What the fuck is the point of using hieroglyphs for every word? East Asians (Chinese, Japanese...

What the fuck is the point of using hieroglyphs for every word? East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) have to memorize thousands of symbols that have only one meaning. Furthermore, because their language is hieroglyphic rather than phonetic, that means a single "word" can have numerous meanings. That means that unless you understand the context of a statement, there's no way to know the meaning.

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youtube.com/watch?v=O27TgLW6pCU
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/whats_the_most_efficient_language.html
rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs-density/
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They are aliens.

Gook here. Gooks no longer use that thing. Most of teen and young adults can't even write their name in those characters

Korean is not in any way similar to chinese or japanese

>leaf education

hey you fucking retard korean is an alphabet and Japanese is a syllabary

are you retarded? korean writing is completely different from chinese and japanese

>hieroglyphics
>implying 한글 isn't the best writing system in the world
t. Korean linguist

the worst part is that I saw some moonspeak like this written out next to the english and it wasn't even any shorter.

it's nice to see some people aren't silly geese

1. It's not objectively worse.
2. It would actually be impossible to adapt Chinese or Japanese to phonetic alphabet.

they're pretty helpful once you know them

also a good barrier against immigrants I think.

the point is, during medieval times, to make it harder for peasants to achieve literacy, thereby concentrating social power in the hands of the wealthy and powerful, who can afford to have their children study an overly complex script system rather than working in the fields.

Japanese speaker here,

>Furthermore, because their language is hieroglyphic rather than phonetic, that means a single "word" can have numerous meanings. That means that unless you understand the context of a statement, there's no way to know the meaning.

This isn't true. In fact I don't even really know what you mean by that

Anyway, it's true that the language might be more "convenient" or "easier" without kanji, and in fact in the early Meiji era and after WWII there were proposals to abolish it, and use only hiragana (the Japanese phonetic alphabet) or even the Latin alphabet. But they kept the writing system more or less intact basically for traditional reasons.

Tradition is good, this lets people actually read old texts and stay in touch with their country's past, plus it's aesthetically pleasing, and kanji themselves are often very evocative

Koreans still like to use Chinese characters on occasion for some reason.

How is that any different to western society in the middle ages. If you don't know how to read it's because you weren't taught as a child, it has nothing to do with how difficult you perceive the language to be.

Japanese would be unreadable without kanji. It would take four times as long to understand the meaning of a sentence.

>2. It would actually be impossible to adapt Chinese or Japanese to phonetic alphabet.
>what is kana

it's ok to be a brainlet like you just be thankful you were born immersed in the world's easiest language to learn

Of course it would make more sense to dispense with the entire lame ass Asian bullshit and just speak and write English.

I learnt Chinese and not Japanese, but the Japanese didn't left hieroglyphs intact because tradition. They did because the phonetic alphabet wasn't able to solve the needs.

>Korean
Nobody uses Hanja anymore. Hangul is probably the simplest writing system in the world, and much easier than English's godawful orthography (Mostly because English uses an alphabet designed for a vastly different language, and Hangul was created by one guy for the sole purpose of writing Korean).
>Japanese
They need to memorize less than 3,000 characters. still pretty retarded though. The only reason they still do it is because of tradition.
>Chinese
We already knew those gooks are autistic.

youtube.com/watch?v=O27TgLW6pCU

why so many homonyms though

That shit is so annoying

you have no idea how fast chinese ppl can read.
They just scan it for 2 second and they know what it means.

>it's true that the language might be more "convenient" or "easier" without kanji

Bullshit. An all hiragana sentence is just a solid fucking wall of garbage. Kanji helps to break up the sentence letting it flow much better.

>The only reason they still do it is because of tradition.
No.
There are distinct and objective advantages to using kanji.

In fact every language would be improved by having, say, 500 explicit characters for the most common words. The human brain is capable of remembering more than 26, so why hold yourselves back? The increased hassle of learning them is offset by the time saved in using them 24/7 for the rest of your life.

Where Japan messed up was allowing multiple readings for kanji. The characters themselves are fine.

Unless you're speaking Esperanto, your own language probably doesn't make much sense either. These things just happen naturally.

It's like having a lookup table for all inputs of a function vs. manually calculating every time.

their language is probably the root of why asians consistently score higher in IQ tests than other races

Hey dumb fuck, Chinese characters in Japanese are logograms, not a "syllabary".

It's not as bad as it sounds. There are advantages too, such as information density and being able to derive the meanings of unknown words by knowing the characters. Stuff like 地獄, which means hell. The characters mean "ground" and "prison". Even if you don't know the specific word, you can still usually get a pretty good idea of what it means. With English, a lot of time you're out of luck unless it has Greek or Latin roots.

China and Japan have among the highest literacy rates in the world, and attempts to "simplify" the writing system haven't been received well. People like their Chinese characters. Most of the criticism seems to come from weebs butthurt that they need to sit down and study for a while if they don't want to be illiterate.

I think it's dumb but it's their culture. They probably think it's dumb we snip baby boys ding dongs and let white women fuck black men openly.

yeah they got them circles and shieet mane.

>Unless you're speaking Lojban, your own language probably doesn't make much sense either.
FTFY

t. Lojbanist

Japanese actually 2 syllabaries, 平仮名 (Hiragana) and 片仮名 (Katakana), along with ~3,000 Chinese characters, called 漢字 (Kanji).

(Gee, I hope my weeb-ness isn't showing)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

This is going to be more and more serious as young kids grow up using cell phones and the internet. Chinese and Japanese will barely be able to handwrite in Chinese characters in the future.

What if you're referring to a prison cell built into the ground? Is it just context to understand the difference? Or if someone wrote a letter to you saying, "we sent him to the ground prison" would you have a hard time determining if they meant they sent him to hell or an actual prison of cells in the ground?

There's also word amnesia for other languages.

Ever wrote something and it just looked weird to you? And you weren't sure if it was right?

But your point about technology is valid.

It's showing as far as your lack of understanding.
Not a soul uses the kanji for hiragana and katakana and there are considerably more then 3k kanji

IT'S JUST A BUNCH OF CIRCLES AND LINES

>There's also word amnesia for other languages.

>Ever wrote something and it just looked weird to you? And you weren't sure if it was right?

Nope. It doesn't work that way when you use an alphabet. Character amnesia is limited to writing systems like Chinese that uses what are essentially pictograms.

Leaving gaijin out
Protip: It works

地獄 means "hell" rather specifically. We're talking ballpark meaning here. If you didn't know the English word for "hell" you'd be completely out of luck, at least with 地獄 you can get the gist of it if you don't know the word. It may have been a bad example. Guess what 同性愛 means, given the character meanings. 同= same 性 = sex 愛 = love.

Yeah Cyrillic too fuck that shit

>What the fuck is the point of using hieroglyphs for every word?
The word you're looking is logograph.
Koreans don't use chinese characters.
Japan's language doesn't consist entirely of them either.

Actually, you just seems confused since you say
>have to memorize thousands of symbols that have only one meaning
and then
>that means a single "word" can have numerous meanings

Also English isn't phonetic either. Actually, Japanese's scripts are both syllabic, which are at least closer than English has.

Tradition. That said, English should be expanded to that system Linguists use so that we can cement the proper pronunciation of words

And since their langauage is so inherently descriptive, they sound like they think at a 2nd grade level when their words are translated.

>What if you're referring to a prison cell built into the ground?
you would say that it's a prison underground?

Is poetry based on rhythm and sound?

If what you just said were translated into Japanese or Chinese through Google Translate, you'd sound like a retard to a native speaker. Computers are just shit at translating.

It has its advantages if everyone used the same moon runes like it used to be done in the cultural influence areas of China, it was great because you could read and write and be basically understood everywhere you went,nowadays you might be able to read japanese being chinese and viceversa to some degree but it use to be like latin during medieval europe
I think best koreans throw in some hanja studies every now and then,also old confort people classics are written in moonrunes

>And since their langauage is so inherently descriptive, they sound like they think at a 2nd grade level when their words are translated.

Why do people that KNOW they have no idea what they're talking about still feel the need to comment.

>What the fuck is the point of using hieroglyphs for every word? East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) have to memorize thousands of symbols that have only one meaning. Furthermore, because their language is hieroglyphic rather than phonetic, that means a single "word" can have numerous meanings. That means that unless you understand the context of a statement, there's no way to know the meaning.

1. Koreans don't use chinese radicals.

2. Its useful in the same way emojis are useful. Someone from Spain and Vietnam may not know what "happy" means but they can both understand a smiley face. In the same way they can understand the chinese radical for "happiness".

3. Its not like chinese built a language from scratch, it tooks thousands of years of evolution just like english.

>Furthermore, because their language is hieroglyphic rather than phonetic

You've got it completley backwards. Because they have a symbol for every word they don't need as many duplicates like "dye" and "die".

The Chinese language is literally like caveman-speech.

Me eat food good eat.

Me hit die you.

She girl pretty.

Conserves paper/screen space.

>wall of garbage
Check this shit out spaces.

cuz hangul was invented by sejong and its rooted in chinese

a lot of the characters/words sound similar to their chinese counterparts

>And since their langauage is so inherently descriptive,
What does that mean? Do you mean the opposite?

Western language are extremely descriptive whereas languages like Japanese are extremely context based. You read between the lines.

ever thought the way they learn language is what makes their ability to memorize and excel in mathematics?

So you're arguing english would be a lot better off if instead of "hell" we said "fire bad place"?

There are a lot of homophones in Japanese when written (i.e. there are subtle voiced differences that can't be expressed in written form using the kana). If kanji didn't exist it would be very difficult to understand a lot of sentences without proper context.

I heard Cantonese is the only language that annoys even the Chinese

Hello Black Pigeon Speaks.

>that means a single "word" can have numerous meanings. That means that unless you understand the context of a statement, there's no way to know the meaning.

no

that only happens with chinese

japanese is very literal and korean doesn't even work like the other two languages

read more, leaf

Haha this is the most typical american comment ever.

Ever thought the tremendous pressure, plus high suicide rates, means those that can't maths are literally eliminated from the population?

It's natural selection.
When the Asians conquer the world only the strongest whites will survive (and no blacks)

The information density would at first appear to go down, but infact in does not really variate between languages much if we are taking speed into account.

realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/whats_the_most_efficient_language.html

rosettaproject.org/blog/02012/mar/1/language-speed-vs-density/

>>日本語分かる馬鹿外人から

>no
>that only happens with chinese
>japanese is very literal
On'yomi and kun'yomi don't real.

Trolled softly desu.

>When the Asians conquer the world
This will never happen because they must first conquer each other.

Chinese characters have phonetic and semantic radicals. It's more similar to an alphabet than you'd think.

Although it's an alphabet with ~100 letters, it's not as horrible as you'd think.

>t.brainlet
Offcourse every non-english language will sound like caveman-speech when you translate it word for word to form an english sentence.

POO

The difference is that with Roman letters, if you misspell something, people still know what you mean.

If you forget how to write a certain character though, you're shit outta luck.

They also have the largest cranial capacity of any race. Even if they only speak English they consistently score higher. They have high Neanderthal ancestry (Neanderthal had a 17% larger cranial capacity than modern man) and they also meditate. I can't remember the source at the moment, but i once read that researchers had data which seemed to indicate that meditation can physically shape the brain, especially if it is done from a young age.

>Although it's an alphabet with ~100 letters
The largest kanji dictionary I know of is 大漢和辞典 (daikanwajiten), which has over 50,000 entries.

harder for foreigners to learn, natural barrier against immigration

>nope english is harder!!

nah evidence: filipinos are finding it hard to succeed as migrant workers in japan because of the language, they don't seem to be having problems here though

Not really, just that each system has advantages and disadvantages. The Chinese and Japanese people I speak with seem to function just fine with their writing systems. The people I see bitching about Chinese characters are always foreigners.

>t.jamal/jose

You can aslo witre nnossene and hvae it be uotsnedrd.

it's redpilled. that's what words really are. not just how they're spelled, not just how they sound

explain why limb and climb sound differently. you can't. you only know once you're familiar with that specific word.

It would still be readable if japanese actually had spaces though

Just write it in the alphabet only you autistic retard.

He's talking about radicals which make up the kanji. If you look at an assortment of kanji you'll see that the same shapes get used constantly.

>hurr if you say submarine how do I know if you mean a sandwich or a soldier.

You really only need to know about 2k for 99% of Japanese, probably 1k if you want 98% coverage (a big difference actually, but 90% is probably enough to enjoy most media). I've shown a Chinese friend some characters from a Chinese dictionary I found interesting that she had never even seen before. She's still perfectly literate.

Why does it look like cheap Chinese mixed with Manchu cut pieces (the line on the right side)?

China has multiple, mutually unintelligible, languages while the characters convey the same meaning to everyone - a real advantage. Ancient writings are fairly accessible to the average person too, as the Hanzi were standardized about 2000 years ago and it's a living language.

Hangul is a fucking sexy writing system, not gonna lie. Been meaning to learn the basics for a while now.

Right, most characters I've seen are written using two radicals or. Of course, many words are written with more than one character (I'm not actually sure the rigorous way to classify everything - let's just say each semantic unit usually has about 2-4 radicals). That gives 100^2 possibilities (at least), which is on the order of the number you cited.

So, yea. I think what I wrote is reasonable.

Grammar is for arr intensive purposes the same,

Just one uses arphabet and one (better one) uses syyrabry

>that means a single "word" can have numerous meanings. That means that unless you understand the context of a statement, there's no way to know the meaning.
Tthats part of the English language too, you uneducated fuck

hangeul is actually a really good system desu senpai

The Korean alphabet is probably the best writing system in the world. Took me about 3 hours to learn it.

>thousands of symbols
*tens of thousands
I would say hanzi are more recognizable than many written languages, try reading a scientific paper in English, you would find out you can't understand a single science vocabulary word without dictionary, however a teenager in China can get the general idea if you translate the paper to written Chinese
also pls go back

The Chinese writing system is quite complicated and it is considered art in Chinese culture. We have separate classes merely for writing beautifully. The characters are not that complicated, because your pretty little head has been so dumbed down by jews and greedy ass fucks.
We start to study at the age of 2 or 3, we accumulate a lot of knowledge and information, and our synapses are accustomed much more to information input and processing. With this, we work on our intelect. This is why we're legally occupying the two greatest shitposting countries on Sup Forums, Leafland and Upsidedownalia.

Speak for yourself, ABC. The kinds like you are constantly being ridiculed when you come to China.
The Korean scripture was recently updated and it's quite easy to learn.
Yours barely has circles, you cuck

china was a beautiful country once until opium and communism destroyed it's culture permanently, pretty sad

reminder if you want to destroy any culture or nation, give it a bunch of drugs and a socialist government

>>That means that unless you understand the context of a statement, there's no way to know the meaning.

Autism is blindness of context, OP.

>We have separate classes merely for writing beautifully.
We do too, it's called calligraphy.

>>reminder if you want to destroy any culture or nation, give it a bunch of drugs and a socialist government

So that means both Mexico and the USA are about to go down the toilet , eh ?

Ah I see, so it's a superiority complex eh? What you think your better with you kanji, and sick ass looking writing skills, who needs Japanese anyway? (Starts crying wishing I knew Japanese)