The teens who can barely talk - only an 800-word vocabulary!

[fluffyhamster]

I have never tried to learn Chinese, but have been told that because their pictograms give a clue to meaning, it's no harder than English.

Even if the fully-developed Chinese writing system were unfailingly pictographic in nature (it isn't), it would be of greater help to be given clues to pronunciation - which Chinese does, but much less reliably than English, if such a thing were possible!

And most younger Chinese think that the improvements to their writing system were very worthwhile. All change is initially opposed by the old and the conservative.

Active opinion has always been divided (e.g. regarding the aesthetics or logic of some simplifications), and nowadays there are apparently issues of cultural identity and nationalism (resurgent ~) in the PRC tied up in the question of continuing there with simplified characters versus reverting at least partially to more traditional forms.

My personal opinion is that the simplifications were generally quite well done and do save time in handwriting at least, and that it is a shame that the Chinese-speaking world was divided politically at the time the simplifications were promulgated.

One compromize would be to revert to traditional characters, but then also use or establish (and if need be [re]develop) a syllabary of truly simpler symbols akin to the (Taiwanese) Zhuyin Fuhao/bopomofo, or (I'm thinking) rather the Japanese kana, so that transcriptions of foreign words and/or loans could be made to stand out that bit more (and be the more immediately readable). Some seem averse to the idea of syllabaries for Chinese though, because they sense that the next step might be at least partial romanization (with Pinyin most obviously)...(not that I am a great fan of more phonetic writing - ever tried reading English in IPA?! Plus people often omit tone marks when writing/typing their "Pinyin", which can make things yet more ambiguous).

Anyway, one has to wonder what Taiwan would do if the mainland chose to revert to writing exactly like the Taiwanese have continued to. Would the Taiwanese then switch to simplified characters, or better yet create their own unique character set? More importantly, would the world take real notice of it? Probably not - meaning that most foreigners especially would probably be happy to continue with the simplified characters - oh, but wait, then there's Japan, which uses more or less traditional-style characters, with a smattering of a few pretty well-designed unique simplifications. Perhaps we should all switch to using the Japanese kanji, then?

By the way, John DeFrancis's The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is still one of the best books available on the nature of Chinese writing, though something like Ping Chen's Modern Chinese: History and Sociolinguistics would probably help bring things a bit more up-to-date.

[woodcutter]

English isn't that bad. The basic sounds that you teach as the "sounds of the alphabet" account for thousands of words. Chinese is far worse, yet East Asia has always been relatively literate.

And by the way I'm sure I can understand thousands of Portuguese words. I can't speak a single sentence of it though.

[Masha Bell]

English isn't that bad.
And by the way I'm sure I can understand thousands of Portuguese words. I can't speak a single sentence of it though.

English isn't too bad if u are reasonably bright and are brought up by literate and supportive parents, but the likes of 'and, any, apron' and 'on, only, once, other' (2000 of which are shown on the Sight Words page of my website) leave 1 in 5 people functionally illiterate.

The three other most difficult European writing systems are French, Portuguese and Danish. But English is the only one which poses both serious writing and reading difficulties.

[Metamorfose]

The three other most difficult European writing systems are French, Portuguese and Danish.

How do you make that?


José

[woodcutter]

I don't believe the statistic to be honest, 1 in 5, and I don't think that Spanish speaking nations benefit to any great extent from their more phonetic way of writing - most people catch up in the end.

The main thing is though, there is not a thing you can do about it. If a dictator controlling 98%(?) of the world's Chinese people and with most of the Chinese intellectuals at his beck and call can't force through a reform, who do you think can do it for global English. Obama? Davie Crystal? Graddol? Standardization is difficult to achieve, and tradition (and snobbery too, unfortunately) cannot be ignored.

Kim Jong Il benefits greatly from the fact that pretty much nobody in his nation can read anything that his regime didn't write. I wouldn't like to live in a society where the majority are cut off from their past. Frankly, I think it is a more important thing than resolving the learning difficulties of the least able. But once again, as with many issues that "progressive" people think that "we" should solve, there is no "we" to solve it in any case.