>>4
Chinese characters are basically, in Orwellian terms, Newspeak. It is crafted so that the native will be unable to conceptualize any opposition to the party line, as well as be more open to contradictions[1]. Consider the comparison of the three languages: Chinese (completely hanzi), Japanese (partial kanji, but new concepts can be introduced as words with the syllabary), and Korean (sharply divided by traditional North and the reformed South). The Chinese speaking society is a closed, autocratic dictatorship, with widespread support, while the Japanese speaking society, with it's only partial usage of kanji, still contains traditional elements, but is a much freer society. The case of Korean speaking societies lends even more support: South Korea, which rarely uses hanzi, has experienced a cultural renascence since, while the North, which is a fanatical cult.
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[1] - This is obvious when studying Eastern philosophy, which sounds profound and wise, but ultimately contains nothing. It teaches the student that when a contradiction is reached, the student's entire life must be devoted to meditating on the contradiction, rather than modifying the hypothesis.
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Anonymous2013-06-13 22:41
>>10
but the north completely abolished hanzi until they had to start using it in educational literature
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Anonymous2013-06-13 22:46
>>11
That's DPRK propaganda. Other reports state that the invention on the characters is attributed to Kim Jong-Sung.
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Anonymous2013-06-13 23:54
They draw them on paper, then send them to a specialized company that types them out. They then they send it to the Communist Party censors through the mail, who will post the message if it is appropriate.
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Anonymous2013-06-14 2:02
>>1
You're wrong, they don't even have an alphabet, even though they've tried to get one.
>>10
It's easy to create new concepts with chinese characters, just string them together. There's an advantage in doing it this way also as Hanzi have certain meanings or connotations, and phonetic characters do not.
Anyone who knows Kanji, Hanzi, etc. can usually understand a new word easily, whereas when someone who can read katakana sees a new word they only know how to speak or read it, and have no idea what it means.
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Anonymous2013-06-14 22:33
>>36
so figure out what 咖啡 means without having seen it before
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Anonymous2013-06-14 22:53
>>37
I'll admit that there are combinations which are difficult to guess from the characters alone, but that isn't one of them.
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Anonymous2013-06-14 22:55
>>38
so how would you guess what it means from the characters alone
I don't remember if those characters are in Heisig's books or not, but I learned those characters as coffee and morphine respectively. If I didn't already know the word, I would have a pretty good chance of guessing correctly.
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Anonymous2013-06-14 23:22
>>40
but the proper chinese reading of 咖 is grade, it only has the meaning of coffee because it is an abbreviation of 咖啡, which only means coffee because it reads as coffee phonetically
Obviously Chinese has peculiarities because they don't have a standard phonetic alphabet (unlike Japanese), and they derive certain loanwords from pronounciation, but that isn't necessary, and it doesn't apply to Japanese.
I don't speak Cantonese but I can read it fairly well simply because I learned plenty of Kanji.
If you only spoke scottish gaelic yet knew how to read the alphabet, would you have a chance of understanding english?
I remember reading about a keyboard where you could type in chinese characters with key chords. I'd love to try that someday, but remembering thousands of key combinations would be a bitch.
Typically though, you'll type in the pronunciation of a set of characters and the computer will attempt to translate it to the correct characters.
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Anonymous2013-06-15 3:26
>>42
* chinese
* japanese
* cantonese
* kanji
* Scottish
* Gaelic
* English
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Anonymous2013-06-15 5:48
I don't speak Cantonese but I can read it fairly well simply because I learned plenty of Kanji.
Is that even possible?
My girlfriend is Taiwanese and her keyboard contains strokes that are typed to simulate the writing of the words. For instance, if a word is written by first drawing a vertical stroke, then you would start by typing the vertical stroke key, and so on.