If English was written like Chinese | Hacker News Reader

If English was written like Chinese

zompist.com

14 pointskkim14 comments

I'm a true believer in the dis-value of pictograms representing words. I lived in Japan for about 1.5 years, and was amazed that you need to memorize at least 6000 kanji to be able to read the newspaper well. I was able to speak and answer the phone after about 6 months and learned their two phonetic alphabets (1 for Japanese words, and one identical in meaning but not in look for 'foreign' words. But the kanji were overwhelming.)

My theory is that all of this memorization has a cost, and I think it is no accident that languages requiring so much memory expense tend to have users less able to innovate and integrate ideas given the mental overhead required. (I was in Japan because, for those of you who have not visited, Japan has some of the ugliest urban environments imaginable and they need help architecturally. Ancient Japanese architecture from the Imperial days is beautiful, but modern work tends to be completely non-integrated and non-harmonious with a few notable exceptions.)

I'd say be careful of native bias. Usually, native speakers of a language think that their own language is easier than others--especially if they grew up with it. Each language has strengths and weaknesses.

English has its share of headaches, but you don't notice them as often if you're a native speaker. Pronunciation is a big headache. How do you know that you pronounce the "t" in "skillet", but not in "fillet"? You memorize it. How about "through" and "though"? You memorize it. Sure, there are standard pronunciation rules in English, but because there are lots of borrowed words from other languages in English, you end up with lots of exceptions--that you have to memorize. I went for a long time calling "fajitas", a fah-gee-tuhz instead of a fah-hee-tuhz.

The fact that we have a National Spelling Bee in the US and Britain only attests to how difficult it is to pair up the spelling of a word to its pronunciation. Other languages don't have this. In French, they have grammar bees for kids. Chinese speaking kids join dictionary look-up bees.

Verb tense is something that needs memorization in English as well. Verb tense changes by pronoun, by present/past/future, and by active/passive. They're just something you have to memorize. In Chinese, there is no verb tense. So that's one less thing to memorize.

Korean has a pretty simple alphabet, and it's easy to pronounce too. So by your argument, Koreans should be able to innovate a lot better than the Chinese and Japanese. While I don't have any studies to point to, I kinda doubt that's the case, because there are lots of other factors to innovation besides language, and we don't know which has more weight--we can't run a SVD on it. Therefore, I think it's quite a leap to go from native language to correlation with innovation.

If you said something to the effect of language on speed of education, then you might have something. But innovation...I'm very skeptical.

I grew up in the US since I was five, and I'm a native Chinese speaker. I don't have enough vocabulary to read very well, so when I read Chinese online, I use http://www.popjisyo.com to assist me.

I don't know about the rest of you guys, but when I read English, I tend to see the whole shape rather than individual letters. It is not that much different than reading the hanzi that I do know. And just as you can pick apart English words based on its Latin or French or Gemanic roots, you can also pick apart the meaning of the hanzi based on the component radicals.

With regards to the speed of education, the Chinese and Japanese cultures as a whole has a much stronger literary tradition for the educated social class. In America, you can upgrade your social class by upgrading your financial statement. In the Chinese culture, social status is directly mapped to level of education. You prove it by taking nationwide tests, though the importance of this practice has been declining in the past two decades. Traditionally, the language and the mountains of literary history was what allowed the Manderin class to stay in power. I suppose that was why Mao Zedong went around breaking the traditional class power attacking the educational process ... and simplifying the pictographs.

As for innovation, having access to two different languages has helped me think and express problems in different ways. It is the same phenomenom of using two different programming languages, one more expressive in certain problem domains than another.

However, I don't think I'll ever actually _code_ in anything but English ...

I wouldn't call it native bias, but it may be an error of adjacency instead of causality. While living in Japan (in the early 90's) it was very common to hear from Japanese that their mode of operation was to copy and then improve on the copy rather than to make any great new discoveries. Also, at the time I was there, the educational system enforced strict conformity - common saying "if you see a nail sticking out, you hammer it down."

In any case, I was there as an architect, and I was amazed at how the building designs there, which were typically very strange attempts at copying other styles, were horribly integrated. Sure, each part of the building was executed beautifully, but the whole was horrible. I was among many foreign architects broght in to improve on the local design talent there. This is primarily where my observation of lack of integrative ability/innovation comes form - the built forms .

For the kanji discussion, even though there are many idiosyncracies about pronunciation in spelling for English and other languages, you can get pretty far phonetically. With Japanese/Chinese, you can't get far at all without learning so many separate images (except for the few words using phonetic alphabets.)

As far as innovation, Toyota has revolutionized business processes with their lean system, but their car designs (the look) when they are good, are most likely done out of country. (Many car design exteriors come out of California, including the look of the Porsche Cayman and Boxter, etc)

I'm seeing a pattern in my post here: maybe the memorization of all those images makes it more difficult (but certainly not impossible of course) for the language user to create visually integrative designs?

Or maybe in the rush to imitate the Western styles, the Japanese at the time discarded their traditional arts. Until they gained experience in that new style, they could hardly create visually integrative designs. They obviously were able to create visually integrative designs when they weren't trying to imitate someone else.

I don't think the use of a visual language impairs that part of the mind as much as you seem to think it does.

What is interesting is that it seems that there was a person or persons who developed the traditional Japanese style including modularity, scale proportional to humans, space usage flexibility, about 1000 years ago. That style was copied again and again. There are also many non-integrative contemporary buildings that do not try to imitate a style, so I'm still not unconvinced about this - but again this is clearly a pretty big generalization without any significant research, but something to think about.

I don't know that much about architecture so I'll take your word for it. Thanks for the conversation.

I would say English is far more tolerant of "mistakes" then any other language. So much so that it changes radically over a short period of time.

By mistakes, I mean mispronunciations, using the wrong words, or made up words or words from other languages. As long as there is some sort of context that the meaning gets across, in the "mainstream" it is acceptable. This then flows on to more formal writing.

In that sense I think it has become a very flexible and international language. I would think of French as the polar opposite. No idea about spanish (it seems a bit flexible). Japanese was strict, but these days they seem to like throwing in all sorts of words (as long as they can mangle it with katakana then they will say it - at least the kids will).

Chinese and Japanese are constructed via "strokes", which build into simple characters (like letters, if you will), which then constitute more sophisticated characters. Chinese characters are not pictograms, in the sense that every character is distinctly unique.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but you seem to imply that Chinese and Japanese do not innovate or integrate ideas as well as Westerners? If so, this observation seems to contradict reality.

Did you make a typo with your 6000 figure? It's actually more like 2000 or 3000, depending on the newspaper and your definition of "well".

Also, could you give some examples of ugly urban environments that were built in the last 20 years? From what I've seen of contemporary Japanese architecture, it's simple, modern, and doesn't try to be "original" for the sake of stoking the architect's ego.

6,000 is an exaggeration. There are only ("only") 1,945 "common use" characters that you are expected to know when you graduate high school. Besides, once you know the first couple hundred, you can figure out what the others are about from context.

This is simply an utterly brilliant and original way to explain the Chinese writing system!

Still, in this age of 100dpi 24bit color monitors, why stick to monochrome line drawings for yingzi? One could create the world's first photorealistic writing system!

You mean: "If English were written like Chinese".

Subjunctive mood, people!

No thanks, I like my language the way it is... it was tough enough learning cursive as a kid, no way in hell I'm drawing tiny pictures just so you can better understand my language ;)

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