SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the soylentils-are-characters-too dept.
It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet.
An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds.
They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves.A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!
For those who are curious, who are language geeks, or who are updating their skill set to learn how to say, "Yes, boss," in Mandarin...it's a bit too cursory on the subject of radicals, which are the heart of Chinese characters and how you look stuff up in the dictionary, but a reasonable introduction into the writing system.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @01:05AM
The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!
Can't compare. Yeah, nice cop-out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Thursday December 17 2015, @02:17AM
Linguistics is quite complex and highly political. An article introducing teen readership to a linguistics subject can't be expected to do anything short of copping-out.
On a more factual basis, the Wikipedia has this to say:
In contrast to the popular conception of Chinese as a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, the vast majority of Chinese characters (about 95 percent of the characters in the Shuowen Jiezi) are constructed as either logical aggregates or, more often, phonetic complexes.
So, assuming 3000 symbols, an average Chinese will memories a good 150 symbols and then map the rest through differentiating rules.
By comparison, I'm guessing English is just as bad if not significantly worse. Well, I don't have to guess. There's literacy rates published annually proving just that. And if PRC statistics are untrustworthy, comparing to Japan or Taiwan who use similar or the same system shows similar results.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:22AM
I'm guessing English is just as bad
The main problem with English is the horrible orthography, but I take it you that already know [okanagan.bc.ca].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:25AM
s/you that/that you/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by moondrake on Thursday December 17 2015, @10:17AM
>So, assuming 3000 symbols, an average Chinese will memories a good 150 symbols and then map the rest through differentiating rules.
I am not sure I agree. It is true that you learn to guess meaning based on radicals and what not, but to say 150 symbols is enough is vastly underestimating the systems complexity (I can probably read about 150 characters, but are far from understanding complex text). The fact that many characters were constructed as phonetic complexes does not help you little because of the dialect and time in which the character was developed. Often its no longer pronounced as it was originally. This is even more so for languages like Japanese, who still have many alternative pronouncations for the same character depending on context.
I do doubt the statistics a bit. Not because they come from China, but I wonder how they are measured. I know for a fact that many young people have trouble writing characters by hand because they are using cellphones/PCs most of the time, which allows you to write a sound (using our alphabet or similar systems in Japan) and then select the character from a list. This is much easier compared to writing some more complex characters from memory, and also a source of hilarious "spelling" errors.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:03PM
150 symbols is enough is vastly underestimating the systems complexity
A rule could be, "Plain is spelled like Plan but with an I after the a". That's to say, many times the rules are actually worse then memorizing unless you already speak the language fluently so that you're mapping sounds to symbols as opposed to learning sounds and symbols at the same time.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday December 17 2015, @09:07AM
But you can't compare apples and oranges!
That's a terrible analogy anyway. Apples and oranges are easy to compare. They're both fruit, they both have colour, mass, length/width/height...
You can't compare apples and melancholia.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:33PM
Stuart: Ooh, Sheldon, I’m afraid you couldn’t be more wrong.
Sheldon: More wrong? Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.
Stuart: Of course it is. It’s a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable; it’s very wrong to say it’s a suspension bridge.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"