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I'll save everyone the trip to their favourite search engine. It's part of a larger quote:

"宰予晝寢。子曰：「朽木不可雕也, 糞土之牆不可朽也。於予與何誅」子曰：「始吾於人也, 聽其言而信其行; 今吾於人也, 聽其言而觀其行。於予與改是。」"

"Tsai Yu slept during the daytime. The master said, "Rotten wood cannot be carved; dirty earth cannot be used for cement: why bother scolding him? At first I used to listen to what people said and expect them to act accordingly. Now I listen to what people say and watch what they do. I learned this from Yu."[0]

(I hope Chinese uses quote signs too.)

_____ [0] http://www.lrsolution.com/konkar/SF_LunYu.html

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「 and 」 are quotation marks.

The directionality of those is pretty cool. Of course with latin style quotation marks you can always do the 'smart quote' style quotation marks, but those really depend on handwriting a lot more.

I suppose adopting those style quotation marks in English is probably a lost cause though.

In German we use ,,this style'' of quotes. Which is discernible even with bad handwriting.

Thanks! I really like those visually. While non-standard, I just might have to start using those in my English typesetting/formatting of documents.

As a complete tangent, I think that over the next 50 years, various Chinese phrases, language quirks and usage will start bleeding into English, much as Spanish has if not moreso.

Dong ma?

> I think that over the next 50 years, various Chinese phrases, language quirks and usage will start bleeding into English

Right on. That was one of my favorite elements of the Firefly TV series.

One of the criticisms of Firefly was that for a future that was supposed to have a large Chinese population / integration of Chinese culture, you never really saw any Chinese characters (aka whitewashing). That said, I always thought it was an elegant work-around to broadcast TV's limitations on cusswords.

Maybe they could start picking up a phonetic alphabet in the meantime, so it doesn't take me that long to become competent with their written language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

That doesn't appear to be used for internal communication, but rather for communicating with foreigners. I'm sure many millions of young Chinese schoolchildren would love it if Pinyin was adopted as a native written language, so they wouldn't have to spend quite so much mental effort memorizing the tens of thousands of characters needed to qualify for a diploma.

Same goes for Japanese schoolchildren, since they're plagued with a non-phonetic alphabet as well. The widely-used phonetic [hiragana] alphabet is ready to replace their daunting kanji alphabet imported from China.

Won't start a big argument, but replacing kanji with hiragana would make the language a vaguely-worded nightmare. Massive number of homonyms; huge number of verbs with slightly different nuance achieved through a different choice of kanji.

The language IS evolving toward hiragana for simple, everyday words, but ask any adult who has to read children's books (all in hiragana) how painful it is to group the words correctly and you'll agree a bigger change won't come soon.

If there are many homonyms that could be mistaken despite context, how do people understand the spoken language? Are verbal inflections incompletely represented in hiragana versus kanji?

As for grouping into words, other languages have found spaces useful. ; )

There's a tonal accent, which is not conveyed in writing. I believe there are some regional variations of it, too.

In Japanese, it's related to something called the "accent nucleus." Googling that will give you a lot of random scholarly articles. Oddly enough the best simple explanation I could find was this:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100122132557AA...

So not only does hiragana need spaces, but it also needs accents?

Sort of. You're forgetting katakana, though. And there's still ambiguity, but live speakers know how to avoid it... usually.

There's just so much nuance they convey that the language would be less expressive without kanji. Even if they are a pain in the rear to study.

You're forgetting katakana, though.

Yeah... about that. Do you really need two different phonetic alphabets? I mean, c'mon! Give a lazy gaijin a break!

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090420033449AA...

"Katakana are not used only for foreign words. Katakana are also used with onomatopoeia, newly coined words, names when you don't know the kanji, and more.

Furthermore, katakana can be used to vary the style in writing. It is not uncommon to see an entire sentence in nothing but katakana, often to express a certain emotion (even when it lacks foreign words altogether). In other words, ヲ is actually used once in a while.

In addition, in ancient times, katakana were considered the proper way to write the language, while hiragana were considered sloppy and vulgar. In this respect, katakana can be used to evoke an archaic style. "

Not to dispute your (very credible) assertion that it's more suitable for common use than hiragana, can katakana express more tonal subtlety than hiragana? Are there words for which it would be preferable to use hiragana for legibility reasons? Are both used together in compliment to express an even wider range of verbal tones?

Homonyms usually have different pitch (accent). Which differs depending on the region you are from :D

In writing homonyms use different kanji so there is no problem differentiating them.

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