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>>Modern Chinese is mostly polysyllabic
Knowing characters helps even less with Classical texts. Basically, Classical Chinese is a not really a "language"; it's the predecessor that changed slowly through 2000 years with lots of obscure characters (often very compact in meaning) and lots of obscure stories - and the worst thing is the presence of huge numbers of elisions. The Chinese scholars in those days tended to be very frugal about words... it's okay for natives nowadays to be able to read a bit of it, but for me, well, it cannot already serve as something like Latin for European language speakers. This economical trend continues today - sometimes it's polysyllabic, sometimes it is not.
My current observation is that, thanks to the general tabloid and very colloquial trend of Hong Kong newspapers, electronic media and films, Mandarin has borrowed a lot of monosyllabic stuff as neologisms, which means even more idioms & expressions to learn. At least in generic Chinese, knowing characters won't help much in reading, and, anyway, a great many characters are simply limited to certain expressions or literary contexts, such that the ??Pareto ratio?? would hold.
So, here, I must be biased, but I'd question the use of the Heisig's method; I wouldn't want to learn idioms from an idiom dictionary with 1,000 entries from the first to the last, without a lot of contexts (scattered in example sentences), and learn characters almost like in isolation.
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Xie, what did you mean when you said that you like hanzi because they help you avoid inflections? How would writing in pinyin cause the Chinese grammar to change?
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It's just about typographical economy when writing by hand. English words form complete meanings through writing a few words, and since space is needed, you'd end up having to write a lot and need a lot of space. In a Russian case, which Chinese laymen of foreign languages would be startled, it would be needed to create additional huge blocks of letters for a monument or any construction works because a case marker is needed. In Chinese, you just have to get the "square" things right - the strokes, the shapes, the font...
When writing in Chinese, I can save space because 1) no "space" between words (so, the space button is on the keyboard is useless for Chinese) 2) several characters can convey meanings which would take up more words in English. Since it's hardly inflectional, there is no inflectional endings, and I can even skip some functional words for "handwriting" economy, like the possessive particle 的/之, aspect particle 了, and whenever possible, I can chop up many bisyllabic words into monosyllabic, as long as the message makes sense, like 已經 (already/done/partciple/schon) to 已 (the same thing; only the second character is dependent on this first).
I'm still doubtful whether Chinese has "no inflections" at all, because there are still lots of markers for indicating aspects, yes/no answers/questions and even objects. It just happens that Chinese has nothing as an ending (imagine additional strokes for declensions! how funny...), but some "amateur" Chinese I come across do claim Chinese has cases. One example would be an unknown case for: 把 sth/sb 給 transitive verb 了. (Where 給 may be optional in some cases, and sometimes you can just say "transitive verb + sth/sb" instead of using these markers. I sort of feel that another "subtle" difficulty, besides the (in)famous characters, would be our tradition of skipping things - 50 years ago, the strokes (simplified characters), and for centuries, syllables and even functional words (like pronouns).
When anyone sees the notes and wants to understand, s/he would probably speak the message in the mind by "expanding" 已 back to 已經 (which is used almost exclusively in spoken language anyway). So, things are very dependent on context, and we tend to be very frugal about words. Typographically speaking, my biased view is that English headlines cannot be simplified as much as Chinese ones are.
AFAIK, it seems that particles and any functional words (as opposed to content words) are separated from other words in pinyin.
If pinyin happened to replace hanzi totally in the distant future... I can't predict, but at least before that, I would bet the tones would be gone first.
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<< Development of computers and input methods have made Chinese less difficult to put in an information system.
See these discussions
Chinese characters WILL last
http://www.chinalanguage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2984&sid=98ebb4749b541bec93c5fcd3020d6c49
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The question isn't whether they will last, but *how long* they will last. I strongly doubt that Chinese characters in their current form will still be used 1000 years in the future. But in the shorter term, like 100 years, it's likely enough that they will be.
From the article: "On the contrary, Chinese texts take up less space in a digital system, and less time to type. I'll tell you why."
This is a bit misleading. How much space Chinese text takes up depends on the encoding used, but this statement is probably correct for almost all Chinese text produced today. The "less time to type" claim is more specious. Many speakers of Mandarin simply type in pinyin and convert it to characters on the fly. Obviously, it would save time to just leave the text in pinyin, especially since you wouldn't have to find the right characters to express what you want to say. There are other, faster methods of typing in characters, but they are a bit difficult to learn, whether or not Chinese is your native language. Either way, Chinese characters again prove more cumbersome than phonetic writing.
- Kef
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Also, I will note that the compactness of Chinese text data becomes less relevant when the text is compressed by a data compression algorithm. English (or pinyin) text will compress better than Chinese text, so after compression they will probably be about the same size.
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I don't understand why. I posted something here and it seems to have been deleted. It's about typing Chinese. Am I mistaken? I hope I'm being paranoid this time.
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Xie - I didn't see such a post... it might have been that you typed it but you forgot to press "submit", which I've had happen before, or maybe you did press submit and it gave you an error message and you didn't notice... so it's quite possible that you're paranoid. But then, with the mods here, you never know... *sighhh*
- Kef
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Southern Korea made a real progress with the move from Hanja to Hangul.
It has the highest literacy rate and literary production in the region.
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Ok, simple. Someone may have said that Chinese aren't really monosyllabic. It's about words, not characters. I've only learnt one bisyllabic character in my life so far, which is that for nautical mile.
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B5%B7%E9%87%8C
If you can read Chinese, you can see that it isn't even used in PRC-style Chinese now. I learnt it when I was having math. lessons as a kid, and ... I never learnt in "China", hence my knowledge.
I also suspect that someone else's post might have gone, too. I think I'm really paranoid. I don't really know... but good, I've hence expanded my intended post a bit.
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I remember you saying that "nautical mile" bit, but that may have been in another thread... if so, I don't know where it is, though.
*sigh* I really hate this place. Why do I keep coming here?
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Darn, I don't really know what is going on. Are "we" (or I only) being dreaming deja vu or paranoid?
I didn't say literally "nautical mile", but if you did see my "first" intended "word" or "character", you, Kef, know very well that I'm saying the same thing.
I'm giving its a second try. If that happens again, then, I don't know, my ISP or this forum posting system is to be blamed. I didn't say anything sensitive or offensive. I really hope I'm being paranoid.
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I saw your previous post about the word meaning "nautical mile" as well. It must have been deleted.
BTW, is this character used in Chinese?
浬
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Yes, exactly. As a natural rule of my own, I won't bother to paste such stuff, because I assume no one knows this language.
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