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: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday December 17 2015, @03:09AM
Ugh, that describes me...I'm missing about 60dB in each ear and am badly tone-deaf. My girlfriend is trying to get me to learn Mandarin (she's Cantonese but speaks both fluently). I honestly cannot hear the different tones unless the speaker is speaking very slowly, and for some reason i can't reliably produce them either.
Plus, when you're used to Japanese, you look at the characters and say them *in* Japanese. To make matters more complicated, some Japanese readings of characters, the on'yomi, are similar to but not exactly like the Mandarin reading (JP "sui"/ ZN "shui," where the second one is closer to "shu'ei" than the "shu'i" i'd natively expect).
Then there's the fact that I can't read the simplified character set properly, or that some things just don't translate one to one; theoretically Hazuki (leaf + moon) would become Yeyue, but that sounds bizarre and I don't think I've ever seen it.
You would think a couple of countries with over a thousand years of history togethr would have blended more.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday December 17 2015, @10:41PM
You'd think that might be the case, but even in the UK, which is smaller than Japan, never mind China, there are a variety of accents and dialects from one end of the island to the other. And it's not even the same language, seeing as Wales has that town named Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
(Score: 2) by bugamn on Friday December 18 2015, @06:38PM
I just want to point out that I marveled to discover that name.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday December 19 2015, @02:24AM
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch."
That sounds like a town made of Taz. Not "a bunch of Tasmanian devils." A few hundred clones of Taz, the Looney Tune. How the hell do you pronounce that? o_O
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...