Comment by KennyCason | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KennyCason | Hacker News Reader

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I'm impressed, If you remove the Kanji from Japanese, my reading speed goes down significantly.

Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed.

What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English reading speed. I find Chinese very efficient to read/parse. I think there are many factors that contribute to this such as well defined word roots, similar sized characters, relatively small number of radicals (larger than alphabet of course), very simple/clean grammar. The more I study, learn, and use Chinese, I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc.

I've studied Japanese/Chinese both for a long time (10-15 years). Nowadays, I use Chinese everyday as that's the language my wife and I use.

As a pure alphabet goes, I really like the Korean implementation. I was able to mostly learn and retain it with only 1-2 hours of study.

Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective as a native English speaker and a Chinese learner.

> I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc.

It had been a dominating language/writing system for part of Asia, and we can still find its legacy in Vietnamese, Korean, Japan.

But I think "legacy" is the keyword here. As a software engineer, the Chinese writing system is not in a ideal shape at least for me. There used to be systematic ways/principles to create characters, but there has never been any sustainable approach to "maintain" some of the internal consistency. It's like stacking workarounds one after another, and it becomes what we see today. Users can just accept it without any efficient way to modify or even refactor it, not mentioning the burden and effort to create just one beautiful font design.

Thanks for your perspective as well.

I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :)

I agree with you that there must be a newer/better way to construct a Chinese-like writing system that isn't quite a burden to both learn as well implement in computers (fonts, etc). I.e. Words could still be built up of logic word roots , similar to current system but more consistent/logical. More advanced words could be built of simpler words. Some of my favorite examples are words like "skull" that are in Chinese 骨头 (literally "head bone"). These sorts of constructions for me as a foreigner learning Chinese are amazing. I'm able to memorize so many Chinese technical/science terms that are a pain even for natives in English.

I sometimes have imagined training a neural network to generate "word vectors" that are actually just small 32x32 colored images, just to see what they would look like. Sort of like the word2vec generations, but using images as the input and the output would be a sort of viewable "character". I also imagine "hyper-intelligent" beings developing languages like this, only with higher dimensionality of input and not only images.

> I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :)

Improvement or not? I argue that it depends. Once in an international situation, Mr. Xi wanted to speak a seldom-used and very old idiom in his draft, which was "通商宽农", roughly standing for the meaning that farmers (农) can live much better (宽) if economy is getting good. However, he spoke it as "通商宽衣"， which is not a established phrase but can still be reasoned as "get economy better and get undressed (宽衣)"。

As a reference, the traditional version of this idiom is "通商寬農"。"農" (farmer, agriculture) has a very different shape compared to "衣" (cloth, surface) in traditional Chinese, but obviously they looks similar when you become a important but nervous guy.

If we regard the Chinese language/writing system as a huge project, I would say that simplified Chinese was a hard fork without much testing but soon widely adopted, and its design was based on some novel but destructive compression algorithm without any peer review process.

> I sometimes have imagined training a neural network to generate "word vectors" that are actually just small 32x32 colored images, just to see what they would look like. ...

Cool idea! Sounds like some kind of esoteric language. Looking forward to it.

Haha that’s a great example. Those are definitely areas where the written language has room for improvement. I could also imagine myself making a similar mistake.

Regardless, I’ve always been impressed that the Chinese can make such a bold change as their written language yet here in the United States, I’m still arguing with people who don’t know how many feet are in a mile as to why we should switch to metric. :)

If I ever get around to making my “hyper language”, I’ll be sure to post or let you know. I imagine it will likely be “not-very-user-friendly”. haha

About the neural network part, not exactly what you're looking for but you might enjoy this blog post[1] by David Ha with a neural network "dreaming" fake kanjis.

[1] http://otoro.net/kanji/

Ha! That’s awesome! Some of the kanji hall-of-famers actually turned out pretty great.

Part of my motivation with Dotsies was to capture the compactness and visual distinctness of Asian characters, while still keeping what's good about alphabets. I'm guessing native Chinese speakers find it exhausting to have their eyes dart back and forth at a comparatively hectic speed to take in the same information when reading English?

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