for sharing it's better. My native language is Spanish.
A point I wanted to make is that while Hanzi might be challenging to write, it seems remarkably easy to READ. By this I mean recognise individual characters in a line of text. Assigning sound and meaning is a lot harder for those learning second-hand, but I strongly suspect that children exposed to written Chinese in what we think of as "preschool" / kindergarten [when semantic and syntactic basics are being internalized] become skilled readers at an early age.
It's not remarkably easy to read. Recognizing characters isn't the same reading. You might recognize the two easy characters 二 (er4: 2) and 王 (wang2: king [also a surname]) but yet have no idea that when placed together they refer to two of China's greatest calligraphers (Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi). I remember spending five hours once to understand a single page of text. I knew all the characters but still had to go through the slow process of figuring out the meanings of the "words" (which are often combinations of characters) and their functions in each sentence. You also might not even recognize that a group of characters is actually or a name (or at which character the name ends). You can't easily spot names in a mass of characters like you can in languages which use capitalization and spaces.
From my experience, they aren't any more skilled than English-speaking kids (or if they are you can chalk up the difference to more hours of tutoring rather than the features of the language itself).
Chinese characters become important when one considers the number of phonemes in Mandarin (I know nothing about other dialects) but when you only have 4 tones, you can only end syllables with -n and -ng (for the most part), you have relatively few consonants and vowels, AND you try to make all of your words one syllable, you are going to get a lot of different meaning words that sound the same. If Mandarin was written phonetically, it would be difficult to resolve ambiguities. In conversation you can respond to cues from the listener to disambiguate your meaning. In writing there are no cues, and you would have to anticipate every possible misunderstanding.
People always criticize English for its spelling, and justifiably so, except that written English uses ridiculous spelling to resolve ambiguity, similar to the way Hanzi uses different characters for identical sounding words. For instance: I and eye; there, they're, and their; slay and sleigh; right and rite; and many, many more (let's not talk about red, read, reed and...read). I now think of English spelling as being like Hanzi. Don't bother trying to make sense of the spelling, just remember which spelling means what.
It would be nice if there were systematic rules for combining a limited number of radicals into a very large number of full characters, but I suspect that in order for the rules to actually work they would have to be just as complex and hard to learn as the present set of often randomly constructed characters.
Having said all that, I think they blew an opportunity with the simplification by trying to accommodate people who already knew the old characters. They should have taken the 200 most common characters (or whatever number you choose) and made them really simple (still not phonetic). Ninety percent of the writing in any language consists of the same two hundred or so words used very often. Learning 200 characters is a lot faster than learning the two thousand you need to be considered competent. It would suck for the already literate, but life is like that.
One of the great ironies of Mandarin is that the spoken language is very easy, probably because it has been learned by large numbers of foreigners for a very long time, but the writing system means that most of those foreigners have been functionally illiterate. Learning Hanzi as an adult is a major pain, made worse when it is claimed that it is a "system" which "makes sense". Makes about as much sense as English spelling. If you look at the history of stupidly spelled words it becomes clear why they are spelled that way, as I would speculate that Hanzi characters also make sense if one considers the history, but from the standpoint of using them today, right now...no. Hanzi is not an organized system and the closest you can get to the meaning of a character by looking at the radicals is an idea that it might be about something having to do with something. Which is not particularly useful.
Rant, rant, rant. Rant.
I think to a large degree in English because pronunciation has drifted so far from the written standard we tend not to care about the phonetic pronunciations anymore, and actually do actively try to distinguish meaning in writing. For example the word “whole” never originally had a ‘w’, but it was added in order to distinguish it from “hole”.
Honestly though, this approach has been quite flawed. Sure it disambiguates the differences between homophones, but not to the point where English is not phonetic at all. As a result we try to figure out how to say words we do not recognize, and often fail. The ambiguity was never really a huge problem, if it was we would run into the problem far more often in spoken language than we do. These days it might look funny to native English speakers if we started writing “Santa flies on his slay” rather than “sleigh”, but it merely would be a growing pain as English speakers would still understand what is being said. There are edge cases where it might need to be specified, but realistically most English speakers would very quickly pick up what words mean with context if they started writing phonetically. And when you consider how many resources are expended on teaching spelling to children only for them to continue to fail to spell correctly in adulthood, the supposed advantages of English orthography really appear miniscule when unlike Chinese or Japanese you cannot really even derive the meaning of words from the writing without considerably broad vocabulary knowledge in languages that are not English.
I am learning on Busuu and with Chinese friends, in coversation using mix chinese/english to build vocab - Chinglish...I have along way to go and want ot get HSK1 next year but won't take test until very sure, Idon't want to scrape thru, better to wait and nail it.
Lovely video. And you have a lot of good points wty and Idk haha I'm learning Thai and I'm still struggling with reading it hahaha and it's more easy than Chinese but a little more complicated than Korean so meh~ I'm not sure if the latin writing system it's better or korean..., but all of them is always worth to learn hahah. I love you 🥺.
A huge disadvantage of phonetic writing is that a language's phonetic system is constantly changing and varies by dialect - so unless you reform it (and have multiple dialectic varieties), you end up with words like 'ENOUGH'.
You mentioned Chinese people forgetting Hanzi - how many English speakers constantly mispell words?
Germans just constantly reform theirs and ignore dialects (some dialects are more akin to separate languages).
Thats a gud point, M H. Pronunseeashun duz chanj acros dekades and senchyureez, so keeping writing consistent with speech is a pereniel chalenj. However, id say that even mispeled wurds ar mor comprehensibl then arbitraree visuel simbels.
@@declup but English from the 1200's and that of today are incomprehensibly distant whilst Chinese from 2000 years ago still looks like Chinese one would or could write (in spite of shapes having been somehow altered over time)
Yeah, but on the flip side an alphabet helps you see how people used to pronounce the language in the past. To do the same with a logographic system like Chinese, you can only make guesses based on the sound clues in the characters, as well as from comparing with conservative non-Chinese languages like Vietnamese.
There wasn't really standard spelling until recently. The king's English is remarkably inclusive due to empire. Not like say French. But simplified Chinese has killed the diversity of the language in the name of nation building.
American-born, moved to and lived in Taiwan for 2 years now. While my literacy has improved tremendously, after all the efforts to fully immerse myself in Chinese characters, I entirely agree with the argument in this video and can never put down my disapproval of Chinese characters and its complexities beyond just acquisition.
Honestly the title alone earned my subscription . And the 愛 character side note cracked me the fuck up
Very interesting video!
One question; Which chinese characters are used in japanese, korean and vietnamese?
@7:50 Is the best part for those of us using Chinese characters for other East Asian languages--Traditional Mandarin (Taiwan), Japanese, Cantonese, etc. (I dabble in whichever are available on language apps such as Duo, Memrise and Clozemaster.)
I think the good things about Chinese writing system is that it can express meaning with much less charters. So even though it is not good for writing and typing but personally I find it much faster and easier to read Chinese books. You can look at a Chinese character as a complete word rather than charters.
In Chinese:
我覺得中文書寫系統的好處是可以用比較少的字表達意思，所以說雖然它寫或是打起來比較麻煩，但是我個人認為讀中文書的時候快而且簡單很多。你可以把中文字當成是一個字而不是字符。
You can see it's much shorter and faster to read.
Yes, I do agree Chinese is more concise, but everything is a trade-off. Concise writing comes at the expense of steeper learning curve. For example, (we could make English more concise) by [simply creating new words.] If we create a new word "A" that means (we could make...) and new word "B" that means [simply creating...], then my previous sentence would be "A by B". Wow! that's so much shorter. But you can probably see the problem is you'll end up with a much much bigger vocabulary base to achieve the same level of communication.
@@ABChinese I agree there is a trade-off, and I also think Chinese is harder to write, but reading is where Chinese Shines. Concised charaters makes Chinese very easy and fast to read. The learning curve for reading Chinese is arguably faster than English. If you read English by spelling evey word out, it would take a lot of time just to read a sentence. What I find out is even in Engish, we read the word as a whole rather than breaking them down as characters. I also see similar conclusion in my machin learning project.
中文的信息密度比英文高不少。
I disagree that you can't guess the sound at all， and also the meaning. Because the Chinese character is composed of two parts : the key which is the semantical world to which the character belongs which gives an idea of the meaning and the phonetic part which gives an idea of the sound. So for example if you see a character you don't know with a tree key and a "ba" sound phonetic part， you can guess it's a kind of plant and also that it is probably spelled ba or bo or fa.
Excellent video with an equally excellent comment section. ☺
@ 4:03. What about Cangjie?
To your point about forgetting the characters, my gf is from Taiwan and she forgets the characters all the time. It's very funny when I'm doing my beginner/ intermediate review lessons and I have to tell her what a character means. 😂
i think she's either trying to test you or making you feel better
@@cubing7276 I think you didn't watch the video.
建设你多了解一下中文和英文的差别！你就会发现中文远比英文高效的多得多❗️👍
中文采用的是两级构词法！而英文是一级构词法！就像低维度的人无法理解高维度的人一样！😅
为什么我不喜欢👎用英文评论？❗️主要原因就是英文和中文输入相比太慢了😅
So interesting. What impresses me the most is how this video anticipates all of my counter-arguments and answers them. Wow.
I would like to see and I've put some thought into a mapping of Han characters to English, for a number of reasons. I've seen some projects going about it before but I don't think they had the exact direction I had in mind. It would be fun if nothing else.
What do you mean, map them into English?
I think the best way to go about it would be assigning a character to each morpheme, the problem is sometimes English words don’t decompose neatly or very intuitively
For example should emotion be e(x)-mot-ion (3 parts) or e(x)-motion or just emotion?
for cranberry should it use the same character as crane, because it comes from Saxon roots meaning crane+berry鹤莓, or should “cran” be considered different enough from “crane”? Or maybe cranberry should just be one character… who knows
It is not so difficult to draw individual Chinese characters as to paint Mona Lisa. Because all characters are different possible combinations of 27 different shapes of strokes. The real challenge (or fascination) is to memorize many characters and still distinguish them from each other so quickly.
Describing it this way makes it seem a lot more like an alphabet (though irregular)
2:46，As mentioned in the top comment, Wubi input method.
The modern pinyin input method is based on big data and AI analysis to enable efficient input.
Wubi input is based on the shape of the characters. If you understand the beauty of the Wubi input method, you can use one second to input a phrase that requires four to five seconds to input in pinyin. For example, the pinyin input of "People's Republic of China（中华人民共和国）" is "zhonghuarenmingongheguo" , It takes about four seconds. This is the first option that can be directly input after AI calculation. If there is no big data AI, it will take more than five seconds to search word by word, and it may take more than ten seconds.
And Wubi input "People's Republic of China（中华人民共和国）" is "kwwl", nothing more.
It's just that Pinyin is a simpler, international and systematic input method that more suitable for foreigners.
Because Wubi's stroke system has been classified in various ways in China since ancient times, and Wubi is specially developed for Western-style 26-letter keyboards, which retains Chinese tradition and Revolutionary inventions integrated into the mainstream of the world.
You've made a great video. These are true for me when I was learning Chinese as well.
One important fact: post-Roman European states actually use Latin as a written language but spoke it in their own dialect, kind of like Chinese languages right now. The idea of using Latin alphabet to write using each vernacular (localized) language only came around after the Protestant Reformation.
听 聽
心 口 耳 （I don't know how to represent the tiny simple in the simplified version of country) one of them was kept and changed but the others were not 近 jin rhymes with the particle pronounce the same 今 or 斤 what does mouth or all the meanings of that character have to do with listening
actually an alphabet does not help you much when your language has silent letters --- even silent first letters or when there are many letters for a simple sound ... so for German d,t,th sound the same , f,ph,v sound the same, k,c,ch,q sound the same and we got lots of silent letters and they are even increasing in number
Nah. I disagree. Not a speaker of chinese myself, I just know how to say "I read a book" in mandarin haha. Spanish and English speaker here. I think that judging a writing system based on how it suits technology or "modernity" is an oversimplified way to put it. It's like saying that playing the piano is totally impractical and inefficient because we have synthesizers or Sibelius nowadays, or that painting by hand is a silly and time-consuming way to create art because we have Adobe Illustrator nowadays. A language's speaking form and writing form, in my opinion, serve much more purposes than just "practicality". There's a point in the video where the speaker says that Chinese needed to resort to a romanization process so it would be easier to know how to pronounce it. Well, at some point our languages also required the creation of a phonetic alphabet so it would be easier to standardize their pronunciation. Languages evolve, and I think the fact that a language doesn't suit computers doesn't make it terrible, because maybe there are other purposes that it may serve more efficiently than our languages do, purposes we're totally unaware of because of our cultural bias.
I have just started to learn mandarin and happened to find your videos, and what a great surprise to see excelent videos about mandarin! Thank you! Besides Japanese, I think Mandarin os one of the most beautiful languages ever! So hard to pronounce though! Well, not as hard as arabic hahaha!
Faguo sweatshirt ... And yes, your videos are great because they are amusing and relatable and we all know the Chinese aspect of understanding Hanzi but hearing the English point of view from you is why we watch this video.
If you used any other language as a basis for your comparison, some of those that actually use phonetic writing systems, your arguments would be valid. The problem is that even when learning English you need a secondary (pronunciation respelling) system when learning new vocabulary because you are usually clueless about the pronunciation. In languages such as German, Spanish or Slavic languages you just need to know the basic pronunciation rules and that's it, you know how to read everything... no need to spend years to learn the English spelling chaos. For me learning Chinese script is often more intuitive than learning often illogical "right order and the combination of letters" you need to know to write down some English word. Both English and Chinese are my second languages, so I'm not subjective in that regard.
While we're on the subject of characters.
I never understood why the pinyin keyboard doesn't actually allow me to actually write the tones when searching for a character or when it's trying to guess a full sentence I'm writing.
Let me freaking scroll all the "shì" rather than all the "shi" !!! 😣
I would likely also provide a better auto complete as well.
Unless it's a feature that I missed, but I haven't seen that anywhere so far.
On the french mobile keyboard I can just hold "e" to see "é", "è" and "ê", and on PC i've keys for "é" and "è", and double key combo for "ê"
Why can't Chinese Pinyin do that as well ?
You can write tones with a bopomofo keyboard.
@@tyunpeters3170 Oh !
Nice ! I guess I should learn how to use one then 😍
Thanks !
@@tyunpeters3170 oh thanks !!
You could type 2 words and delete the second one to be efficient (e.g Type 事情 and delete 情), or like the other guy said, bopomofo does have tones, but you have to learn an entire new set of symbols just for typing.
@@Imperator_27 Yup, the 2 characters thing then erasing is already what I'm doing. For example if I want "跑", I'm usually typing "跑步".
Because I'm already mostly interacting with Taiwanese people, I think it will make sense for my own uses that I move to bopomofo, at the very least on my phone (right now it's in QWERTY pinyin traditional chinese).
I might keep my computer to my custom AZERTY pinyin traditional chinese set up.
I don't think learning the new set will be that much a big deal compare to what I already have to do to learn how to recognize new chinese characters 😅
I think my main struggle will probably relearning the keyboard mapping, because that'll be way different than AZERTY and QWERTY which I'm both used to.
Interesting video!
Just a curious question to those who were Chinese-educated or had some exposure:
For highly technical domains with very long compound-words (eg. EDTA, 2,4-DNPH) do Chinese ppl invent their own new words/characters or simply use the English/international names/abbreviations?
(Or some kind of both?)
ie. Will anyone actually write 乙二胺四乙酸酯, 二硝基苯基肼 (from Google translate)? looks like it will take forever, and (probably) no feasible Chinese abbreviation?
Or they might name it sth else after someone/something?
缩写和你们的一样，但用汉字读可以助于理解分子结构，和推测属性，烃 = oh 酸= co3
钠=Na 通过左侧偏旁说明他是金属 硅 =si 通过左侧偏旁石说明他是非金属 氦 =He 通过气说明他是气体 氕氘氚是氢的三个同位素
你可以搜索中文元素周期表事实😂
Most science is written formally in english. But there are chinese translations of the technical terms to help in educating monolingual students, however they are not as efficient as using the abbreviated forms from IUPAC or something.
agree, but you shouldn't conflate alphabetic systems and phonetic scripts, they are different. and a script being hard or even impossible to implement in technology, sometimes it really is the fault of technology, like for example vertical scripts.
Chinese characters is a glyph / pictorial based writing system which is basically designed for communicating the meaning. By looking at the character you can guess the meaning even if u don't recognise the character. In the traditional characters, if you recognise the parts of the character you can even guess the sound as they do form a pattern of how to sound. Simplified characters, however, have mess up the reading pattern part though.
Alphabet based writing system like English is designed for easy reading of the word but it doesn't convey the meaning at all. Korean newspaper sometimes include Hanja (Chinese characters) instead of Hangeul (sound based) alone because the context isn't very clear which word/phrase the article is trying to say as the words have the same reading.
Take for example Japanese writing system which has both elements of alphabetical system (hiragana/katakana) as well as Chinese characters (kanji). If you read an article based solely on hiragana alone, you will find that it is much harder to understand the meaning of the article. However with the appropriate use of kanji used in place of the hiragana, the understanding becomes much faster and easier.
In conclusion alphabetical system is focused on reading, while pictoral based system is focused on understanding.
Salt = 盐
The video is great! As usual; but the comments section is greater today... waiting with popcorns to read new snippets of info on chinese writing system.
seeing none of the comments agree on this channel makes me ultra-relieved. as a native speaker from taiwan, the chinese character system COULDN'T be more perfect, not only because we use traditional characters without simplifying the essential parts, but also it allows us to at least recognize the pronunciation even tho we've never seen the character before.
I love the efficiency of Chinese characters. I think if you keep learning Chinese you may change your mind on some of the points you talked about here. Good luck.
I think that the fact that the number of syllables in use is limited to around 1400 for each tone, and the fact that when put toghether the possible combinations are also much lower than in European languages makes the characters neccesary.
If we add to that the fact that polyphony is ingrained in the system then character triple association (sound, form, meaning) and its correspondent memorisation goes even trickier, what is a pain.
One unrelated note to my previous paragraph: not every region in China used the same writing system, there is one region that uses European writing, another using arabic...up to a total of 6 different writing systems. All of them appear in the country money notes, as a recognition of that multiculturalism.
Nowadays, with the linguistic unification tried at schools as a vehicle to form a common communication language, your comment makes more sense thought, and I even get your point regarding past times where not so many people was able to write the language, and where most of them that did write used the same character system (but those 6 writing systems already existed then).
Can you talk about the old Chinese keyboard in which the keys were actually characters? Or the Chinese input systems in general?
No, only during times during the printing press were Chinese characters each printed with a separete key. In Computer keyboards, before pinyin became popular, 五笔(wubi) was one of the inputing methods which used the shape of the characters to input them on the keyboard. However, it would be kind of hard to explain if you don't know Chinese.
你好! Do you think it's worth to learn Cangjie? Right now I use the Microsoft pinyin input method but that feels like cheating, I just have to type the pinyin and the hanzi comes out. Cangjie however is much harder and I wonder if you think if and when I should start learning it.
仓颉不困难吧，但是仓颉没什么效率，还不如学其他形码
pinyin is best ，we Chinese basically use pinyin！
Absolutely agree. And because Japan adopted them, and I now live in Tokyo, I’m suffering and struggling trying to remember thousands of characters. Even though I can speak Japanese, my reading level is only at an elementary school level - and it’s a little difficult to live as a borderline illiterate 30 year old 😆
Always love your videos!
Also totally understand absolutely loving learning something - even though logically you can acknowledge it’s impractical. But I rarely hear other people able to do that so this was a really interesting video
I live in HK and tried to teach myself Traditional Chinese characters years ago when I was also trying to learn Cantonese, I gave up, maybe some day I will resume, but the fact that what you say out loud isn't the same as what you write kept throwing me off
I can read Hiragana and Katakana but Kanji i'm struggling.
Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong SAR all have their own standards for commonly used characters. Mainland China: List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese: 2,500 characters. Taiwan: Standard font list of commonly used Chinese characters: 4,808 characters. Hong Kong: Table of commonly used fonts: 4,759 characters. There are about 300 commonly used Chinese characters in China, and these Chinese characters account for 70% of all documents, and after expanding to 2000 common Chinese characters, they account for 98% of all documents.
@@gzkony I'm not sure about Japan. I can read about 500 characters but it's definitely not even close to enough to be able to read almost anything. I think it's said to be able to read common basic documents you need to be able to read at least 3000
Very nice analysis, making some very valid points.
啊但是作为母语者，在听到非母语者说汉字很难之前，我个人一直没有感觉到汉字哪里不方便欸（即使是学了英语之后）（小声）
可能是从小就学的优势？对汉字的各个部位组成和作用的印象更深更系统一些？(´･ω･`)
(1) Why would one have to reform one own language for the convenience of foreigners (mainly Westerners) to learn? A language is primarily used to communicate between native speakers of the language. It does not exist to serve foreigners.
You cite the 'character amnesia' among young Chinese (which I think can be attributed to overly relying on pinyin input on smartphones and computers) but average native speakers of phonocentric languages (like Germanic, Romance, or Slavic) also have a spelling problem to which autocorrection helps to mitigate. Many languages that adopt Roman-Latin scripts also have problems to transcribe their pronunciation into Roman-Latin scripts. These written languages cannot accurately represent the pronuciation. Modern German is an exception because the written German is standardised very recently.
You praised Hanguel as one of the best writting system but Hanguel does not even represent Korean pronunication accurately either. Many consonants change their pronunications when they are in different place in the word or a sentence but the character is the same. The Best?
(2) Your video is just repeating phonocentrism over other form of langauges. Maybe because you are an American and a native English speaker. Why would photocentrism be better and logocentric langauge like Chinese is 'terrible'. It is not clear to me. I find that each language has its own advantage within its own context. I understand that you have to make money, so saying that 'Chinese writting is terrible' attracts more clicks than saying ' Chinese writing is difficult but there is a reason for that'. Your video is not 'an objective judgement' as you said but a very subjective one from the perspective of a phonocentrist.
(3) Chinese writing is difficult to learn than phonocentric langauges but from the perspective of learning a language as a whole it does not make much different. I say this as I speak 5 languages (Thai, Lao, English, Chinese, French) and I can read Italian and Spanish. I am learning Korean and Japanese and I know a few Thai and Chinese dialects (Putonghua, Teochew, and Cantonese). In phonocentric languages, you can easily learn how to read the alphabets and most of them can take less than 1 hour but you do not know what does it mean. The alphabets transcribe the sound but they have no meaning of their own. In logocentric langauge like Chinese, you can easily learn to understand the characters but you do not know how they are pronunced. 'MOUNTAIN has no meaning on its own (and it does not even tell you how to pronunce it it can be pronunced Mo-Un-Ta-In and many other possible ways), 山 does look a lot like a mountain but we do not know how to pronunce it.
(4) I originally have many things to say but I find it unproductive. I recommend you to read a book called 'Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958'.
_"but average native speakers of phonocentric languages (like Germanic, Romance, or Slavic) also have a spelling problem to which autocorrection helps to mitigate"_
I guarantee you that no literate German has ever forgotten how to spell the word for "egg" or "toothpaste". The problem with Chinese characters is on a completely different level than the occasional tricky/unintuitive spelling in alphabetic scripts. Also, if I somehow do forget how to write "toothpaste" in German, I can sound it out and get at least close enough, so that I and others know what I mean. If I don't know the character for "toothpaste" in Chinese, I'm just screwed.
Also, a writing system isn't a language, it's a technology used to record information. There are no "phonocentric" or "logocentric" languages. Chinese isn't a "logocentric language", it's a language that is traditionally written using a logographic(-ish) script. You can write any language with any type of script.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs You think that it is a problem because you are trying to shove a whole different system of language into your narrow view of how a language should be based on a phonocentrist view.
You are not the first to say that the best writing system is the one that can perfectly transcribe sounds. Those people before you were Western philosophers like Aristotle and Rousseau who think that speech is supreme (and writing system is parasitic). It is not surprised that Western civilisation is built based on phonocentrism and Western colonisation helped to spread the idea that "Chinese writing system is terrible because it does not transcribe the sounds".
That is entirely your own definition of a language (which is again based on phonocentrism). Derrida, many linguists, and me think otherwise. Phonocentrism vs Logocentrism is a huge debate and I did not make it up.
@@chaiyasitdhi Chinese characters work as rebuses, basically. I don't try to remember every stroke in e.g. 梨 I remember it as 'profit' over 'tree', I remember 利 as 'grain' and 'knife'. Which I think is also useful.
@@adapienkowska2605 I agree with you. Chinese native speakers have pictorial memory of their characters. Modern (and young) Chinese may not be able to draw or write certain characters (since they do not write much these days) but they still remember what it looks like. If you show them the text, they can still read it. For example, almost everyone who knows about Mona Lisa knows how it looks like but most of us cannot redraw it with the exact details.
I think these people see Chinese characters through the lens of native Roman-Latin script users. They complain and trash the whole writing system as 'terrible' because it cannot compare to their superior writing systems in coveying the sounds (which ironnically do not work as they should be either). These ways of thinking lead to the idea that spokeng langauge is superior than logocentric langauge like Chinese or sign languages used by the Deaf community.
Your first point has a lot of things together. This is very much not my area of expertise but I'd like to comment a few things:
1. There are many reasons why the convenience of foreigners might be important to a language, particularly when you want foreigners learning it or when you are in competition with other languages. It is definitely not a mute point. My language recently had a grammar reform (portuguese) and one of the arguements was that it would make the language easier for second language speakers, which is important when you have countries where many people speak minority languages as their first language or are aspiring to be a global language.
2. The problems of transcribing any language to an alphabet exist as there are never fully phonetical systems, as languages have historirs, variations etc. That said, all languages can definitely be faithfully transcribed, as they can be pronounced, alphabetically. You just need to create the right system. Of course as times change, accents evolve and so on, more discrepancies appear, but that is not necessarily a huge problem as the system overall tends to make sense as its humans who make the sound changes. Regardless, just because no language has a perfect representation of how people speak (which is impossible) it doesn't mean that having a closer representation to a high degree is not a workable and useful thing.
I'd also disagree with your third point, granted, I gave up on learning how to write logographic languages, so I may be biased, but I don't think the cost to learn a logographic and an alphabetic language is roughly the same. Even if my language is totally unrelated to two separate languages and writing systems, it'd be easier to learn the alphabetic system and thus the overall cost of learning a language would be significantly lower. If the languages or writing systems are related, then that is where the advantage lies: its easier to learn unrelated languages with related logographic systems, but if the languages are related then its easier to pick it up with alphabetical writing (especially when they use the same alphabet, I'd say). The difference is that the alphabet has some advantages regardless of whether you use the same alphabet or not, while for logograms you can only hope to argue that its easier if the twp languages are using the same or related systems.
I can only imagine what will happen when ABChinese encounters Japanese writing...
English is awful phonetically. When I studied I had to mentally disconnect reading it phonetically and just memorize sound to word because nearly all similarly spelled words are pronounced differently. Just look at rough and dough only differ in 1 letter yet does not even rhyme. To drive the point home, the following makes sense but in written it looks like crazy talk. Read and lead rhymes, read and lead also rhymes, but neither read and read nor lead and lead rhymes.
What I love about Chinese characters is that it's like learning logos and street signs. You can see the puma or adidas logo and your brain recognize it faster than it would take you to read the word. I agree that it is slower to learn than lets say French or Spanish but I still love that instant understanding when I see a character I know. That feeling is priceless!
thanks for this video!
A friend of mine took introductory Mandarin in college and dropped it because it was so difficult and took more work than all his other science and math classes combined. Calculus was a breeze compared to Chinese, so he says.
By the way he's not native Spanish speaker and he learned English without too much undue trouble.
Yes it's terrible but it has other perks. One is information density. I studied German and Chinese for a while and I can tell you, seeing those long German words is such a headache. I feel like the spaces occupied by each letter is such a wasted space. It's similar to English but to a lesser extent. It's also one of the reasons why Japanese people still writes Kanji despite already having a widespread phonetic character set Hiragana and Katakana.
Moreover, it's not like native speakers see words letter by letter. Our brains make shortcuts while reading a certain text. Thats why when you see the word "stuednt" your brain translates it immediately to "student." The text as a whole also gives meaning, not just the letters.
I think the problem with Chinese is native speakers dont usually use a fallback when they forget how to write something. Japanese people aren't afraid to use Hiragana/Katakana when they forgot how to write something in Kanji. Chinese people on the other hand, strictly want to write in Hanzi whenever they can.
YES, very true. Chinese writing is more dense than English too. This was definitely a perk in the ancient world when paper was super expensive, but it doesn't matter as much anymore.
@@ABChinese Information density is still important in this era. Even though we rarely use papers, the screen size of devices such as smartphones is still limited. If you've ever used a phone set in German, you'll see what I mean. There is a tendency when buttons, or any text box for that matter, do not have enough space for some German words.
Another example: writing this comment here is very cumbersome as CZcams only provide a tiny space for this very task. I constantly need to scroll up to see what I've previously written. It's a minor inconvenience but you can't deny that information density still matters even in the age of computers.
I didn't really understand, is the pinyin used on keyboard, converted into "full/simplified" chinese, or is it stored in these pinyin symbols ?
How are books printed ? When it uses the full character set, people must know them all. So "modern" people are kind of able to passivly read these "older" characters, but they are not used to write it any more ? Is that put the right way ?
Pinyin that is input on the keyboard is converted to Chinese characters.
Love that you have explained the major difference between Chinese character and English.
There are six rules or maybe conclusions about Chinese character from the ancestor.
象形者，畫成其物，隨體詰詘，日、月是也。
指事者，視而可識，察而見意，上、下是也。
會意者，比類合誼，以見指撝，武、信是也。
形聲者，以事為名，取譬相成，江、河是也。
轉注者，建類一首，同意相受。考、老是也。
假借者，本無其字，依聲託事。令、長是也。
I think it may be better to start learning Traditional Chinese by these six rules or conclusions. I don't know how much of these six rules remained in Simplified Chinese.
没了，放心吧。
English uses IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) in dictionaries because you can't 100% know how a word is said.
My native language, Finnish, is pronounced like it is written. But because of long conjugations, the words are super long and a bit hard to read.
I don't think there is a perfect writing system.
Indonesian is phonetic and there are no conjugations. Viola, the perfect writing system.
@@tyunpeters3170 not 100% phonetic because there are silent letters like h in tahu. Also e represents 2 different sounds like énak and kena.
@@tyunpeters3170 conjugations have nothing to do with writing system.
@@adapienkowska2605 The original commenter mentioned conjugations
Let me add that I knew some guys from HongKong that when they type the chinese characters in their phones, they don't use a phonetic system. They have no idea about pinyin, since mandarin is their second language. So they type the characters using the strokes of them in a weird and complicated manner that was hard for me to understand, but much easier for them.
There's also Jyutping input for Hanzi in Cantonese pronounciation, and it is easy to get, I downloaded mine online in just a few minutes.
They may be using the Cangie/Chongkit keyboard layout (倉頡輸入法) where the Chinese radicals are assigned to a particular key.
3:56 That’s hilarious. I also tried using Wubi years ago but I could not figure it out. Idk how there are people who can use it😂
An advantage of this system is the elimination ambiguous words that sound almost the same but harder to clarify by context easily in written form. And also provide a pretty reliable ethymological connections between words, that is harder to notice in some languages.
Now, are this advantages worth it to memorize this thousands of characters? Hard to say, however what we know is that it's basically impossible to get rid of them even if you try to.
I agree. It is beautiful, but if you could use pinyin all the time, learning Chinese wouldn’t be much harder than learning many other languages. I began learning Chinese a year ago, planning to use only pinyin. Then I got interested in the calligraphy and learning from songs. I’ve made my own alphabetic dictionary based on pinyin.
I learnt how to input a Chinese keyboard from your video, and to type in Chinese.
Except that there are many homonyms. "Yi" has over 200 homonyns. People have written stories using just "Yi"
@@caroline10081 So true, and my pinyin dictionary if full of words beginning with z!
@@caroline10081 or "施氏食獅史" and I'm sure it would be completely not understandable if its in pinyin
Loved the video as always - couple of random thoughts:
Hangul: Illustrates your point completely. Hanja was too difficult for ordinary folk to learn. It needed a custom-made phonetic writing system in order to bring literacy to the masses, and it work incredibly well. As a writing system built around mouth shapes it will be fascinating to see whether it updates its spelling as and when Korean goes through a major pronunciation shift, or whether Hangul is set for life and people will just carry on using the old spelling because that's what they're used to.
Hanzi & History: One of the main advantages Hanzi has over a phonetic writing system is exactly that: it is not tied to speech. You pointed out that it means other languages could use it (Korean, Vietnamese etc) which allowed inter-country diplomacy, but it also allows Chinese speakers to connect to their past thanks to the fact it is not rendered obsolete through language evolution (such as vowel shifts). Unlike in Chinese, if an English speaker wants to read something written by Chaucer then you'd need to translate it from Old English; it is literally unreadable unless you speak 1500s English. Plenty of poetry, plays, philosophy, culture, etc is rendered null by modern English speakers speaking what is effectively a different language. (Side note: a video on how Chinese pronunciation has changed over the centuries would be awesome)
Hanzi & meaning: In phonetic languages you can usually guess the pronunciation of an unfamilliar word, but you cannot guess the meaning unless it is in context. Chinese has an (admittedly unreliable) chance of inferring meaning based on the radicals used to write it. This is nice, but probably of less use than the phonetic thing, and I guess which you prefer is an individual choice. A language like Esperanto would be idea as it's the best of both: written phonetically, and constructed deliberately so a reader can immediately tell if it's a verb, noun, etc... and roughly guess the subject matter (ie. somthing with 'bon' likely means it is good, or well, a word that ends in '-ilo' means it is a type of tool)
Writing: The below link might interest you - it's a lecture by Tom Mullaney on Chinese typewriters. At the timestamp he talks about (afaik) the world's first predictive text, in the 1950s. It seems to be a precursor to Wubi as it works on stroke order, but it's a fascinating watch.
czcams.com/video/KSEoHLnIXYk/video.html
Holy smokes! That machine looks both fascinating and insanely intimidating... I would like to make a video about how Mandarin rose to dominance, but I'll have to spend some time on research;)
WOAH THATS AN AWESOME MACHINE! ESPECIALLY FOR 1947!
Chaucer is Middle English-not Old English, and not very difficult for native modern English speakers. Early 1300s and earlier is more difficult
@@angusauty4396 I think the point still applies here. And I might add that as a native English speaker I have trouble with Chaucer and Shakespeare already, I can't imagine trying to read Ænglish.
@@yoshilovesyoshi it depends on dialect and how well-read you are but Shakespeare should really not be too difficult at all if you actually try, and chaucer requires a bit of effort at the start but it's really just a matter of getting used to it. Old English requires significantly more effort because it has case and more verb conjugations etc and is significantly different as a language, so you generally have to actually study it, whereas middle English is basically just reading it enough and maybe googling the odd word if you get really stuck
can china adopt altered korean writing system for communication and use hanzi for arts?
I don't know about that, Chinese and Korean are completely different languages. I think hanzi fits the Chinese languages just fine although it is hard.
That would be amazing! But people would probably be reluctant to switch because they don’t want the time they invested learning Habzi to be in vain. Just like Hangul was in Korea when it was invented, people didn’t want to switch from Hanzi to Hangul
A great video!
English is actually quite bad as a writing system as pronunciation is not accurately or consistently represented by the written characters. Spanish is way superior in that regard
I am not learning Chinese but Japanese. I have enjoyed learning them and I find them very unique. But I would be lying if I said they where ideal, but not without merit. The benefit is that I can guess the meanings of words which is especially useful as a learner if you get over the initial hurdle, also it's very compact good for garbage websites like Twitter that limit how much you can say. I wish you could have the best of both words but just isn't possible to my knowledge. My favorite writing system from functionality level would be Hangul(also very compact due to how it works, but still phonetic), but from looks I quite like Hiragana, Katakana and Cyrillic
I hope you like millions upon millions of homonyms cuz that's what you're signing up for.
the way understand it, you input the pinyin, the computer shows you all characters that are covered by the pinyin, and you select one, right? so, before the computers got good graphics, how did the chinese use computers to process text? I am not curious... in the 70s and 80s
I feel like sticking to a character writing system after seeing alphabets in action is like some remote tribe being shown the wheel and they walk away saying "Nah dude, I'm fine, I think I'll pass on that."
I both agree and disagree, but I also think the writing system is less important than the education system. As an American, I definitely struggle with Chinese characters. I do think that the need to learn so many characters has slowed my learning of Chinese. However, now that I know Chinese characters I am frequently shocked that I can follow along with Cantonese and occasionally even Japanese language shows if the subtitles are in characters (not Chinese language, just using the Chinese characters). This matches your earlier point that the flexibility of the characters allows communication even between different languages.
I also disagree with your arguments that Chinese "relies" on pinyin to function in the modern world. Pinyin is helpful, but there are other methods of writing characters, as you point out. Furthermore, even English needs a second writing system for proper pronunciation (there are multiple - IPA is the most famous, but very few people actually use it. The simplified pronunciation guides you can find in dictionaries are better examples). Linguists almost always resort to IPA, or some other notation system, when recording a new language, as very few languages are truly phonetic (and the few languages that are tend to be languages for which the writing system was invented or reformed just a few decades ago, linguistic drift over just a few hundred years means any writing system must either go through frequent reform or become non-phonetic).
The high literacy rates in China, Japan, and Taiwan further show that even a very difficult to learn writing system can be learned by almost everyone in the population, provided there is good access to education.
I also disagree that history is the only reason to learn traditional characters. Taiwan and Singapore exist, and they use traditional characters almost all the time.
I agree with your point, although Singapore and Malaysia actually use simplified characters.
what's your opinion on Georgian script?
I tried to talk slower in this video, and I also got rid of the post-roll at the end. Let me know what you think!
Your speech pace is just perfect, don't think about it too much, people can adjust the playback speed if they need 😁
You manage to pronounce the word "characters" with only two syllables, rather like "cactus".😂 You do talk fast, but that just communicates your enthusiasm. Your speed is manageable for native English speakers, but I don't know how non-natives find it. Do you talk so fast because you're catering to the modern short attention span and trying to say everything in as short a time as possible? If so, that's a mentality you should get rid off. Your content is interesting and people will listen: you don't have to rush.
I'm only beginning to learn Mandarin, but I think it's beneficial in some ways. Mostly because there are plenty of words that have the same sound AND tone, that are different concepts altogether. In that sense, maybe it was bound to end up the way it did. Because when shí can be a sound that can mean 12 different things, (not considering 3 other tones and a neutral tone that also have other meanings), it's probably beneficial that in writing, one can distinguish between the idea as opposed to just the sound. It might actually make learning it incredibly difficult.
The first argument is just "Chinese characters don't fit into technology designed for alphabetic writing systems"
Many people think that the technology is objective and if it is a certain way, that means it is the ONLY way. Which is false, obviously.
Thanks for this video. One question I have is whether a person using simplified characters would be accepted readily in Taiwan. During my first visit there back in 1981, I showed my "Concise Chinese-English Dictionary" to a girl, and she said it uses "Mao Zedong's writing".
I recall reading that way back during the Revolution, Mao questioned whether the language should be converted to a phonetic basis, and Stalin suggested keeping it in the form of characters, to preserve an important aspect of China's culture, so Mao didn't make this change.
I wasn't completely on board with your argument until the example of 爱 , that was quotable!!!
Also note that the system we've settled on for inputting Chinese characters into a computer (pinyin) removes one of the biggest supposed advantages of Chinese characters, namely that they're pronunciation-agnostic and can be understood across dialects/languages. Now you _do_ have to know how a character is pronounced in Standard Mandarin if you want to type it. Seems like people don't actually care very much about that benefit in practice.
oh damn great point
Firstly, there is Jyutping for Cantonese. Secondly, Since Mandarin is the "official" dialect of Chinese in basically all places that speak Chinese, you don't really need cross-dialect communication.
9:00 For most of Europe history, many European countries had multiple dialects spoken inside the same countries, all using latin letters (at least for western Europe), some of them not being intelligible at all even in writing.
The borders mostly if not always related to nobles and kings wanting to get more land, and European royal families marrying each other to form alliances and unify. I don't think it's related at all to languages.
The different national languages being spoken inside countries usually happened after as a goal to unify the multiple dialects spoken in each European country with already existing borders (which lead to quite a lot of dying dialects that governments are now trying (and failing) to revive to build new "european identities").
For example Catalan has been spoken for a really long time and still is spoken on both side of the French / Spanish border.
Another French example, in Western France there is the Basque language that isn't mutually intellgible with anything else (some linguist found links with the Georgian language which is spoken quite far away from France ahah, and btw, Georgian's writting system is great as well, it's phonetic ♥).
In Italy, for most of its history spoke multiple non-unintelligable dialects, so does Germany.
And there you also have Luxembourg, Belgium, and Switzerland who were multi languages almost ever since they existed and didn't impose a single national language unlike many other European countries.
As a matter of fact some Greek, Italian and German dialects just like in case of Chinese dialects are more akin to languages.
Europe has a bunch of dialect continuums and those did create sort of cultural areas which favored cultural exchange and even alliances. In some sense therefore I guess there's an indirect conection to language, but except for more modern countries of eastern and central europe (romantic nationalism), its definitely an indirect conection
I would like to add a few more observations from the perspective of a native Chinese speaker. As for the writing system being not alphabetical, due to the comparatively limited amount of phonemes in Mandarin (meaning the repetitive use of the same sounds), transforming the writing system into an alphabetical one while still retaining the meaning is simply impracticable. And although one cannot know the pronunciation of the character one doesn't know, one might still be able to guess its meaning and have a basic idea of what the character wants to express. It's similar to guessing the word from its Latin/Greek roots in Indo-European languages. And as for typing the characters, I think wubi 五笔 is still quite popular among the earlier generations, and a person conversant in this way of typing generally types faster than a person using pinyin. Yet it's true that nowadays people prefer pinyin because it does not require extra hours spent learning it.
And as I have been recently learning about writing systems across the world that are not alphabetical, I consider myself justified to say that there is no writing system completely in line with the sounds it tries to record.
Yet what intrigues me is that despite the writing system, the Chinese language is not dissimilar to alphabetical languages. A Chinese word (nowadays usually comprises of two characters) is just a series of sounds linked together as is in any other language; but the ideogram system makes people quite oblivious of this fact (at least it seems to me). And in this sense I quite agree with what you said about the character representing love. Anyway, thank you for making this interesting video.
I just love the fact that in the chinese writing system you at least get some clues to the meaning of the word, even if you don't know it. while in an alfabetical writing system, you're just able to pronounce an unknown word but are left clueless to it's meaning.
I actually enjoy learning the chinese writing system, as it's a journey on it's own. learning to write my own language was quite boring and repetitive (dutch, which is probably the language where the spelling stays the closest to how you pronounce it, spellingrules are often revised to reflect changes in the spoken language). It did go fast indeed. but the learning how to pronounce words correctly and how to spell them (all the exceptions to the rules), takes much longer then in chinese in my experience. Chinese is such an easy language in that respect. so there are always pro's and cons.
It depends on how familiar a reader is with the languages English comes from. English actually even has special spelling conventions for imported Greek words, so you're given a hint at what language a word's meaning comes from.
Someone who knows some Greek, Latin and/or German would be able to guess a *lot* of English.
If not because of the political conflict back then,
I think Zhuyin will be more widely uses as simpler writing system. Just like what Hiragana and Katakana are for Japanese.
im currently learning chinese, and one day decided to stroke out some traditional characters... it felt nice and oddly satisfying, also some characters just feel so silly to stroke out too haha