Comment by sdrothrock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdrothrock | Hacker News Reader

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The primary problem with people who don't know Japanese or Chinese arguing against kanji/hanji is that they use very loose comparisons that they think are 1:1.

For example, when you write "inconceivable," you're not regurgitating every single letter in a line from memory. You probably remember the prefix "in," "conceive," and you know "able." You probably also know the common patterns "cei" or "eive" or "con," so the word "inconceivable" really isn't as complex as the initial length makes it look, as long as you know the blocks.

Kanji/hanzi are the same way -- they look complex and inscrutable to the uneducated eye, but they're all made of common building blocks that make it easier to remember them. After all, human memory works roughly the same way all the world around; people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless.

The vocabulary utilizing kanji/hanzi works the same way.

Someone could look at "inconceivable" and say "well shit, that doesn't make sense! It's long, you'd have to memorize so many letters, and the letters themselves have so many bits! Plus it has 'in' in it, which makes no sense because 'in' commonly means 'inside of something', and 'con' usually means 'to swindle someone'! This alphabet thing is completely useless."

It's absurd, reductionist, and a bit offensive.

If chinese characters weren't unusually cumbersome, why then do chinese schoolchildren learn a different alphabet first (pinyin), just to assist them in learning chinese characters?

> people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless.

Well, people don't. 20 strokes is an unusually high stroke count, and people don't remember thousands of those. Simplified chinese characters were created because traditional characters were too complex and cumbersome for people to remember.

> If chinese characters weren't unusually cumbersome, why then do chinese schoolchildren learn a different alphabet first

Also why did Korea and Vietnam abandon them entirely?

Probably because Chinese characters are a poor fit for Korean and Vietnamese grammar/vocabulary. They are a poor fit for Japanese grammar/vocabulary, too, as you can see by the fact that every character has multiple possible sounds depending on which word it is used in. In Chinese, however, the characters very much make sense for the language. Most words are one or two syllables, and correspond characters correspond to both the meanings and the pronunciation. A large number of characters even have a pronunciation hint built in. I, personally, think that Chinese is much easier to read in characters than pinyin, and you certainly won't find any Chinese ever using pinyin for more than a teaching tool. (Especially because nobody except foreigners seems to put tones on the pinyin). The fact that China has kept using them, despite a very pragmatic government that wanted to move the language more phonetic, should say something about their utility.

> The fact that China has kept using them, despite a very pragmatic government that wanted to move the language more phonetic, should say something about their utility.

Or just inertia. Norway has had a steady stream of language reforms over the last century aimed at bringing the official written language better into sync with a majority of spoken dialects. This is a result of hundreds of years of Danish rule that ended in 1814, followed by the period of national-romanticism in the period up to the subsequent break from Sweden, that led to a lot of desire to make language etc. more uniquely Norwegian.

As a simple example, we inherited parts of Danish counting.

It used to be in some parts of the country that we'd say "fire og tyve" for 24 - literally "four and twenty". This was changed to "tjuefire" (twentyfour) in the early 1950's. Anyone who has learned Norwegian in school since then has learned the new form in school and been marked down for using the old forms etc.

Despite that, and being born to parents who were in primary school when this had just changed and who learned the new forms, I still regularly use the old form.

I never learned it at school, and I occasionally had teachers complain about it. I don't use it consistently, to make matters worse - it's not a conscious choice to use a more conservative style or anything, it's just habit I picked up mostly from my dad, which is persisting in my spoken language now, when I'm 41, despite having changed in a language reform a couple of decades before I was born.

This is a difference where there's no practical benefit at all to the old form - it's longer, and the new form is more consistent with spoken Norwegian overall -, yet more than half a century later the old form still persists out of habit.

In particular, trying to engineer changes to language tends to take a long time even when there's no resistance to the change.

> learn a different alphabet first (pinyin), just to assist them in learning chinese characters?

Is that what they use hanyu pinyin for these days? I've always thought of pinyin as a pronunciation guide for Mandarin, similar to furigana in Japanese.

A child/foreigner can point at "inconceivable" and ask:

'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?'

as opposed to 'what does "..." mean'

A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..."

compare this with seeing テリヤキ

> 'what does "in-con-ceiv-able" mean?'

Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.

> A japanese beginner will see 照り焼き and say "uhhhh.. ri..."

A child or beginner would probably be more likely to say "uh, what's that thing with the 日 and the 火, it's something ri something ki." Just because something is a symbol doesn't mean you can't describe it. Children are also very likely to just sketch out a picture of what they remember, even if it's incorrect, and you can usually figure that out.

> Really? You don't think someone with less experience in English would say "what does... inkonsayvaybull mean?" There are plenty of instances where the word is not pronounced the way you think it is.

You're missing his point and English is a crappy example because it's spelling is an unmitigated disaster. For example, if you can read and vocalize the Greek alphabet, you can just ask someone what "νόστιμο φαγητό"* means because you can vocalize it. You only need basic knowledge of the alphabet there. Where as with Chinese/Japanese you need to have a good base of characters to be able to potentially vocalize an unknown character which requires much more work than learning a new alphabet.

(* νόστιμο φαγητό means delicious food)

Similarly in Spanish, which has great consistency, in that if you see a word written, you pretty much know how to pronounce it, and vice versa. English is pretty bad in that department, but still much better than Chinese.

While many Chinese characters have a phonetic component (in addition to a component related to the meaning), it rarely corresponds exactly to the current pronunciation (in Mandarin).

Furthermore, you can very rarely conjure the right character out of pronunciation and and some aspect of the meaning.

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