[Feisbook Control]

(12-02-2013 06:50 PM)Fathom Wrote:  

(12-01-2013 09:21 PM)Feisbook Control Wrote:  

One of the biggest difficulties compared to other languages is that Chinese does not use an alphabet, meaning that you can't just see something and read it out loud and ask someone what it means.

Yes, and that is why the biggest hurdle in learning, as I mentioned above, is building the vocabulary. But again, once you reach a critical mass, you will eventually guess a character's pronunciation intuitively with a fair amount of accuracy, since many use the same parts.

Example: 马 This character is pronounced "ma" (I'm intentionally ignoring the tone.) Take a good look at it. Now, guess what this character sounds like:

妈 (again, intentionally omitting the tone)

How about this one? 骂

Or this one? 码

Maybe you're much more knowledgeable than I am (I'd say I'm only low intermediate, perhaps, it's really hard for me to judge because I can sometimes read or listen t a whole block of something, and other times not understand a single sentence), but my impression thus far is: yes and no. Take this very simple counter example:

木, 林, and 森 (mu, lin, sen). They all have semantic connections, of course, but not phonetic.

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The more characters you learn, the easier it becomes. And until you do, yes, you can use the Pieco app or the nciku website. Or go hardcore, buy a Chinese English dictionary and look up by radical and stroke count.

The broader issue is that even though you are somewhat correct, characters put the cart before the horse. You need to know an extraordinary number of characters before you can use them to learn more. With an alphabet, you're off and running in hours or days. English is a bad example because it has so many irregular spellings. That is not the case with all languages that use an alphabet.

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Anyway, I didn't mean to derail the business topic. I just feel I must dispel the unrealistic impression most foreigners have of Chinese. People shouldn't be discouraged over something as negligible as a writing system. Take heart in the fact that Indo-European languages and their Latin alphabet are much more confusing to Chinese than their characters are to us. And if that makes you go, "WTF? How can 26 simple letters be difficult to people who master 2,000 characters by the time they graduate high school," then get used to that feeling, 'cause you will experience it a lot in China. It is the great Cultural Divide which makes China so interesting to many foreigners.

Have you seen what they have to go through to learn those characters? (They're worse in Taiwan.) It's a brutal system of learning, and I think it has flow on effects into other areas.

I don't agree about your point regarding the alphabet. I suspect that a massive amount of that attitude from Chinese comes from them seeing themselves as the Middle Kingdom and all other cultures as automatically being inferior or suspicious. I suspect that a Latin based alphabet language speaker could learn another script (Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, etc.) fairly easily because those systems are inherently easy. That's why much of the world uses alphabets as opposed to characters (historically, there were more civilisations that used characters of some form, but some changed).

Even with the Roman script, it still has advantages in that I can use it to be off the ground and running with dozens of other languages (including many that are not Indo-European. e.g. Malay). There are times when I can read Japanese, but I still can't pronounce it. That's a problem, obviously. I know that many Japanese words (e.g. mountain) have two pronunciations, one that is similar to Chinese (san vs shan), but one that is not (yama vs shan). So, reading Chinese would be an advantage in reading Japanese, but there would still be issues.

Anyway, you are right in some senses that Chinese is not that difficult to learn, tones aside. The grammar is pretty simple and vocabulary is often quite simple too if you know the parts. For instance, traffic lights are "red green lights", a zebra is a "striped horse", etc. You can start assembling the parts.