Clarification on Chinese character, etc.

[Rudolph C Troike]

I'd like to clear up a few points re my remarks on Chinese vs English,
which started this interesting interchange.

1. Chinese characters are definitely not easy to learn, unless you are a
schoolchild in China/Taiwan and expected to learn several hundred a
year. If you are over 40 as I was when I started, you quickly find that
college-age students soon surpass you. And you also discover, as Doug
commented, that you rapidly lose them if you don't use them (though I
doubt this is as much of a problem if you started learning them as a child
in China/Taiwan).
        However, most characters have a combination of a
"phonetic" radical and a "semantic" element, such that the first often
gives a clue to the pronunciation (in a complex variety of ways) and the
second to the meaning. Characters are very difficult to learn up to about
the first 1,000, and beyond that those who know (I got only to about
300) say that it gets progressively easier as you learn more to relate new
characters to: in other words, the process becomes generative in the way
that alphabetic writing does.
        It is a mixed blessing that Korea dropped the teaching of
characters in the schools some years ago. A student of mine who grew up in
the old system listened to a lecture in Chinese by a linguist from the
mainland, who brought along a copy of his talk in characters, and when I
asked her afterward told me that she understood not a word of his speech,
but was able to follow his argument from reading the written text. In
Korean formerly (and Vietnamese) and still in Japanese, content morphemes
are represented in characters (kanji, han zi in Chinese), and grammatical
morphology not found in Chinese is written in kana. Studies of reading in
Japanese show that people fixate on the characters primarily, not
surprisingly from an information-processing point of view.
        By dropping the teaching of characters in Korean (especially
unfortunate since so much of the content vocabulary is borrowed from
Chinese, as in Japan), Korea has essentially cut itself off from easy
access to Chinese knowledge-generation.
        On the other hand, even with my limited knowledge of Chinese
characters, I can use Japanese bibliographies without having first to
study Japanese, and access a certain amount of information in Japanese
although I don't know the language.
        This is comparable to reading technical material in Russian on the
basis of being able to recognize pan-European cognates.
        If I knew Chinese characters well, I could make much deeper use of
Japanese sources by making a few adjustments for word order differences.
If European languages were all written in characters, one would not have
to spend a great deal of time studying each discrete language, but
information flow would be greatly facilitated on the basis of a common
orthography. The concept is at least partially parallel to the use of
characters like 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. to represent morphemes which receive very
different pronunciations in different languages. A Turk and a Russian
could not follow an oral discussion in the other's language, but can
certainly follow a written presentation using these characters. After all,
charaters have served to hold together a motley of mutually unintelligible
but grammatically similar languages for thousands of years, so they
certainly have something going for them. The putative advantage of
alphabetic systems declines through time, and unless periodically revised,
the results wind up being very much like Chinese characters (one has only
to compare, e.g., the English and French pronunciations of "Charles"), as
words like "write", "right", "rite" show (not to mention "wright"). So the
simplicity of alphabetic systems is really rather illusory.

2. Yes, as several have noted, the similarity of a second language to the
first is a great advantage. Korean students definitely do find Japanese
easier than English speakers do, as I've learned from experience, since
the two languages are 90% identical in their grammar. The reverse is not
true, since Korean morphophonemics are complex, as is the honorific
system. But except for learning the writing system, Japanese is no more
difficult than Turkish, and very similar in many respects.

3. Pinyin is the romanization used on the mainland for teaching initial
literacy. Most Chinese forget it once they have reached a certain level of
proficiency in reading characters, but it is also used for organizing
dictionaries. Chinese (Mandarin) is cursed with a huge number of homonyms
(tones apart), so writing purely in pinyin would be very difficult to
process visually. Characters, while harder to learn initially, are really
a superior way to represent the language.

        Rudy