Learning Chinese does not mean learning to speak Chinese

kwaii   Sun Jun 17, 2007 2:05 am GMT
It seems absurd for people whose language consists of alphabet, but it is ture for people who learn Chinese.
The reason is that Chinese language is not alphabetic.

Japanese and Korean have adopted Chinese characters to build their own writting langauge, and many Japanese and korean can master 2000+ characters in daily life. But both Japanese and Korean failed to speak good Chinese, therefore, I think the similar thing may happen to people from other countries.

That is to say, people would write and read in chinese, but they cannot speak good chinese. Anyway, the history of East Asia has shown that Chinese language can be a good tool for communication in writting and reading.

Today, many korean and most japanese have a good command of 2000+ chinese characters. Actually, 2000+ chinese characters are enough for people to express most thoughts and ideas. So learning to write and read chinese is not so difficult for western people if they can begin learn chinese characters in primary schools.

In addtion, People need not really speak that language, they can learn some chinese characters for convinience of collecting information about China. So If you hate to learn the tones and pronunciation of Chinese, then learn some chinese characters just as you learn to draw pictrures, and every Chinese character is like a picture.
Matthew   Sun Jun 17, 2007 2:39 am GMT
There's also the problem that saying that one "speaks Chinese" is a rather vague statement to make. There are so many varieties: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Taiwanese, the list probably goes on further.

However, you mention that the characters have been adapted to the language. That's the key word: "adapted." In Japanese, for example, kanji are used nothing like the Chinese they are borrowed from. Korean doesn't even use them other than in some names and for distinguishing homophones. In each case, the characters are never used without some sort of alphabet, be it kana or hangul.

In any case, you can't just learn the characters. You have to actually learn Chinese, both writing AND speaking it. Practice, and you'll get it sooner or later.
Matthew   Sun Jun 17, 2007 2:41 am GMT
Bottom line:
Yes, learning Chinese DOES mean learning to speak it.
Learning characters is NOT learning a language.
kawaii   Sun Jun 17, 2007 3:06 am GMT
Since Chinese grammer is just simple, people with knowledge of some 2000+ characters can freely read and write in Chinese even though they do not actually know the pronunciation of each character.

That is the point.

However, if you want to directly communicate with Chinese people face to face or through phones, you need to learn speaking. But for most people, they learn a language just for information purpose and have little chance of oral communication. Therefore, they can just learn some chinese characters and a basic knowledge of Chinese grammer, then they can start read and write in Chinese just for information purpose.

In fact, it has been estimated that until the 18th century more than half of the world's printed books were in Chinese. And the authors include Chinese as well as Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

That is what I want to emphasis.
Matthew   Sun Jun 17, 2007 3:12 am GMT
I guess we just must have different definitions of learning a language! =P

True, learning the characters and grammar is useful enough, and you probably could squeeze by that for reading and writing purposes. I just figure that if somebody puts that much effort into it, they might as well learn the pronounciations while they're at it.

(sorry if I sounded ticked off in that last post!)
furrykef   Sun Jun 17, 2007 5:39 am GMT
<< Today, many korean and most japanese have a good command of 2000+ chinese characters. Actually, 2000+ chinese characters are enough for people to express most thoughts and ideas. So learning to write and read chinese is not so difficult for western people if they can begin learn chinese characters in primary schools. >>

Unlike people in China and Japan, western children in primary schools are not surrounded by kanji everywhere they go. That pretty much eliminates most of their incentive to learn the characters... there's so much for them to read in English as it is, so most of them aren't going to be interested in Chinese. This fact also makes the characters harder to learn, because not being surrounded by the characters means no reinforcement outside the classroom.

<< Since Chinese grammer is just simple, people with knowledge of some 2000+ characters can freely read and write in Chinese even though they do not actually know the pronunciation of each character. >>

That is incorrect. Characters are not words, they are morphemes -- word components. Most Chinese words are composed of two characters, and the meaning of a word is not necessarily obvious just by looking at the characters it's composed of. Even figuring out where the word boundaries *are* is not necessarily an easy task for the student, since there are no spaces or any other means of separation.

And, I have to be honest, the Chinese writing system is... well, it's really not a good writing system, for the Chinese *or* for foreigners. I'm not calling them stupid for sticking with it or telling them to change it, but I seriously doubt there is any way in which the Chinese writing system is superior to a phonetic script. Sure, all the dialects of Chinese can be represented in written Chinese characters, but they could also all be "represented" in Pinyin. I bet Chinese students who speak a language other than Mandarin wouldn't find Mandarin Pinyin harder to read and write than Chinese characters, and as a bonus they could learn how to speak Mandarin Chinese! They would just have to pronounce the words by their letters rather than by their meanings.

- Kef
-   Mon Jun 18, 2007 3:46 pm GMT
I think your comments are very western-centric. Why do westerners always think alphabetical writing systems are easy and graphical ones hard? Do you think it is easy for an asian to learn English? But asians have no choice , in order to survive in the world now, you have to learn english, english has become a requirement for many jobs. Therefore, I believe that the strongest and richest economy in the world gets to use their language as the de facto international language. As long as the USA is still the most powerful country in this world, English would be the international language.

Many people are using Japanese to justify that Chinese would never be able to be an international language and the chinese craze would just fizzle out like the japanese one. However, I beg to differ because the Japanese dont have much less speakers in the world, they dont have the military clout, they are hated for their actions in Asia (just like why Germany has not been so keen in promoting german language because of the historical baggage) and of course they are the world SECOND largest economy, not first. So people of course learn english instead of Japanese. Last but not least, the Japanese society is a closed one, they are not so welcoming of foreigners(in sharp contrast to the open and virbant USA) , so that makes it difficult to propel Japanese to international settings.

I would also like to remind everyone that when China was a superpower 2 centuries ago before contact with Westerners, neigbouring countries like Japan, Korea and Vietnam used the chinese writing system and many used Chinese as the dimplomatic language like French in the 19th century and English in the 20th and 21st century. It was only after China became weak did the Chinese writing system of its neighboring dispear with a phonetic system in place like Vietnam which used an aphabetical system invented by its french colonisers of Japan which is an ally of USA and westernization.

In conclusion, I believe that as long as China becomes a superpower (maybe 50-100 years later), it would then start to propogate its culture, just like what USA is doing now. So the chinese are now bidding their time and trying to avoid conflicts, but remember that they will start to emerge with pride and gusto once they become a superpower. Once that time comes, chinese culture would become the "pop" culture just like western culture now. So all the critics and sceptics can now talk about the impossiblity of Chinese language and culture ascension in the future just like the french did in the 19th century to the english (England was ruled by france and french was the elite language in England some centuries ago). But that day will come...
furrykef   Mon Jun 18, 2007 6:12 pm GMT
<< I think your comments are very western-centric. >>

That's hardly a surprise, considering that I am from the West. And there is probably some truth to that. I can't help being biased, but I think neither can you. I don't think it's possible for *anybody* to be completely unbiased in discussions like these. We've been using our native writing systems all our lives, so of course we think ours is better.

I should note, though, that it's not only Westerners who have thoughts like these, as we shall soon see.

<< Why do westerners always think alphabetical writing systems are easy and graphical ones hard? Do you think it is easy for an asian to learn English? >>

No, I don't think it's easy for an Asian to learn English, and I think it would be comparable in difficulty for me to learn, say, Japanese without the kanji. Certainly doable, but harder than learning a language like Spanish. But I doubt that it would be any easier for an Asian to learn if English were written in hanzi, either. It would be easier to learn how to read it, but it would be much harder to learn how to speak it.

Now, here's the part where there are actually Asians who agree with the Westerners. Specifically, the Koreans and the Vietnamese. Both once used a modified Chinese writing system. But nowadays, Korean is written in Hangul, a phonetic script, and, as you already mentioned, Vietnamese is written in a modified Roman script. (However, it's worth nothing that Hangul was invented before Koreans ever heard of Westerners.) Hanja can still be used in Korean, although it's relatively uncommon, and North Korea doesn't use them at all in its official documents. I wouldn't be surprised if hanja will be completely forgotten within a couple of centuries, and Korean will be purely phonetic. Now, you said that these languages didn't stop using their equivalent of hanzi until China lost its power, and that might be true, but let me ask you this: would they have done so if they saw no problems with the writing system? We still write in Roman characters even though the Roman Empire is long gone.

Also, Japanese, although it will not give up its kanji anytime soon, has shown signs of this type of thinking. Of course, Japanese has the hiragana and katakana writing systems, which are purely phonetic. Currently, hiragana is used mostly for writing things like verb endings and particles, and katakana is used mostly for loanwords, but it wasn't always that way. For instance, centuries ago, women would be taught only hiragana and they would write everything completely in hiragana. Now, why would they do it that way? I can't think of an explanation other than "because it's easier". Japan has also considered eliminating kanji in the past, although of course it didn't work out. Although, again, I really doubt that Japanese will shed its kanji in the near future, it does indicate that they thought there was a problem.

Let's not forget that Chinese characters aren't the only logographic writing system ever invented. For instance, Roman letters are ultimately very distorted versions of old pictographs. But that's exactly it: the trend always has been that writing systems evolve from purely ideographic, to semi-phonetic, to completely phonetic.

Finally, I'll paste what I wrote in another thread, which probably belongs here more than it does there anyway:

* * *

1. What other writing systems can you think of where it's quite easy to completely forget how to write a word that you know, and not even be able to take a first guess at it?
2. What other writing systems can you think of where it's quite easy to completely forget the pronunciation of a written word, and not even be able to take a first guess at it?
3. The characters don't necessarily even represent meanings very well. Often a character can have multiple meanings, or even be used purely phonetically (especially in Chinese, which has no phonetic characters).
4. What other writing systems require such complicated dictionaries? You have to have one just for the characters, and another one for words!

Again, I don't hate kanji/hanzi, and I'm not really "anti-hanzi" -- far be it from me to tell the people of China and Japan how they should write -- but I'm certainly not "pro-hanzi", either. In fact, I love kanji... but I see it as a work of art. It is a thing of beauty, yes, but a thing of utility, admittedly not so much.

* * * [end of paste]

As for your points about China's economy and political position, I don't have any comments. I don't really know much about that sort of thing.

- Kef
elbarto   Mon Jun 18, 2007 7:44 pm GMT
Hello Chinese people, this is me Elbarto calling you, you know what you should do... you should change your official language to Spanish, that way you can to the Statians and to anyone else, hey you my language is better than yours!! oh yeah.
Guest   Mon Jun 18, 2007 8:47 pm GMT
Spanish is a dogshit language. Learn it if you like to eat dogshit.
Franco   Mon Jun 18, 2007 11:28 pm GMT
Nunca he visto a un hispano comiendo caca de perro.
Laura Bush   Mon Jun 18, 2007 11:37 pm GMT
Yo sí he visto a muchos americanos comiendo mierda en McDonalds.
furrykef   Mon Jun 18, 2007 11:58 pm GMT
Spanish and "dogshit" have nothing to do with Chinese...

El español y la "caca de perro" no tienen nada que ver con el chino...
Franco   Tue Jun 19, 2007 12:16 am GMT
Uno de mis amigos trabaja en McDonalds. Dice que escupe en la comida. Una vez uno de los otros trabajadores meó en la olla en la cual cocinan las patatas fritas.

Todos los turistas no saben que están comiendo saliva y pis!

Afortunadamente para mí nunca voy a McDonalds.
Laura Bush   Tue Jun 19, 2007 12:18 am GMT
Por qué creéis que a los americanos les gusta tanto comer Mcmierda?