Why are Chinese characters still used?

yes that's true. i can sort out some of them even most of them are just ancient chinese and we never use it nowaday.

龖 this one is just two dragon 龍(we use simplified font now as 龙)
what i guess is just a group a dragon or a kind of dragon. according to dictionary that's mean flying dragon in ancient chinese

龞 龜 means turtle (simplified font 龟) what i guess is a kind of turtle. ancient chinese means turtle or the god of turtle

齱 this one is 齒 (means tooth) plus 取(means take) i guess that's mean no tooth at all. ancient chinese means tooth doesn't grow well

鼟 it's a 鼓(means drum) on top of 登(means publish and it pronounce dung), what i guess is a kind of ancient drum or the sound. and i have it right it's the drum sound. ancient chinese again

纞 this one is a long story. 相戀 means love each other for long. while 戀 means something stick together. and the side we call it "絲 side" and it's often used in chinese. 絲 means silk. so in ancient chinese it means some long long silk and also refer to something stick together. we just use 戀 to replace it now i guess.

鬰 this one i know it and we are still using it. it means moody. simplified as 郁. most people should know it because of 郁今香 is tulip

黝 黑(black) plus 幼(young or thin). a kind of black color in ancient chinese

鰰/鰱 魚(fish) they are a kind of fish. 神 means (god) so i guess u know it's about ancient god of fish

躧 足(foot) plus 麗(beautiful simplified as 丽) and actually 鹿 means deer i guess the one invented it think deer is beautiful
躧 means a kind of dance in ancient chinese


people always argue symbolic language like chinese have too many characters compare to english (26 alphabets). actually it is misleading!

chinese word can include a few characters but one chinese character also equal to one english word. how many words in english? and it is growing too so eventually english words are getting longer and longer.

i think i read some misleading blog (with the link on some previous post) saying that it's impossible for a primary school student knows over one thousand of chinese characters. that's bullshit! in hongkong i am sure everyone finish primary school can read newspaper. isn't it hard to learn a thousand of english word during primary school?

think about "computer", when people invented this word can you figure it out? computer in chinese is 電腦, 電(electric) 腦(brain)

so what i think is.. chinese is hard to learn yes! but when you know and master your first thousand common used characters(they are words!!) it will be more relax to master than english.

<<think about "computer", when people invented this word can you figure it out? computer in chinese is 電腦, 電(electric) 腦(brain) >>

Whern I was a kid (back in the 1950s), computers were sometimes called "electronic brains", or "giant electronic brains". Back a decade or so before that, "computers" were people who did computations by hand (using Marchand or Freiden electric calculators, etc.). Take a look at optical books from the 1930s, for example, and you'll see references to "computers" that did lens calculations by hand -- no ZEMAX back then.

龞 If you magnify this character and take a closer look, you can see that this complicated character is actually made up of two characters 敝 and 龜。

敝 means bad, disgusting, obnoxious or scornful.

龜 is a turtle, an obese person or a Caucasian. I'm not sure why a turtle and a Caucasian share the same character. Maybe it's because the Caucasians came from the sea, just like the turtle, when they were first seen by the Chinese, or maybe it's because they both have a long pointed nose. Why it also means an obese person is obvious from the shape of the character.

From these two root characters, it's easy to guess or tell what the character 龞 means.

Go ahead! Give it a try! You may guess the meaning of the character right even though you don't know Chinese. It could be fun.

Chinese sounds interesting, but they are cumbersome.

You retard, does it matter to you? Then why doesn't America get rid of those awkward and strange measuring systems such as inches, gallons etc.? Things exist for a reason. Just don't learn Chinese. Do you understand that the language is such an essential part of culture? Your question is exactly like " why doesn't that guy cut off his head because I think he's stupid?" Think before you ask,please

Todo lo chino es repugnante.

el Dimrfico atolondrado, screw you, you have no life and have no idea what you're talking about, don't fricking insult races on a language forum. I hope somebody murders you one day and you go to hell, I really hope so, you sonofabitch.

Hmm...this seems like an extremely interesting discussion, I would not like it to die out.
First of all I agree with Moshui although I think that he is avoiding some topics that should be touched.
My opinion on all of this is that the Chinese language is pure, meaningful, beautiful, and has so much culture in it, which English just lacks, and that although it may be hard to learn at first (other people have said this too) once you reach the 1000 barrier it gets much, much easier.
English is taken from many different languages, and to me has no aesthetic value.

And don't even get me started on how convoluted, paradoxial English is. Compared with Chinese Chinese has so much more sense. While it is true that Chinese characters and phrases sometimes seem strange, these are very rare. Almost all words and phrases have beginnings unlike English.

Here are only SOME examples:

Plurals (tooth = teeth yet booth does not equal beeth).

Femme to masc., Chinese's stress pronouns are the same as regular pronouns, but in English the masculine is "him", yet feminine is not "shim"!

There is no egg in eggplant, is there?
There is usually no ham in hamburger, am I correct?
And pineapples don't have apples.

Quicksand is slow, guinea pigs are NOT pigs.

"Amends" is always plural, what if you want to make one amend?
If you "have a bunch of odds and ends", what happens when you get rid of every single one except for one? Is it an "odd" or an "end"?

People recite at a play, play at a recital. People ship by tuck but send cargo by ship. Things burn up even as they, "burn down". You "fill in" a form by "filling it out".

It's a "fat chance" - or it can also be called a "slim chance" because somehow they mean the same thing - that you can explain every single one of these.

<<From these two root characters, it's easy to guess or tell what the character 龞 means. >>

Scornful Caucasian?

<<
Here are only SOME examples: >>


Now, if you knew English and studied the etymology of these words and expressions you ridicule, you would find they have just as rich a history as Chinese characters. By ridiculing them ignorantly you are doing the exact same thing as the people who were ridiculing Chinese ignorantly.

"English is taken from many different languages, and to me has no aesthetic value"

I don't know if it has aesthetic value or not, but I can tell you that was a packed audience, and almost no caucasians when I saw a visiting Shakespearean troupe in an Asian country.

"English is taken from many different languages, and to me has no aesthetic value"

English indeed has aesthetic value. It is a bit strange though - it's writing system is not phonetic and requires that those who learn it rely on spelling in addition to being able to say the word. As for Chinese and Japanese, they basically must use characters.

Let's start with Japanese. Japanese doesn't have that many individual sounds, with around over a hundred. (Assuming that this figure is based on the possible sound combinations with hiragana.) Korean has thousands of permutations. Therefore, having the writing system only use hiragana would be slow and cumbersome to read. For example, compare...

僕の先生は「明日は試験がある」と言った。 with...
ぼくのせんせいは「あしたはしけんがある」といった。

Kanji (漢字) make Japanese more readable, and that is why they're now indispensable.

As for Chinese, it is true that pinyin or bopomofo can be used as a substitue in romanization. However, it is easier to tell exactly what word it is. Chinese uses tones to distinguish between words, so characters make it immediately obvious which word is being conveyed. This is true with Japanese too. For example...

掛ける (to hang)
欠ける (to blow)
書ける (to be able to write, conjugated form of 書く, to write)

are all pronounced kakeru. Chinese characters are also not that hard to learn - for all purposes, children do not have a problem learning it. Whether you pick simplified or traditional doesn't really matter in this argument. And I hope the characters display, since they're in unicode...

I hope that this post can contribute to the thread.

@ chicken:
Interesting posting. Kanji isn't that complicated at all.
As for the 「欠ける」example, it means "to lack". "To blow" is 「吹く」

Cheers!!!

i do not know japanese but i do think their hiragana solution is kinda smart. as least japanese can be input easy.

the only major issue for chinese is input problem until handwriting input available on every system.

Actully Chinese is very easy to type:

http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=27240&start=15

Many people still have the wrong conception that Chinese is difficult to type since its characters are complicated.

Let's compare the numbers of keys you need to type the following English words and their corresponding Chinese words:

computer (8) 电脑/dn1 (3)
hippopotamus (12) 河马/hm5 （3）
Australia （9） 澳洲/azh1(4)
personality (11) 性格/xg1 (3)
spaghetti (9) 意大利面/ydlm1 （5）
volcano （7） 火山/hsh3 (4)

To type out those six English words, you need 56 keys altogether.
And to type out the corresponding Chinese words, you need only 22 keys.

Typing English requires more than half the time and effort compared to typing Chinese.