To Abolish the Chinese Language: On a Century of Reformist Rhetoric
lithub.com
lithub.com
'I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.'
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
Book looks very interesting, just ordered a copy.
They're not talking about that, they're saying "We can't remember how the word looks at all". It's pretty neat as a problem to have, to be able to say it but not even have an idea about how it might be spelled.
FWIW, I could write it correctly, but I also spend 40 minutes per day practicing vocabulary, the bulk of which is spent on writing the characters.
I can guarantee you that each of those students would recognise the character if they saw it, they just can't generate it correctly from scratch.
The key to good English spelling is the meticulous study of etymology; I learned this when I was about five years of age. Once you get used to thinking about words in terms of their root languages, then things start to make sense most of the time, except for all the exceptions.
I'd argue it's the key to good understanding and use of any language
Dear Dr. Li, I'm sorry to say that I have to cancel our appointment this afternoon because I've been coughing and sneezing all day. I look forward to seeing you when I feel better again.I really had to zoom in before I could even see the difference....
Write 打喷替 and someone will figure out what you mean.
IIRC, he reports several actual difficulties in learning to read and write:
* You have to learn many, many characters. And using a dictionary is non-trivial. (IIRC, the key is stroke order.)
* You may have to learn a different language. Written Chinese is written Standard (a.k.a. Mandarin) Chinese. If you happen to have grown up speaking Cantonese, you'll have to learn a related, but different language.
* Traditionally, the "proper" written language is classical, and by 'classical' I mean old. Imagine speaking modern French or Italian and writing in classical 1st century BC-1st century AD Latin.
* Many characters have a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. That might help, right? You could sort of sound things out. That is, if you were into historical phonology---like every other written language, the sound component as written was frozen when the character entered the language.
Correct. Dictionary apps makes it easy to look up characters, however.
>* You may have to learn a different language. Written Chinese is written Standard (a.k.a. Mandarin) Chinese. If you happen to have grown up speaking Cantonese, you'll have to learn a related, but different language.
This is a regional/cultural thing and has nothing to do with the Chinese (Mandarin) language. French isn't a bad language because the Swiss also learn German.
>* Traditionally, the "proper" written language is classical, and by 'classical' I mean old. Imagine speaking modern French or Italian and writing in classical 1st century BC-1st century AD Latin.
What? Nonsensical and incorrect. Mandarin evolves like every other language in existence.
>* Many characters have a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. That might help, right? You could sort of sound things out. That is, if you were into historical phonology---like every other written language, the sound component as written was frozen when the character entered the language.
Again, what? 90% of Chinese characters are phonetic compounds where the component on the left modifies the sound of the main component.
In general, these types of ideas that the Chinese/Japanese/other non-alphabetic languages are inferior are strongly culturally biased (what exists in my own culture is correct, other cultures are wrong) and has hints of /r/iamverysmart (you actually have no idea what you're talking about).
>What? Nonsensical and incorrect. Mandarin evolves like every other language in existence.
The person you're responding to is contrasting Classical Chinese with Mandarin. Recall that it wasn't until the Republic of China that Classical Chinese was abandoned as the written standard and that it is quite a bit more divergent from Mandarin than Latin is from Italian. The spoken language changed plenty but any educated person could read pretty much the entirety of the Chinese canon because the only writing in the vernacular was what was perceived as popular dross for peasants and women. Much as almost all scholarship in Europe up to the 1700s was written in Latin, anything for an educated audience in China was written in Classicak Chinese.
Mandarin(普通话) is a lot more divergent from Classical Chinese than Cantonese is, not that any modern Sinitic language is particularly close.
Total agreement on the boring and stupid assumption of superiority of lots of writers from languages with alphabets. The massive and unnecessary complexity doesn't do any harm to anyone except foreigners trying to learn a language who can't speak it already. Removing it would be uprooting a people from it's culture, like Vietnamese.
First, people don't write 喷嚔 often, although they use it in spoken Chinese regularly. It seems people are reluctant to write down words that describe certain body functions.
For 嚔, the difficulty is that its "sound" component is extremely rare in Chinese characters. The majority of Chinese characters are 形声字. Each of such character has a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. Many characters can share the same "sound" component. The "sound" components are usually the "harder" component in writing, in that they have more strokes. (For 嚔, the rectangle at the left is the "meaning" component. The complicated looking part at the right is the "sound" component.) As a result, if one remembers how to write one character, one can simply remember many other characters with the same "sound" component. If one of these characters is commonly used, it is an easy task to remember all the others.
I only know two other characters who share the same "sound" component with 嚔, and I don't think people use them now. They only appear in ancient books.
So 嚔 is a character you don't often write down, and there are no other commonly used characters who shared the same "sound" component. Then you get a character who is hard for native Chinese speakers as well.
(I'm assuming here that when Chinese writers can't remember the symbol for an unusual word, they also can't write down a recognizable approximation. Maybe not true?)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%AC#Romanization
but probably with a nicer interface. (They do have to be able to recognize the written character when they see it. Here the character Moser was trying to produce is one of the forms under item 5.) Also, there are statistical techniques to show the most probable characters in context following particular other characters, not just the most frequent characters overall.
For example, if Moser had just typed 喷 on a computer and then was looking for a character pronounced "tì", software could suggest 嚏 as the most likely possibility in that situation.
But it would probably be a fairly terrible situation when not using a computer.
It can be solved with a dictionary as well, by looking up the character from its pronunciation.
With neither computer nor dictionary at hand, it would mostly fall into three scenarios. First, you vaguely remember the character, but can't produce the correct one. Then you can make up a character that look closely to it, like an approximation ("entrepenor") in your example. People will get what you mean from the context.
Some people will substitute with another character of the same sound. Usually it is a character of much simpler form. This is actually an evolving process naturally occurred in history (I don't know what is the correct term in linguistics.) Many very complicated characters had been gradually replaced by simple ones of the same sound in Chinese's >2000 years' history. That is one of the reasons why one character may have multiple meanings.
Some other people will substitute with pinyin. It mostly happens in children's writing. Many children start writing diary at very early age (Chinese is indeed a difficult written language, so we have to start early :) Children like to try new words, especially the "big" words they hear from adults. But it is tiring and frustrating to keep looking up dictionary. Pinyin comes to the rescue. I find it cute, even aesthetic visually, that a child's writing has occasionally pinyin mixed with characters.
What Chinese and Japanese need are spaces.
I struggled for 2 years to study Chinese here in Taiwan. I tried many ways (see the blog), and wasn't picking it up.
Then I wrote Pingtype, which puts spaces between the words, colours for tones, and a literal translation. I started reading the Bible every day using it, and also listening to music and reading the lyrics. Since then I've learned so much more.
The problem is not the language. It's the education materials. Now I think that traditional characters are better, because I can rebuild a character from typing only the parts I know into Pingtype's keyboard and searching for a suitable match. I had to build my own tools, but I wish these could be popularised to help the thousands of foreigners who give up learning Chinese.
Support for Taiwanese Hokkien is also included in Pingtype, thanks to the Taigi dictionary for POJ transcription. See the Advanced -> Regional section. It is very different to Mandarin, but learning Chinese is a necessary stepping stone. I'm working on a lyrics video of some popular songs by Fire Ex as some educational materials.
Please give me feedback on Pingtype; only a few hundred people have visited the page and it's kind of depressing. I don't know how to do marketing, so it's not catching on. Even if the tone colours and pinyin don't become widely used, I really wish that spaces between words could be introduced to this beautiful language.
But thats kind of the advantage too, there is no preset standard grammatical way of looking at anything, you simply take it all in and infer everything on context. No learning verb conjugations and endless rules like in some languages (I'm looking at you, French)
People are saying Chinese is harder to learn than other languages, and it's true, but mostly only for the first few years, after that, it's way easier to learn than a new romance language for a native speaker of a romance language
I don't speak Chinese, so I don't have a personal intution about this, but in this case, I think you're conflating as many as three different linguistic issues.
* Word boundaries not being represented in orthography means that there is more ambiguity about whether something should be regarded a compound word, a fixed phrase, or a single word. Speakers of languages like English may disagree about items like "mail box" vs. "mailbox" or "zu Hause" vs. "zuhause" ('at home' in German). In Chinese orthography there does not necessarily need to be an answer to these questions and people don't necessarily need to take a position on them.
* "No grammar" might be an intuition that people form about Chinese, but it's not true at all. Chinese doesn't mark a large number of grammatical categories that other languages do, but it marks some that other languages don't, such as classifiers or measure words used with numbers.
https://digchinese.com/measure-words
Also, Chinese word order is not free and forms a part of the grammar. So 我爱你 'I love you' is a different sentence from 你爱我 'you love me', and that distinction is a grammatical distinction. In Latin, "ego amo te" and "te amo ego" have the same meaning! (The inverse is any permutation of the words "tu me amas".) In comparison with other languages, this is one way in which Chinese speakers don't just "take it all in and infer everything on context", because they get to use word order to derive the meaning, which would be a far less useful signal in Latin or Russian.
* Chinese pretty much never inflects words, so there aren't tables of inflections to learn as there would be in an inflected language. But conceivably an inflected language speaker might feel that Chinese is being verbose (!) by requiring the expression of subject pronouns in order to indicate grammatical subject. For example, a speaker of inflected pro-drop languages (where subject pronouns are optional) like Latin or Spanish might find it weird that you have to use two "words" 你有 to express what to them is just a "simple" word like "habes" or "tienes" 'you have', that inherently reveals the identity of the subject in a concise and intuitive way. :-) Or for tense, speakers of these languages might find it strangely verbose to have to throw in 以前 'formerly' or 曾经 'once' or something, instead of a concise infix like -ba- (amabas, in both languages, instead of something like 你以前爱 which can be regarded as three distinct words ... or maybe, as you said, not always analyzed that way by some speakers!).
DeFrancis' counterexample for the myth that each Chinese character is a word is "coral", 珊瑚 (I hope). According to the dictionary he quoted, the two characters, individually, mean "coral" but they're never used separately.
Unfortunately for me, I'm a programmer, not an English teacher, so I spend all my time reading instead of speaking. So I have to learn it the hard way.
But:
* where is the code? i couldn't find it. Is it a private repository? Ability for others to contribute might go a long way.
* Presentation matters, a lot. The interface looks more like a 90ies windows program than a modern web-based tool. Working on the design and UX a bit could go a long way.
* a short explanation of what it is and does and how to use it right on the start page, which can be toggled on and off, might help too.
- How should I improve the interface? Specifically. I mean something like "orange buttons" not "use React".
- I used to have an explanation text that was in the translator input areas when the page loaded. Soon I realised that it was quite annoying, because I had to manually clear the inputs before I could enter my own text to translate. Toggling on and off would require a cookie, and then I would need a cookie warning (which is another barrier to the user).
Of course, back when I was starting with Japanese, my teacher insisted that we use spaces until we knew enough kanji to make our writing legible without them.
Vicious :)
Rather, that you can look at something like "食べる林檎" and, using just orthography, find the word boundary "食べる 林檎".
I threw katakana in there just because a word written using katakana instead of kanji does not actually present a problem for this.
Words written in hiragana, however, do present a problem for this naive approach of finding word boundaries, but do not pose a problem unless you have a long string of them.
I use Anki flashcards to review vocabulary; the Chinese Support plugin makes it easy to create cards with colored Pinyin Ruby, pronunciation and translation. I read just about anything for practice; lack of space has never really been a problem. When I find a sentence I can't tokenize, I'll have to look it up anyway. (I use the Pleco dictionary for Android.)
BTW: I saw you complaining on your blog that 望 is being displayed as 亡月王 instead of 亡匀王. Since I'm probably never going to email you about that, I'm tacking it on the end here. It's the font reflecting different handwriting preferences [1] that Unicode decided not to encode. I used to have the opposite problem and had to install a new font to have it look the way you don't want it to look. I suggest finding a font you like instead of putting up with the font you currently use.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%9C%9B#Alternative_forms
I guess you have a really good memory to remember words just from flashcards. I tried that, but could never remember the words after class. Learning words is much easier for me if they're in context.
https://pingtype.github.io/docs/blog.html#vocabulary
In the end, I discovered the Pingfang font, and now I load that every time you visit the Pingtype website. It slows down the page, but it looks better and has fewer glyph problems.
Ask even a native, and they'll tell you that characters are a big part of the problem (though less of a problem in Chinese than in Japanese).
Another confusing item in learning the language is that so many people are named after things, so sometimes it's not obvious in a sentence that you're talking about a person rather than an object and you have to reparse the sentence a few times. Obviously the language works because there's a giant country using it without people constantly having to second-guess each other, but as a learner, it's one of my pain points.
I, too, went to Taiwan when I began learning Chinese. It was very interesting, but ultimately a waste of time for anything except visiting the lovely museums, developing an early (in my Chinese linguistic education) feel for the transition between traditional and simplified Chinese characters, and the political reality of Taiwan's steadfast refusal to accept communist pinyin - a clearly and embarrassingly superior romanization system to anything Taiwan's academics could ever muster.
What I later learned (on the mainland) was that speaking to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of accents about a wide variety of every day matters and things of interest was the more efficient way to learn, but also learn to understand and be understood both verbally and in writing. Of the 1.4 billion people in mainland China, over sixteen years I've met perhaps ten who gave a damn about the bible, and nine out of ten were clearly and literally impoverished.[0]
I would wager that this is the source of your issues: frankly, nobody cares. You are learning a vocabulary without practical community or utility. It may be very important to you, and perhaps Taiwan has some happening churches, but in the context of Chinese language it's totally irrelevant to almost everyone.
It's interesting that nothing like this seems to happen for any other language and culture combination, most notably Chinese for this article. How much of the lack of ability for Chinese to spread as a culture is just how damn hard it is to learn Chinese as a non-native? Or is it that the Chinese just don't seem that interested in spreading their culture and ideology farther than they can directly benefit from? Or is the fact that they aren't interested in that based on them knowing and even taking pride in their language and culture being particularly impenetrable? Related to this article, it seems notable that movements within China to radically simplify the language never seem to pick up much steam. Sure, it would be insanely complex to do on a logistical level, but even above that, it seems like nobody is much interested in it.
It reminds me a little of thinking about AIs. They say that an AI will only want to do what it gets programmed to want to do. It may become smarter and more powerful, but there's no reason for it to change what it wants to do. Changing what it wants to do would itself be an action, and it has no reason to take that action, because it isn't part of what it originally wants to do. It seems similar that cultures sort of evolve to care about some things and not care about other things, and efforts to make them care about something they don't care about at best have quite the uphill battle.
False. It has happened. Chinese culture has spread to neighboring countries, but that's almost a millennium ago. Ever wonder why in the Unicode BMP there's a huge block of "CJK ideographs"? It's because historically the Japanese, Korean, (and Vietnamese) all use Chinese characters in their communication. Sure their respective languages are very different but the script is the same. And at that time China had plenty of influence over these neighboring countries.
Not entirely. There scripts are the same enough (and large enough) that the designers of Unicode wanted to combine them into a single character set. God help you if you actually want to combine these languages within a single text. The writing systems are different enough that to get a good result, you need to use a font that was designed for the language you are reading.
- no central language approval body (no Academe Anglaise)
- Hollywood, the BBC and the World Service.
> the Chinese just don't seem that interested in spreading their culture and ideology farther than they can directly benefit from?
Traditionally the end of Chinese outward-looking culture is attributed to the end of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_voyages , but I'm sure it's more complex than that.
Given the overhead of learning new languages, in an era of mass communication the world's auxiliary language ought to be even more of a winner-takes-all market than search or social, but French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian have a headstart and a very dedicated user base.
Not sure how big an advantage the lack of central language body is though: on the one hand it means that people using it in an idiosyncratic local way as an auxiliary language aren't subject to foreign third parties insisting they're doing it wrong, and can inject other shared vocabulary and adjust to each others' fluency level. But on the other hand there's nobody influential to promote any attempt to fix English's confusing irregularities and dreadful orthography(ies) and lack of authority to appeal to doesn't stop people being terribly snobby about "correct" English.
Spanish has more native speakers than English, but when you include people using secondary languages, there are more English speakers in total than any other language.
* "Chinese is a world script" - The author Tom Mullaney notes the rising popularity of Chinese classes in schools all over the world. I think Chinese script is actually holding back Mandarin from becoming more widely spoken. It's difficult to write properly, and adds another layer of complexity to remembering vocabulary. I think it's much easier for people to learn a language that has an alphabet-based script, and it's possible to go further with such a language in a given period of time.
* Paradoxically, the rise of software to write Chinese characters has really made it much easier to write. I say this as someone who learned in the dark ages before such software was widely available. If I had to write a sentence in Chinese using a pen and paper it would be painful for both myself and the reader ... but on my phone or using a laptop or desktop computer I can manage social media, email, and other lightweight uses thanks to easy pinyin input systems. It's improved my reading ability, too, because now I am interacting in Chinese on my devices using language that's more like spoken Mandarin, whereas 20 years ago most of the printed materials I encountered tended to be written in more formal style.
* Mandarin as a world language. The increasing importance of the Chinese economy is becoming a big driver for spoken Mandarin in other parts of the world. I've encountered Thais and Vietnamese who can speak it quite well (but not write) in order to do business or interact with Chinese tourists. A friend who recently visited Italy saw the same thing in high-end shops with young Italians behind the counters being able to speak proficient Mandarin.
* I disagree with the idea presented by @peterburkimsher that a lack of spaces are a problem. Chinese grammar is very straightforward, and in my opinion it's not hard to figure where words start and end (even if you don't know a specific term). (Incidentally, kudos to Peter for developing his system ... I don't have specific suggestions to market it, but I like the idea of leveraging Fire Ex and other hooks).
* There are interesting examples in Vietnam (2) and Korea of societies that abandoned Chinese characters in favor of their own alphabets. It's true that cultures lose the connection with ancient literature and older historical documents ... but not their history, thanks to the spread of literacy and public education combined with a strong interest in history and famous people from centuries past.
1. http://www.ilamont.com/2014/10/our-review-of-chinese-summer-...
One of our instructors was a more conservative, slightly older woman who'd often write down the Hanja (Korean for Chinese characters) behind the Hangul. I mostly rolled my eyes because it seemed too extraneous (and not at all required for the DLPT). Its a dying skill in South Korea from what I know, and obviously not at all well known in the North for obvious reasons.