The Times recently published an article about China’s effort to manage the vast number of characters in the Chinese language. A government computer database, designed to recognize people’s names on identity cards, is programmed to read about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, cutting out the more “obscure” characters.
This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language. The most ambitious effort was the introduction of a simplified system of writing in the 1950s. As part of the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce illiteracy, simplified characters were promoted as the common written language, replacing many traditional characters.
More than five decades later, simplified characters remain the standard writing system of China, while Chinese elsewhere — especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong — continue to use traditional characters.
We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.
>>2
Thank you for demonstrating you know nothing about the Chinese language. Chinese and Japanese are really quite different, the comparison you are trying to make isn't appropriate.
Never mind that about 20000 of the 50000 Chinese characters are 99% fucking useless for any purpose except putting in lists such as dictionaries. About 20000 more are about 90% fucking useless for yadda yadda. Don't believe me? Do a Google search for some of the characters in CJK Extension B. Fucking nobody uses them, fucking ever.
You need around 3000 Chinese characters or so for basic Chinese literacy. Simplified, traditional, doesn't much matter. Most Chinese computer encodings take full advantage of the fact that most of the hanzi are fucking useless because they're just variants of something you'd actually use and learned in school, or were something some crazy scribe imagined up a thousand years ago and nobody was shitheaded enough to decide it needed transcribing.
And your average literate Japanese will know and use more than the 2000 kanji prescribed by the government. So really, you don't know much about Japanese, either, >>1.
Post about this shit in /newpol/, not here. Thread reported.
Name:
Anonymous2009-05-12 2:15
Chinese people are always with great cordiality and hospitality ,so when the foreigner say Chinese they always sad :"your Chinese is very good " but infact ...
so Maybe of this attitude may foreigner can't say a good Chinese !
I never saw a foreigner say a good Chinese but many many of Chinese man say a good English ,
China are no strong enought and too kindness
Name:
Anonymous2009-05-13 17:55
>>6
Korean is my first language, and my English doesn't suck at all.
Why is it Chinese people's English is always shit?
Chinese grammar is piss-easy. What isn't there to understand?
Or you're a troll.
Name:
Anonymous2009-05-13 23:02
>>7
maybe its because their grammar is piss easy that they struggle with other languages. Hell, they have almost no irregular verbs and all you have to do to negate a verb is put 不 in front of it.
on the other hand...
and my first language is Croatian. Our grammar is considered complex yet my some of my family struggle with English. So your point about Chinese having simple grammar is invalid.
You'd be better of comparing Chinese to Hungarian than Chinese to Korean.
Name:
Anonymous2009-05-14 4:46
>>8
Uh, my native language is Hungarian and it probably has the most difficult grammar out of any language in the world. Some Caucasian languages like Abkhaz would give Hungarian a run for its money. Regardless, we have 18 cases. English grammar, and any other grammar for that matter, is incredibly easy.
Name:
Anonymous2009-05-14 6:10
>>9
You probably never met Native American polysynthetic languages. This is hell.
Name:
Anonymous2009-05-14 6:54
>>9
Im in the process of learning Hungarian at the moment. I really like its system to be honest. I think its logical compared to English which probably has more exceptions than rules. I wasn't saying in >>8 that Hungarian is easy, i was saying his comparison was ridiculous.
and yeah its said that almost every Abkhaz verb is an irregular verb.
>>5
>Post about this shit in /newpol/, not here. Thread reported.
>Thread reported.
>reported
AHAHAHAHA YOU MASSIVE FAGGOT! This is not imageboards, this is textboard country. One does not simply report into thread. You ridiculously massive faggot! AHAHAHAH, REPORTED! ON A FUCKING TEXT BOARD!
"Chinese grammar is easy" is a pretty big misconception in my opinion. Sure, BEGINNER Chinese grammar is easy, and you can form basic sentences much easier than in most foreign languages (from an English-learner's viewpoint), but it has just as many intricacies as any other language when trying to say more complicated shit.
>>14
I think i know what you mean. 了 for example seems pretty simple at first and then you find out it has 100 other uses that don't translate well. But i wouldn't say Chinese grammar ever gets hard. Once you get a feel for how the Language flows some things start to come naturally.
Name:
Anonymous2009-05-31 2:30
>>15
I agree it starts to flow pretty well once you get some experience under your belt, but it's hardly as simple as the "WOW CHINESE HAS NO GRAMMAR!" that I have seen spouted online on more than one occasion, you know what I mean?
oh wow an ISM thread, it must contain a very educated and intelligent point of view and not at all random butthurt crying
Name:
Anonymous2009-06-01 9:14
>>18
I agree
繁體 is beautiful whereas 簡體 is fucking ugly, and for stupid people. If you argue it's quicker to write, when writing 漢字 of any kind in the handwriting form it's simplified slightly for speed.
>>9
hungarian is easy peasy, you simply haven't had a go at finnish or estonian, my mother languages
Name:
Anonymous2009-06-15 5:45
頁 = awesome
页 = crap
I can't even handwrite 页 without screwing the 人 part up, it just sucks.
Name:
Anonymous2009-06-15 13:58
They are all shitty fucking shapes meant to communicate, what is this DERP DERP THIS IS BEAUTIFUL THAT'S UGLY bullshit? If you want pretty, go paint a damn picture you faggots. Leave the beauty to calligraphers, let the unwashed masses read and write in peace.
Name:
Anonymous2009-06-15 22:28
>Leave the beauty to calligraphers, let the unwashed masses read and write in peace.
All Chinese characters are calligraphic in nature, like it or not. You have no excuse for your shitty handwriting, enjoy looking like a peasant.
Name:
Anonymous2009-06-18 1:42
>>27
enjoy spending 20 minutes writing a small sentence
I think that reveals more about you than it does me, good handwriting doesn't have to take more time, it just takes a little more care and attention to detail.
Name:
Anonymous2009-06-18 6:43
>>29
not the same guy but, when you quickly have to write something down when your on the phone or something like that, and you still need others to be able to read it, Simplified Chinese is a godsend
Name:
Anonymous2009-06-18 14:59
>>30
In that sense Simplified Chinese has been in use for more than 1000 years before Mao Zedong was ever born. The point is, it was terribly wrong to make those characters the official written standard since they were nothing but a shorthand.
Name:
Anonymous2009-06-18 21:41
>>31
it was done so the common peasant could learn to write. i don't see whats wrong with that? English Calligraphy is nice too but its fucking useless.
nothing against simplified Chinese here, although I do prefer the aesthetics of traditional. Best solution is to know both in order to be able to understand mainland journalism as well as both Hong Kong and Taiwanese based journalism. Plus an understanding of classic literature never hurts.
Name:
Anonymous2012-01-01 7:31
wut
Name:
Anonymous2012-01-01 8:48
>>32
Simplified characters aren't any easier. At least in traditional writing you can clearly see what it's supposed to be a picture of, without a shittonne of imagination. Simplified Characters are nothing more than Ching-chong scribbles
Name:
Anonymous2012-01-22 13:03
Hmm, I see points being missed all over the place.
– Chinese has no inflections or case endings or anything (what illiterates out there confuse with "grammar"; they're two different things[1]), instead it uses word order to specify differences and nuances in meaning. Coming from that gives speakers a hard time learning a language that's full of them. And just for the record: English is simple in this respect.
In a small(er) way, that includes English; it has neither a noun gender system (otherwise found in every Indo-European language, just to name one example), nor a noun class system (like most Asian and a few African languages use). In fact, it's the only language (AFAIK) that has none of those. Which is why English speakers tend to struggle with that when learning other languages.
OTOH, Western European languages (like English) tend to have not one but two past tenses ("went" and "have gone", etc), with complex rules for when to use which. One needs go no further than Eastern Europe to find people struggling with that.
– Using a shorthand version of the same writing (like "simplified" Chinese) isn't going to make it easier to learn to read and write; there are still a gadzillion different symbols to learn.
In the real world, the first step to teaching peasants to read and write, is to have schools out there in the first place. Having a writing system that's easy to learn, while still important, is secondary.
The Korean feudal lords knew this, which is why they resisted the Han'gul writing system for centuries; it can be learned in a day (which was most of the point in the first place), while the Chinese character set takes years.
On a similar note, you can write Vietnamese with Chinese characters (after all, it was done for centuries), but they had no problem switching to the Latin alphabet once a suitable adaptation was made.
– Japanese and Korean use suffixes a lot. These don't always translate well into Chinese characters, and so they use their own writing systems instead to show those. Not to mention they have native words that they prefer to use their own writing for.
And that's not counting how Korean has largely (though not completely) stopped using Chinese characters altogether. As Japanese would have long ago if their simple phonetics hadn't led to their language having homonyms galore. (Classic example: "kami" meaning "hair", "paper" or "god"; context may take care of a lot, but hardly all)
– When a language uses a gadzillion cases (like Finnish or Hungarian), it's more often than not because it has no prepositions ("in", "on", "at", etc); it uses some of the cases instead. This may be a bit hard for a beginner to get their head around, as this is a radically different concept, but it's really not more complex or anything; European languages can be systematically illogical when it comes to choosing which preposition to use. (Like how my native Norwegian uses "_i_ huset" for "in the house", but "_på_ kontoret" for "in the office").
[1] "Grammar" is no more the inflection system (like the infamous "amo/amos/amat" of latin) than traffic lights are the whole book of traffic rules. Grammar is the rulebook of which words go where in a sentence, what and how much to leave to context, if and when to use cases, inflections, prefixes and suffixes, etc. Saying a language has "no grammar" because it uses word order instead of inflections, is like saying a city has "no traffic rules" just because it uses roundabouts instead of traffic lights.
>>36
Vietnamese written in latin alphabet is possibly the ugliest written language ever. Even moreso than Armenian and Tamil, which are pretty hideous languages. They should have stuck with Chinese characters imo.
Name:
Anonymous2012-01-26 16:34
>>37
AFAICT, the main reason they abandoned Chinese characters, is that they take forever to learn. Remember, 2000+ chars just for the basics, some 10,000 for scholars. And that's «simplified» Chinese.
That said, they could indeed have picked something less of an eyesore. Something Han'gul-like? Has anyone ever tried that?
Name:
Anonymous2012-04-16 22:42
I agree with we Chinese should change our language to alphabet based. It's more efficient and easier to learn than characters based.
There are several examples of languages that have a minority who use a different script for them, one example I can think of is Malay/Indonesian with an Arabic script. It wouldn't surprise me to learn something similar exists with Vietnamese, perhaps with a Thai script for Buddhists or something like that?