>>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.