A simple explanation of Chinese characters

>> Combine this with the use of tones, and you get a pretty complicated mess. You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process.

This seems a bit like linguistic relativity. Native speakers don't have problems with tones. It is a challenge for second language learners of Chinese who don't speak a tonal language. Likewise, stress patterns in English are a challenge for second language learners but native speakers don't struggle with it.

There is a lot of word play in Chinese. Just because a syllable has a raising tone does not mean it is the exact same pitch as another syllable with a raising tone later in the phrase, rather the syllables follow the same pattern of starting from a lower pitch and go to a higher one. You can also make vowels longer or shorter.

>> Things in Chinese are heavily relying on context.

That's the case for most languages. What does 'hit' mean in English?

He hit me. Give me a hit. That show is a hit. He hit a tree with his car. I hit a new high. The boss ordered a hit on him. Tomorrow we will be hit by a storm. They hit it off well. She hit on him. That hits close to home. Let's hit the road.

OP here. I think the reality is obviously more messy than what the article tends to portray. All natural languages are messy in their own idiomatic ways.

One of the goals of the article was to emphasize the structure in the Chinese language, because most people who are not familiar with it just assume it's just a big bunch of meaningless ideograms.

It's a "simple" introduction, not a thorough one. It's meant to tease people's curiosity. If you start with a negative bias towards Chinese, you won't be able to see where it shines.

Things that you express with tones in English, can be expressed with particles in Chinese. They can also be expressed in other modulations at the sentence level.

Some subtleties of English definitely can't be expressed in Chinese, but the reverse is equally true. And that's the point I want to stress. Chinese is very different, and where there is difference, there is richness.

As a Chinese, I can tell you that there are only 3000 common Chinese characters. My nephew begin to read news paper at grade 4 ( 10 years old). I begin to read very complicate novels at 13. A good thing about Chinese character is: I can easily read laws if I want, because there is not much new vocabulary to read. Tone is not a problem for baby. They can grasp it from day one when they start to speak.( I have 3 kids) There is a lot logic inside Chinese characters.

I've been living in Vietnam for years now and watched many foreigners struggle to learn the language, which depends even more on tones than Chinese. Tonal languages are very unforgiving, and the differences between tones are very subtle in common conversation. Even when Vietnamese completely mangle the grammar and pronunciation of English you can usually understand what they're trying to say. But if you don't absolutely nail the tones and pronunciation of Vietnamese all you'll get are blank stares back in response. That is, if you haven't accidentally said something wrong or vulgar by mistake.

The saving grace of Vietnamese is that the grammar is trivially simple compared to English. No plurals, tenses, cases, verb conjugation etc. And it uses the Latin alphabet so reading and writing it is vastly easier than Chinese.

I just wanted to comment on your point about tones. I'm a pretty mediocre Chinese speaker, but I find it much easier to hear Chinese than English. At the level of full sentences, English is far easier for me, but at the word level the advantage is equal in magnitude favoring Chinese. I think it's because it's much easier to hear the voiced sounds that comprise the majority of Chinese, whereas in English a lot of the meaning is loaded into the high-pass unvoiced component. From the perspective of the listener, it seems to make much more sense to use the higher-SNR of voiced sounds to convey the bulk of information (as I believe Chinese does), rather than the much weaker unvoiced sounds (which English makes heavy use of.) I'm guessing the prominence of unvoiced sounds in speech owes to their being less effort to form, or to their universality across different people whose voiced sounds would have substantially different frequency components.

"You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process."

Well, er..., Chinese classic poetry is the quite subtle and expressive, I have heard.

And, not sure for your native language but for mine, if I read or hear a word that I do not know, I also have to take the dictionnary. Moreover, in many cases, I will not know how to pronounce a name I never heard before.

And, well, building a search engine is much simpler in Chinese, because characters do not change. So yes, there is (almost) no stemming, because you do not need to stem the words before indexing or searching.

Another point you did not mention: printing Chinese characters on a paper or a screen is much simpler: all of them have the same width and height. No kerning. No need for text justification (almost). Do you know that when preparing for a book in French the typographs have to make sure there is no "rivers" in the page and adjust word spaces accordingly?

I once built a Chinese search engine, which worked quite well. Stemming isn't an issue as Chinese has absolutely no inflection. The problem is that there are no spaces between words. To separate them, I used a dictionary and a greedy algorithm. At any point in the text, I simply found the longest word in the dictionary which matched and committed to that. On rare occasions, it would get it wrong but soon recover (e.g. if my next few characters are ABCDE and the longest matching word is ABC, I'd match that, followed perhaps by D and E, even if the correct tokenization is AB CD E). Without a dictionary you can't meaningfully tokenize Chinese.

> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process.

That's not unusual even in languages without tones. For instance, in Irish, you can't use vocal stress to emphasise particular words like you can in English. Instead, you use a combination of changes in word order and emphatic affixes to convey the same meaning. No expressiveness is lost, it's just that Irish uses as different mechanism to convey the same meaning.

My understanding of Mandarin and the other Sinitic languages is similar: they might not use the same mechanisms to convey such information as in English, but they certainly can convey them.

> Moreover, combining one character before (or after) another can change the meaning entirely. Adding a third one can again change things.

vent con-vent con-vent-tion

Mandarin is no different than any other language in this regard. It's just that it's writing system masks what we'd consider words in languages with alphabet-like scripts. Also keep in mind that the Chinese characters make use of punning, so sometimes those weird character combinations are simply very, very old visual or phonological puns.

[There's a little bit of cheating in there, because the 'vent' in 'convent' is more like 'ven-t', but the principle still applies, and with some though I could find better examples. However, as mentioned, Chinese characters do rely on punning like this in places, it's not a huge flaw in the example.]

> You can't apply a Porter stemming algorithm for example; there's no concept of stem or etymology (no apparently logical one at least).

There are a few reasons for that, but the main one is that Mandarin is a largely isolating language. However, to apply some equivalent of Porter stemming, you need to rely on there being a concept similar to a word in the language and its writing system, whereas Chinese characters are more akin to morphemes, so the concept of 'stemming' makes no sense. Pinyin is another matter though.

> there's no concept of [...] etymology (no apparently logical one at least).

There is, it's just obscured by how divorced the written language is from the spoken language, which isn't the case for languages with alphabets, syllabaries, &c.

> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume.

You can't use Chinese tones, but you can still modulate your speech tonally to convey emotion while respecting them.

> The bottom line is that even for a native speaker, if you encounter a new character, chances are you don't know what it means or how to pronounce it. If it's simple enough, you may guess, but that's it.

Native speaker here, this is definitely true. On top of the characters

Also, children learn the phonetic alphabet[1] before learning the characters. That's why it takes so long to even read a simple magazine: no one uses the phonetic alphabet outside of lower level elementary school.

This article is like the "Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes"[2] but more like "Learn to read 0.01% of Chinese characters in 15 minutes", but interesting nonetheless

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

[2]http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/

On the other hand, I would think that a language that uses tones has higher "bandwidth". When you use tones, you can use shorter words. With these shorter tone-words, you can "transfer" more information in less time, compared to a non-tonal language.

Yes, I started learning a bit of Mandarin this year. Interesting, but tedious. Imagine they constructed their numeral system the way they constructed the (non)alphabet. Instead of 0-9, and all numbers constructed from those, there would be a million characters for counting to one million.

I started out deciding I would never bother learning the Chinese characters and only focus on speech and listening.

But eventually I hit a point where I started to get a strong desire to learn them. I got really curious about them, and wanted to be able to read signs and menus. So I spent a year getting my reading skills up to about the same level as my listening/speaking.

I think that was a nice way to do it. Learning to read helps with listening/speaking skills too, but it's way too daunting to try to learn chinese characters until you can actually speak.

Thanks for the tip for the app. I used Memrise myself.

For listening I recently discovered PopChinese (http://popupchinese.com/) which provide free podcasts. I like it because even beginner level dialogs are spoken at real speed. And I see the fact they only provide transcripts for paying subscribers as a feature: it forces me to concentrate on actual listening until it get it all.

Skritter is not only more efficient than other methods of learning Chinese writing by orders of magnitude, it's also fun to use.

I've been learning Mandarin for a long time. I can understand a decent amount and I can speak pretty well, but I can't read much or write worth a damn, and my vocabulary is small. I also speak French, and learning to read and write took basically no time at all (just quickly learn some pretty regular rules, much simpler than English) and a lot of vocabulary carried over.

So in short, yeah, spot on.

I do think tones are a bigger problem than you let on. You can get by without them. I've met people who are pretty fluent except they just have no command of tones, and they can still understand and be understood for the most part. But the intimidation factor is huge, and even if you can be understood, people want to speak well not just adequately.

I think the language would be easier to learn if we'd punt on reading and writing for the first year or two. Every curriculum I've seen incorporates writing heavily from the start. As you note, it's like learning two languages at once. That's a lot of extra effort to put in! I imagine it would be much easier to learn these effectively-two-different-languages serially rather than in parallel. Attain basic proficiency with speaking and listening, then move on to how to read and write what's already known.

I'm learning Mandarin right now and I love the grammar. I studied Spanish in high school and the lack of conjugation in Chinese is superb. I even feel sorry for people learning English now.

    我是很酷。  
    （Wǒ shì hěn kù.）     
    I am cool.
    
    你是很酷。  
    （Nǐ shì hěn kù.）     
    You are cool.
    
    他是很酷。  
    （Tā shì hěn kù.）     
    He is cool.
    
    她是很酷。  
    （Tā shì hěn kù.）     
    She is cool. 
    
    我们是很酷。
    （Wǒmen shì hěn kù.）   
    We are cool.
    
    他们是很酷。 
    (Tāmen shì hěn kù.)   
    They are cool.

That 是 (shì) stays consistent through all the sentences. Love it. Also the fact that 他，她，and 它 (he， she, and it) all have the same pronunciation (tā).

That (nice!) article gives 9 reasons. Only 6 of them are applicable in 2015.

#3 is now irrelevant because people don't write with pens. They type on their phones or, when at work, on their laptops.

#5 is no longer true, as dictionaries are now on Pleco. Yes, I found it hard to look up words in a paper dictionary when I started learning. But, for today's learners, their first dictionary is Pleco on iOS/Android, and this pain is gone.

#7 is a weird one. You only need one romanization method (Pinyin) to learn Chinese, or to look up the standard (Mandarin) pronunciation of a new character. When would I ever need to use or read Wade-Giles, or any other romanization method, unless I'm reading the romanized version of a Taiwan/HK person's surname?

Eh, the complaints about the characters seem mostly overblown. I think I picked up about 2,000 in a year, and that was not studying particularly hard. Past a certain point most of the new characters are combinations of characters you've already studied. Of course, if you're not practicing your reading it's .

Also, if you have at least a decent level in the language it's not going to be unfamiliar characters that give you trouble in newspaper articles (most of the unfamiliar characters you run into will be from names or chengyu), but Chinese words your unfamiliar with. And in these cases, the characters actually help; you're going to have a much easier time guessing what "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis" mean in Chinese than in English.

#1 through 3 are all saying the same general thing

#5 no longer matters because there are online dictionaries that let you draw the character you want to look up

#7: What's wrong with Hanyu Pinyin?

But it is true that the gulf between English and Chinese is bigger than the gulf between English and a lot of other European languages.

Actually, ALL Chinese characters are monosyllabic.

There are only two kinds of languages - the ones with historical baggage, and the ones nobody uses.

If you think that's a mess, wait till you learn the history of English...

A rosy picture inevitably includes a number of thorns...

I'm learning Chinese, and am having a wonderful time doing so. But there's no doubt that there's a great deal of historical baggage with the language, which is bewildering and exhilarating at the same time.