Why does China have a logographic (Characters refer to concepts) instead of phonetic (Chracters refer to sounds) writing system? It's resulted in many Chinese not being able to read and write as they can't remember thousands of characters.
There was a push to make Pinyin (romanisation) the official way of writing Chinese several decades ago, but this was unpopular, probably because of nationalism and not wanting to use laowai's alphabet.
But the Chinese have their own phonetic character system called Bopomofo, which has 37 characters as opposed to tens of thousands.
thousands of years of culture thrown away that's like saying you guys should replace the czech identity for the german one because germany is richer also they were really convenient
William Reed
But all European countries just threw away whatever writing system they used when they realised how superior the latin alphabet is.
Are the Scandinavians still writing in runes?
Ian Nguyen
>a writing system is a form of culture
Julian Morris
>Greece >Georgia >Anywhere with a Cyrillic alphabet
Elijah Hall
Because their culture values raw memorization ?
Landon Scott
It just kind of seems like characters are pointless.
When you want to type in Chinese you just type the pinyin in and it converts automatically to characters. It's like an added layer of complexity for no reason.
eg to type 我在学中文 I type on my computer wozaixuezhongwen
David Fisher
It most certainly is dumb fuck.
Connor Bennett
No it's not u retard.
Isaac White
Because not everyone in China speaks Mandarin and then some languages in China aren't even mutually intelligible so if you have to send out a letter to every corner of the country you can't just translate the decree to every fucking dialect. The Chinese method is perfect for this, the idea is properly transmitted and no one has any problem understanding
Joseph White
That a very shitty reason to keep it "muh culture" and all that.
Chinese letters were used because every language that used it can communicate with each other seamlessly due to Chinese civilization ruling over many different groups with different language and it was good at that.
yes and no. Many languages switch to another script because they feel using the current one is not worth it or doesn't suit them.
Bentley Wood
Actually it's more literature and books, not the script itself.
Anthony Perry
>no one has any problem understanding
Except for you know, the millions of Chinese who can't read or write because the writing system is so overly complex.
Brandon Reyes
I thought the different dialects wrote things differently as well.
Hunter Nelson
That isn't as much a problem as translating everything to fit everyone's dialect. One idea, one character it's an ingenious and efficient method of communication, yes the learning curve is quite steep initially but it's nothing time and dedication can't fix
Perhaps but then again it's nothing that can't be solved with the current method
Joseph Reed
No, all dialects use Hanzi (Chinese characters)
Each dialect will see the character 我 and say it differently, but they all read it as "I". Even written Japanese can be understood by a Chinese speaker because it's the same character system.
Joshua Thompson
>That isn't as much a problem as translating everything to fit everyone's dialect.
India and Pakistan get around this by having all official documents in English.
Nicholas Hughes
But India and Pakistan were colonized by the British otherwise before they were using Persian. But this doesn't apply to Pakistan anymore since English is no longer an official language
David Garcia
Ríða burt þú hefur rangt fyrir þér
Adam Richardson
>you have to know 10,000 characters or you are illiterate Umm no.
Stop talking about China when you don't know anything except a few wiki articles.
Matthew Walker
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Isaiah Garcia
Cyrillic alphabet is phonetic and very easy to read, in fact Russian language sucks really hard when written in Latin.
Ethan Barnes
European countries changed because they only had to change the alphabet to fit the new language that they were using. They didn't have to change the way the language works. Most of the words still have or had a direct translation from latin or a root from latin. Here you compare countries changing an alphabet based language for an other alphabet based language with a country that would go from ideograms to alphabet. It would creats many problems, ideograms have a broader, looser meanings than words due to the radicals that compose them and the origin of these radicals. When the communist party "simplified" chinese they took strokes away from the most difficult characters and it resulted in many older texts being very difficult or impossible to translate or to loose meaning because without some strokes it came from a set of characters made of radicals with meanings that can be multiples to just symboles that don't mean anything, but communist didn't gave a shit because that's precisly what they Wanted, to destroy most of ancient china's culture that was seen as full of superstition and replace it with modernity, like what the communist did in Russia. Also, making a huge country adopt a new language would be extremely costly, and chinese isn't that hard the education is still a bit shitty that's all. Japanese didn't suppress Kanji when they were asked to because after doing some test American realised Japanese population knew kanji quite well.
