In Defence of Japanese Culture

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


It's debatable that a logographic system is superior to a phonetic system. Instead of conveying sounds, it conveys meanings directly. Thus, it's more compact and has a higher information density.

Which saves paper, but that's a pretty minor consideration.

Originally posted by Snowflake


Actually Chinese characters are equivalent to English words. They are made up by limited number of "BiHua" which is correspondence to letters, only there are fewer BiHua than letters. To teach and learn a Chinese character for a Chinese is no more difficult than to teach and learn a English word for a westerner.

Not even close. Seriously, I grew up on Okinawa and knew many people who were Chinese, Japanese, Okinawan, American or some combination of the above and most were multilingual. Learning characters was much more time consuming, without a doubt.


QUOTE] Originally posted by Snowflake

But are't western students required years of studying to learn all these English words? I'd almost guess a fifth grader in China knows a higher percentage of Chinese words then the percentage of English words a fifth grader here knows. [/QUOTE]

While there are more than twice as many words in English as there are in any other language, an enormous number of them are technical terms which aren't used in every day conversation to say the least. Consider for instance the language of medicine, which has a Greek name for just about every possible part of anatomy, or the use of Latin words in many technical languages like legalese. Many of these technical terms are even exported for the use of technical experts in other countries whose own language lacks a ready term for something.

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


That's speed reading.

You do that by taking a phonetic system and hammer it into - you guess it - a ideographic system. Thus proving the advantage of ideographic systems.

No it's not. It is part and parcel to learning to read the language. In education a theory which seeks to skip the sounding out part of the process is called "whole language theory" and it rightly knows that people naturally learn to recognize words on sight and rarely have to actually sound them out, while wrongly assuming that we should skip the sounding out process in elementary education in order to hurry things along.

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

Though a normal person doesn't need more than 3,000 Chinese characters to be literate. For English, you need to know 10,000 words.

Are we counting word forms here (ie forms of verbs, adverbal forms of adjectives etc.)? If so then it's a somewhat unfair comparison, as Chinese uses seperate words to denote gramatical forms where English makes changes to the words directly. While Chinese has the better system in this regard, it doesn't mean that English is that much harder to learn simply because you have to learn a few forms of the same root word.

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

Not quite. Among all my friends I had when I was studying in the US, less than 5% read by looking at the word shape. More than 95% read by mentally pronouncing the words.

Were your friends native speakers? People who have to mentally "read outloud" to read are usually considered slow here in the U.S. If they move their lips they are made fun of after about 4th grade or so. Imagining the sounds of the words slows you down considerably. I'm not a really fast reader (though my comprehension is top notch), but if I had to imagine the sound of every word as I read it my reading rate would be cut at least in half. The only words people of normal reading ability have to sound out are words which they don't yet recognize on sight.

Finally you have neglected to mention the one real advantage of using an ideographic system of writing, particularly for a country like China. Simply put people of varying dialects can all understand the written word, as can to a lesser extent a fair number of foreigners like the Japanese who use your system to some extent as well.

[Bosh]

God reading that makes me so happy I'm dealing with Korean. Korean has really surreal pronounciation rules (consonants sound different depending on wether they're at the beginning or end of syllable and they can hop from the end of one syllable to the beginning of the next if the next syllable starts with a vowel thereby often changing its sound completely, and then there are the bizarre way vowels merge into dipthongs) but at least its phonetic...

[MRT144]

the problem with japanese culture is everyone has a terrible characture of what japanese culture ie.

bukkake, tentacle rape, animation, technological innovation to the absurd, terrible fashion, and bukkake

for that impression we white people get though, i think we can only blame that on japan.

[Snowflake]

Originally posted by Sikander

While Chinese has the better system in this regard, it doesn't mean that English is that much harder to learn simply because you have to learn a few forms of the same root word.

It's not that insignificant Sikander. I've been in this country for ten years and people have been commenting on how "good" my English is but I still have troubles on those "few" forms of the same root word, as I probably demonstrated here and there quite frequently.

[child of Thor]

Has sushi been mentioned as a good thing? ok its an aquired taste but in its strangeness is some kind of positivity

[Snowflake]

I love almost all kind of food, but still yet have to aquire the taste of sushi.

[Shogun Gunner]

Sushi rocks.... except uni :yuck:

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Sikander
Which saves paper, but that's a pretty minor consideration.

Also saves time, which is significant.

Originally posted by Sikander
Are we counting word forms here (ie forms of verbs, adverbal forms of adjectives etc.)? If so then it's a somewhat unfair comparison, as Chinese uses seperate words to denote gramatical forms where English makes changes to the words directly.

Most of the time Chinese characters ("words") can be used in various forms without change or designation. We didn't use concepts such as verbs and nouns until late 19th century IIRC.

You need to know a lot more words in English because large groups of words have similar but not identical meanings, and sometimes the difference is in the connotations, which is very difficult to grasp.

Originally posted by Sikander
Were your friends native speakers?

Born and bred in US of A.

Originally posted by Sikander
People who have to mentally "read outloud" to read are usually considered slow here in the U.S. If they move their lips they are made fun of after about 4th grade or so. Imagining the sounds of the words slows you down considerably.

That's what I used to do (still do this at times) reading English, and they weren't much faster than me.

Originally posted by Sikander
Finally you have neglected to mention the one real advantage of using an ideographic system of writing, particularly for a country like China. Simply put people of varying dialects can all understand the written word, as can to a lesser extent a fair number of foreigners like the Japanese who use your system to some extent as well.

Yeah, that's a good one.

[Whaleboy]

Ok, so I'm a complete Chinese virgin, basically I've never spoken or read a word of Chinese in my life, nor do I know anything about the different languages etc.

Suppose I wanted to learn fluent speech, reading and writing. How would I learn, what language, how soon would I be able to pick it up? I'm somewhat above average (so I've been told ) in all elements of English if that helps?

[Urban Ranger]

The best way is go to China, say, Shanghai or Beijing, for a few years, probably teaching English.

[DaShi]

Not quite. Among all my friends I had when I was studying in the US, less than 5% read by looking at the word shape. More than 95% read by mentally pronouncing the words.

Just for reference, I went to a "highly competitive" college.

So you asked 100 friends from your college how they read? We have a foreign teacher here who uses this kind of reasoning to prove points. Though he doesn't claim to go to "highly competitive" colleges, because he uses this line to prove why college graduates aren't as intelligent as high school dropouts. He's generally laughed out of arguments. Sorry.

Even if you claim had some validity, many Chinese people may also read by mentally pronouncing the words. Perhaps you're part of the 5% who don't.

Not quite. Words like "through" and "thru", "light" and "lite" have different forms but the same meaning. The words in a phonetic language is based on sounds, not visual cues.

That doesn't disprove the visual component of words. Even your last comment admits that it's there.

How? As I pointed out, Chinese translations of English books are always shorter than the originals.

That is irrelevant. My response was to your claim to hammering English into a ideographic system make Chinese superior, which is a ridiculous claim as I stated originally.

Also saves time, which is significant.

Saves time how?

You don't quite know Chinese. The basic building block is not the character but the ci, similar to short phrases in English.

Again, that is not the point. There are limited sounds. Yes, Chinese combines sounds to form new words. I appreciate this as it makes it sound better, and occasionally the tones flow together. I've been criticized a bit for rearranging Chinese words to make them sounds better with their tones. But this is just a personal preference for me.

As for this "monosyllablism" bit, it does not apply in Chinese (and probably in any language, for that matter). For one thing, people don't speak one single word at a time, they speak sentences.

Actually, proper Chinese is spoken one word at a time. That's one of the first thing they teach you when you begin speaking it, and was one of the hardests habits for me to break. When I first came to China no one understood me because I spoke Chinese 'phrases' like English words and sentences: smoothly and connected. Instead I should have pronounced each sound individually. This is similar to Chinese writing, where a few characters together may represent one word or idea, but are not closer to eachother, marked by punctuation, or identifiable as such unless you have learned their combination and can idetinfy their relationship from context of the other characters.

God reading that makes me so happy I'm dealing with Korean. Korean has really surreal pronounciation rules (consonants sound different depending on wether they're at the beginning or end of syllable and they can hop from the end of one syllable to the beginning of the next if the next syllable starts with a vowel thereby often changing its sound completely, and then there are the bizarre way vowels merge into dipthongs) but at least its phonetic...

And this was chosen over an ideographic language.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
The best way is go to China, say, Shanghai or Beijing, for a few years, probably teaching English.

Not unless you go there to take classes in Chinese. If not, I suggest you take some courses in Chinese before going to give yourself someplace to start from. You'll find the it much easier to learn when you go there then. However, expect to spend a lot of time on it.

[Snowflake]

We are argueing over something that really isn't worth of arguing, people. Both language systems have their merits, and they are always more preferable to their corresponding native speakers. Some points like speed reading doesn't make any difference, because it exists in both English and Chinese. I have to read out about every word in English when I read, or skim through a paragraph and risking missing some points, but I can skim through a Chinese page very fast and can still pick up the entire meaning and mood to be conveyed. But I'm sure English native speakers could have the exact same feeling.

Human being's brain is highly developed and can deal with any complicaty in any language system, if they are taught at an early age. It's hard to examine whether one language is better than another. Then again, harder to learn language may in fact stimulate more brain development in children, so who can say what is really the best.

[DaShi]

Agreed Snowflake. But arguing is more fun than agreeing.

[Snowflake]

Would you like me to argue about that point?