Hacker News Reader

Comment by wesleyy | Hacker News Reader

Yes there actually is! English is a language that really favours the writer while Chinese favours the readers. Most of the time, you can read Chinese a lot quicker because the characters are all the same size (although they might have different complexity), and there is generally a lesser need for linking words to ease the awkwardness of sentences, unlike English, because each Chinese character carries more of a "concept"/"theme", where as english words usually have quite precise definitions, and have more specific places where the words would actually make sense.

This is just my opinion as a native Chinese and English speaker, but I'm sure other bilingual English/Chinese speakers would tend to agree.

View on HN

Hangul (Korean) has the uniform, blocky look of Chinese characters, while also being a phonetic alphabet like English. Every hangul block is composed of two or more alphabets from a set of 24, so if you know those 24, you can read any of the 11K+ possible combinations. It's similar to the concept of "radicals" in Chinese, but much simpler and with fewer irregularities.

So the reading advantage, if any, is not necessarily incompatible with using a phonetic alphabet with a small number of symbols.

The lack of precision (or higher ambiguity) might also be seen as a disadvantage in the highly technical world of today, although I very much appreciate it in literary and philosophical works.

A quick search seems to indicate it's almost a tie, overall. That is, Chinese readers end up reading at about the same speed add English readers. It seems like an unintuitive result though. From my own mild studies of Japanese and the kanji, the few kanji I can read, it feels like the information just jumps right into my mind.

Also apart from the actual reading, which may be a tie, I'm not sure the complexity cost overall, e.g. teaching, fonts, IMEs, etc. are actually worth it. What would a designed writing system look like? I think a properly phonetic/syllable approach like Hangul or even the Kana might be correct.

> What would a designed writing system look like? I think a properly phonetic/syllable approach like Hangul or even the Kana might be correct.

You're thinking in too broad of terms. A system representing syllables as units would be a bad choice for english, which has extremely intricate syllabic structure (consider "strengths", which is CCCVCCC). This makes a Hangul-like system a stretch, though possible, and a Kana-like system, wherein every possible syllable has its own character, completely impossible. Most[1] potential english syllables are unused or used so rarely that no one could ever be expected to know their character. Douglas Adams named a fictional person "Slartibartfast" -- as far as I know, the syllable "slar" (rhymes with far) has no other existence in English. How would he have written it in an English syllabary?

Chinese has so few possible syllables that enumerating them is quite easy, but it doesn't use them all either. Kana work in Japanese because the only legal syllable structures are CV, V, and N.

> What would a designed writing system look like?

Well, all writing systems are designed; none are naturally occuring. It's hard to know what you mean by this, but:

- A syllabary works fine when the phonology of the language allows for it

- Spanish is a good, though not perfect, example of an alphabetic writing system that corresponds closely to pronunciation (a minor wart would be that I believe 'b' and 'v' are the same sound; c/z in Spanish Spanish and c/s in latin american Spanish have a similar problem)

- The Cherokee syllabary was created from nothingness within living memory

- The design goal of Esperanto was probably similar to what you're thinking of

Anyway, big picture, a given writing system is not equally suitable for all languages, so it doesn't make sense to ask which approach is "correct". They're more and less workable. Alphabets (in which the basic idea is one character per phoneme in the language) are about as simple as it gets, since the number of characters necessary is V + C rather than the O(V * C) needed for a syllabary in the languages with the simplest phonological structure.

[1] I have no numbers for this; it's a guess.

Yes I was being imprecise. I suppose I'd combine writing and language. English's pronunciation rules are suboptimal, I think. It just happens to be that way by accident.

By designed, I mean "if modern scientists and engineers designed" versus more primitive people sort of making stuff up and folks adding on. With an explicit goal for efficiency; not aiming to necessarily "look nice".

When I look at Hangul, I see a rather simple underlying set of principles. It seems to logically build up. Compared to say, the Cherokee one, which, by looking at it for a minute, doesn't appear to have any structure. It seems like they're more-or-less random symbols. Maybe there is some deeper design there but it isn't apparent at a quick glance.

But is Hangul's choice of symbols the best representation for human minds for reading? And for writing or algorithmically dealing with characters?

> When I look at Hangul, I see a rather simple underlying set of principles. It seems to logically build up. Compared to say, the Cherokee one, which, by looking at it for a minute, doesn't appear to have any structure. It seems like they're more-or-less random symbols. Maybe there is some deeper design there but it isn't apparent at a quick glance.

It's the other way around; Hangul is also composed of more-or-less random symbols with no deeper design. Hangul is an alphabetic system much like Spanish, except that the letters are arranged into two-dimensional square syllables, and the squares then placed in a line, instead of the letters being arranged into a one-dimensional line directly. That's just an artistic choice.

Well another thing with Chinese characters is that they are usually made up of parts, and these parts generally carry a theme. For example, if I have never seen a specific Chinese character, I can usually decipher its definition easier than English words because of the parts the Chinese character consists of. This is similar to roots in English, but these parts are less specific, and are recycled and reused in many more characters.

I agree that Chinese is not the easiest or best language when all practical aspects are considered, and this is one of the reason simplified Chinese was invented, but the social hurdle to completely adopt a different language or change it even more dramatically would be far bigger than the nuisances that the language may have.

Really? I've been studying the kanji and well this is true enough to build up a framework to jog memory, it didn't particularly seem enough to have much predictive power. I can say "oh, I can see how those 3 concepts could be related", but only after-the-fact. Maybe it gets better when one knows over a thousand.

I've lived in China and studied Chinese for 13 years, much of that reading heavily (I'm a literary translator), and I'm only now, in year 13, developing the ability to scan Chinese text successfully. I'm not posing this as some objective argument about the learnability of Chinese, just that, in the case of my brain, at least, my eyes are far more able to inhale an alphabetic script than Chinese characters.

My increasing ability to scan lines hasn't slowed my increasing disability to write with a pen! Despite my occasional flirtation with wubi.

When you think about the fact that even in English we generally tend to read the word and don't even notice that a letter is not correct I think Chinese is superior in the amount of information it can convey per symbol however a real pain in the ass to master.

I don't know Chinese however however i found the lack of any similarity with European languages fascinating.

Do you think spoken Chinese relies on linking words much more heavily than written Chinese does? My first Chinese teachers kept getting mad when I wanted to begin sentences by linking them to the previous one.

Scientific terms, especially biological, tend to more apparent. Our words have the legacy of Greek and Latin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com