Comment by La-ang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by La-ang | Hacker News Reader

My synopsis: The only way to understand text is to learn the original language. When I compared Arabic text with translated versions for example, although done by supposedly professionals, I couldn't help but sense awkward misalignments in context. Perhaps the interpretation (understanding) of both reader and writer differ, and so does the translation. The transcending misunderstanding can not be rectified unless a glance is made at the original. I know learning another language just to read a book is indeed way too much, but it is worth it, for you will not be reading one book eventually, and learning a language like Mandarin in this instance is an exciting experience. Examples of books I've read in original language and translation include Political Ideals by B. Russell, 100 years of solitude By G. Marquez, Spirits Rebellious By Khalil Gibran. I am also learning Mandarin, but rest assured, I still need another 5 years to be able to read and write decently.

> My synopsis: The only way to understand text is to learn the original language.

Exactly my approach too, hence why I learn Sumerian for instance. Also note that we are speaking of Chinese philosophy here so the language to learn is Classical Chinese, not Mandarin. Few people would jump into that without at least some knowledge of a modern Chinese language, but it can be done (notably by reading Pulleyblank book).

Yes indeed, although I assume that since Mandarin is more accessible for learners, it can serve as a 101 to classical. Quote: [None of what has been said up to this point is to suggest that studying Chinese language and early thought is only for the classically curious and linguistically intrepid].

I would be curious whether it'd be easier to learn Classical Chinese and then Mandarin, rather than the other way 'round. Seems like, if you take the "forward" approach, you get to reinforce your language learning with a complementary narrative of cultural evolution, where the two bodies of knowledge can reinforce one-another.

That does sort of happen to those of us who need learn both traditional and simplified. If you learn traditional, you have a better chance of being able to read simplified with a little more effort than the other way around.

Eh... I feel like I hear claims of both directions. The Chinese internet is full of people claiming that Taiwanese people can't read simplified Chinese or that PRC people can't read traditional Chinese.

FWIW, anecdotally every mainland Chinese person I've met has been able to read traditional characters. For some of them it is, however, more laborious. All of them have been able to read long tracts in traditional Chinese (think the length of a newspaper article or longer), although sometimes it takes obvious effort. This has not been true of some Taiwanese people I've met for simplified characters.

I'm mostly tempted to chalk this up to environmental factors rather than reasons intrinsic to the script. The mainland often gets a lot of Taiwanese cultural imports, while I don't think Taiwan gets as much cultural imports from the mainland. Furthermore there is a lot of stylistic usage of traditional characters in the mainland (posters, store signs, branding, calligraphy, artwork) and university-level Classical Chinese language classes (aimed at domestic students) are often taught exclusively with traditional characters. In comparison there is essentially no usage of simplified characters at all in Taiwan.

The two scripts essentially have a one-to-one correspondence with each other anyways so it's not really that hard to go between the two if you have full fluency in one.

I would argue that, due to merging different characters together, simplified Chinese is more ambiguous in meaning than traditional Chinese. So it's harder for someone more versed in traditional to read simplified, since there's a bit of guessing as to which "mapping" back to a traditional character should be taken. Whereas there's only one way to map a traditional character to a simplified character, so it's just memorization+recall if you learn simplified first.

I'd compare reading simplified Chinese characters after a traditional-Chinese education, to reading Japanese written purely in kana, and trying to figure out what kanji are meant. It's something that requires active use of your brain sometimes, where the opposite—translating kanji to kana—is a rote task.

As a note, although simplified merges far more characters than traditional, it also splits some characters that are merged in traditional. For example, 乾 in traditional is split into either 乾 (qian2 one of the hexagrams) or 干 (gan1 dry) in simplified.

Regardless, the number of simplified characters for which the merger of traditional characters happens is small, even more so compared to the number of Chinese characters you see on a day-to-day basis. On top of that, the vast majority of these mergers involve one character that in traditional Chinese is archaic and very rarely seen or are considered obscure variant characters of the same word in traditional Chinese. I can only think of maybe a dozen or so examples that show up in Chinese you're likely to read on a day-to-day basis. Even fewer if what you're reading doesn't have a lot to do with ancient China. That's why I say it's essentially a one-to-one correspondence.

I do hear your argument often from other Chinese speakers to support why reading traditional characters if you only know simplified characters is easier than reading simplified characters if you only know traditional characters so maybe there's something to it.

I'm pretty sure that's the route most Korean and Japanese speakers go. The differences between the two are exaggerated anyways.

I don't think that's true of modern Korean or Japanese speakers. You're going to have to go back about a century or more to find any appreciable amount of literacy in Classical Chinese in Korea or Japan.

Before the 20th century, this was basically how every educated non-Chinese person in East Asia would've studied Chinese, since they all would have learned written Classical Chinese as part of their education, but would have had to study Mandarin separately. The results were mixed. Ho Chi Minh seems to have done okay. Another Vietnamese compatriot Phan Bội Châu seemed to never really get the hang of Mandarin Chinese despite spending a considerable amount of time in China (although a good amount of that time was in jail).

How did you learn sumerian? And what sumerian texts are you reading? I am intrigued

I registered to a remote degree offered by one of the universities I graduated from (400€ a year). I'm not reading Sumerian texts yet, beside those in the class which are mostly texts celebrating foundation of sometime (a temple to a god for example).

The language is way more grammatical than I expected, and the first year if focussed on learning that. Really interesting nonetheless.

Alternately, you can heavily annotate a text as you translate it, such that the annotations serve effectively as a language course to teach the reader exactly as much of the source language as is needed to appreciate the context of the translation. This is often done for works in early-modern English, simply because there's enough commonality with modern English that the "language learning guide" can fit in the margins, rather than taking up 90% of the work.

But even with these annotated works, I often wish that the original text was supplied alongside the translation (as it usually is in lyrical translations, e.g. opera), so that the annotations could point to aspects of the original text to explain the choices made, instead of referring to an out-of-band original that's not clear on the page.

It also becomes a hurdle to read the footnotes. I often times got sucked in them and forget even how to come back to the original text, let alone the original idea I was reading.

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