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Comment by my_first_acct | Hacker News Reader

Because of the difficult writing system (thousands of characters to memorize, rather than a mere 26), Mandarin is unlikely to replace English as a world language.

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And quality of mandarin content is deterioting ever faster these days, thanks to low quality school education, generally shit-tier English translators, and the self-media sensationalism cottage industry that Wechat and Toutiao from Bytedance helped created.

i don't know about this. how much worse, really, are hanzi (which do have a loose structure to them, it's not just brute memorization) than the deranged English spelling system?

if there's anyone who learned both as additional languages I would be interested in hearing.

Here is an article on the subject: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html ("Why Chinese is So Damn Hard")

And evin bad spelers can riit undrstandabbel englush.

this is fantastic, thanks. I can definitely attest that Chinese people are very proud of the difficulty of their language. One possible factor that isn't mentioned: I believe that culturally, the Chinese value learning and education more.

Your belief needs evidence. Or a more precise definition of "learning" and "education." My experience, both East and West, is that the typical person is just too busy trying to survive to care much about learning or education (in almost any sense).

You can bluff your way through English spelling and let the computer fix 90+% of it and let human readers fix most of the remainder. Can you do that with Mandarin characters?

Yes. If you just type ahead in Pinyin and accept whatever the input method makes out of it, human readers will be able to fix the remainder. It works analogously with handwritten characters, where you don't need to remember every stroke, so long as the general shape is recognizable.

u ll maek urlself look dum tho

When I was little a game I would often play with myself is to switch on the Pinyin IME, keep pressing random keys for a minute or two, and then try to make sense of the ridiculous stuff I typed out. It was a lot of fun because you can always make some kind of sense of it.

It's bad enough that educated Chinese native speakers can't write common words like "sneeze" without the assistance of a computer:

* http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

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