Compare the writing to russian/greek/korean however. The helpfulness of phonetic alphabets can't be overstated. Being able to transcribe and sound-out words is a huge amount of memory you don't have to use that can instead be used for things like grammar/idioms/vocab. I like to think of it as the difference between using some sort of intellisense and memorizing the standard library/documentation when programming.
Chinese writing is phonetic, just not for your first 1000-2000 characters. I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters, because things get dramatically easier when you have learnt a lot of them. These are all pronounced "ding": 丁 订 盯 顶 钉, because they all have that T-like phonetic component. Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no. I will agree though that it is daunting to get started with.
This is a pretty unfortunately uninformed comment. But I especially want to point out this piece:
> Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no.
I've seen people from all different countries complain about English spelling. But not China. No Chinese person has, in my experience, ever even considered the idea that there's anything to complain about. Rather, they rely on the spelling of English words as a crutch to get English speakers to understand them when their accent gets in the way, for example, by saying something like "Poss. <blank stare from the English speaker> Poss P-A-U-S-E Poss."
And to add to what everyone else is saying, here are some characters using the 丁 component, but not pronounced ding:
打 (da "generic verb", extremely common) 厅 (ting "hall", common) 宁 (ning, used in names, common) 灯 (deng "lamp", common)
French spelling is quite regular. Once you know the system, you know how to spell almost any word. The only issue is that some letters are not pronounced.
Dude no. I am French native speaker, and think that French spelling is way harder. I am even starting to suspect that the spelling of the French language was made hard on purpose, so someone who didn't get a proper education would be spotted easily to his/her bad spelling.
Really? I'd be curious to hear what French words are as bad as the 11 pronunciations of "ough" in English ("Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through)". Or, the other way around, there's the /eɪ/ diphthong, which can be spelled a, a…e, aa, ae, ai, ai...e, aig, aigh, al, ao, au, ay, e (é), e...e, ea, eg, ei, ei...e, eig, eigh, ee (ée), eh, er, es, et, ey, ez, ie, oeh, ue, or uet in the words bass, rate, quaalude, reggae, rain, cocaine, arraign, straight, Ralph, gaol, gauge, pay, ukulele, crepe, steak, thegn, veil, beige, reign, eight, matinee, eh, dossier, demesne, ballet, obey, chez, lingerie, boehmite, dengue, sobriquet. Not to mention place names like Featheringstonehaugh (pronounced "Fan-shaw"). What are the most difficult things about spelling French?
Well, in my opinion, English is hard to pronounce (for example, it impossible to know to to pronounce the word 'live' without context) and French is hard to spell.
Since you mention the /eɪ/ diphthong, in French it can be spelled é, ée, et, ed, er, ai, and many others. What is making the French spelling harder, I think, is that many letters are not pronounced, and some words have the same pronunciation with a different spelling (for example: cou - neck - and coup - hit). I can't think of anything in particular, but it all lies in the fact that many letters are not pronounced. I found this website - in French - where you can have fun testing your French spelling: http://timbresdelorthographe.com/
That's a little bit cheating, you're adding silent consonants to the vowel when they're not pronounced at all.
I could say that in Russian the sound [о] can be spelled ол as in солнце, but that would be bullshit. Russian is a largely phonetic language, it's just that consonant clusters get simplified in pronunciation.
The number depends on the dialect. Wikipedia describes it as "at least six pronunciations in North American English and over ten in British English", listing ten of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_%28orthography%29
sure, in English the exceptions are so frequent you cannot possibly forget that you are supposed to learn each word separately. in French you can fall to a few traps, but most of the vocabulary follows complicated yet regular rules.
There is nothing unfortunately uninformed about my comment. There is something unfortunately condescending about your reply.
I am well aware that Chinese radical phonetic components are not as powerful as a phonetic alphabet. I am impliying no such thing. There are however many characters which carry phonetic information, such as my apparently crude example above. I have found this to be very helpful in remembering pronunciations of characters, even if they are only approximations. HN is a tough crowd.
Further, your experiences with Chinese people are not necessarily the same as mine.
> I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters. [...] These are all pronounced "ding" [...] because they all have that T-like phonetic component.
(emphasis mine)
This is, quite clearly, saying that you can get the pronunciation of an unfamiliar character from its written form. But you can't; that's incredibly dangerous and is nearly guaranteed to backfire within 2-3 guesses. You use the particular example of characters with the phonophore 丁 ding1. Okay. What's the most common character incorporating that component? It's 打, which you seem to have conveniently glossed over, and which, despite using 丁 as the phonophore, is pronounced da3. You also give 顶, which really is pronounced ding(3), but which is backwards like 切, making it fairly problematic to guess which component is hinting at the sound. (For a nice summary of that problem, 致 and 到 are both characters in the same style, with a sound hint and a meaning hint side by side. But for 致 zhi4, the phonophore is the 至 (also zhi4) on the left, and for 到 dao4 the phonophore is the 刀 dao1 (in a special form) on the right; the 至 component is telling you the meaning. It's much more common to have the phonophore on the right.)
I agree that the structure of the characters, such as it is, can be very helpful in remembering how to pronounce them. But that doesn't speak to reading unfamiliar characters in any way. Some components are quite prolific as phonophores: 交 jiao, 方 fang, and 青 qing come to mind. You're not advised to assume that a character incorporating them is pronounced jiao （校，效，咬）, fang (旁), or qing (精，猜 [cai1!]), though.
The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write.
Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.
I don't know if simplification has broken a great deal of the relationships, but it certainly has broken some.
Here is a specific example:
Traditional Chinese
車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident)
不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but)
Simplified Chinese
车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation)
不过 (same meaning/pronunciation)
Notice the 咼 in the Traditional 過 and 禍. This phonetic component gives you some indication that is is pronounced like "luo, huo, guo, wo".
In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively.
The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.
But even in that case the relationships weren't completely broken. While 过 changed, 娲wa, 祸 huo，涡 wo，窝wo，锅 guo，蜗 wo，etc. still share the radical to the right, and 过 is a very common character, you shouldn't need to guess how to read it.
I found that simplified characters are much easier to learn than traditional, it is just that much simpler. Enough of the phonetic relations are still there (and some new phonetic relationships were created, I think), and memorizing the base characters is much easier. On top of that, memorizing the characters still requires a lot of practice writing them, and simplified saves enough time that its definitely worth it. For example, for the character for far: 远（yuan), its traditional is much more complicated: 遠. On top of that, a sound relationship is still there, and it is much simpler.
I studied three and a half years of traditional characters, switched to simplified when I went to China, and then started studying Japanese, which uses a mix. I definitely am glad I studied traditional characters, but I feel at least for me, they are much much harder to learn, but that could be different for different people.
Out of curiosity, have you tried learning both simplified and traditional?
Only traditional. My knowledge of simplified, and the debate in Chinese academia about their real value, actually stems from discussion with Chinese linguistic experts, but I have no personal experience with simplified Chinese myself, except casually.
Not Exactly. Phonetic radicals (like 丁 in 钉) represents the pronounciation in Early and Middle chinese, not modern. For example, 塊 contains 鬼, but their pronounciation in Mandarin are different.
indeed many western writing systems such as English or modern Greek capture an archaic pronunciation, which is basically the reason why they are difficult to learn even if they claim to use phonetic scripts.
Probably the worst western example for this would be French.
Spelling of French is based on the pronunciation of Old French (from ~900 years ago!) and sometimes mixed with spelling based on the original Latin word from which the modern French word derives (from ~2000 years ago).
AFAIK modern Greek orthography is not that bad, if you disregard the madness that polytonic script (which is solely based on how Greek was spoken/written in Antiquity) was used until the 80s.
It's not that easy. 灯 is pronounced "dang", not "ding". 汀 is "ting". Phonetic components only indicate "sounds like". And not all those examples you gave had the same tone.
Having phonetic components makes it easier (if you like cryptic crosswords), but not easy.
I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like).
But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun!
So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier.
Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word.
"Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar".
> Russian with its truly phonetic alphabet is cool.
Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced? Not to mention the phonological rules that must be memorised, like how the ending of words are always devoiced (giving us fun conflicting transliterations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonoff%27s_theorem ).
To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness. I've found Hungarian spelling to be more regular, for example.
You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.
Well technically English has no rules mandating anything, since there is no central institute or authority for the language. Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.
Practically, rules that people 50 years ago would never break are routinely ignored now, there are a bunch of things that are grammatically correct but you wouldn't ever say, etc... If something is done one way practically all the time, it might as well be a "rule", whether it officially is or not. Makes no difference to the person who has to learn it.
But that doesn't mean that the rules for English orthography aren't insane. There are very few English sentences that can be read by sounding out letter after letter individually (no matter what sound you choose as the basis for each letter.)
There are rules. If you do not follow them, everybody speaking Russian would understand you, but you'll sound like a foreigner who learned Russian via books and had not enough exposure to real spoken language.
Hungarian is thankfully very regular when it comes to pronunciation, though the vowel harmony rules take some getting used to (but are very beautiful once you learn them). I also really enjoy the agglutinative aspects of the language and use of "post-positions" rather than prepositions.
My parents were both linguists in the military in the 80s, so when I had gotten to around 8 years old or so, they started trying to teach me Russian. Needless to say, it didn't stick, but I've recently been trying it again.
I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/...
And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed.
The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.
Russian writing is seriously un-phonetic. Or, more precisely, Russian pronunciation very often departs from writing. Unstressed vowels are commonly interchanged, voiced and unvoiced consonants too, and rules for correctly writing ь and ъ are so badly known that mistakes can be commonly seen in materials coming from mass media and government offices.
for real. I briefly worked at a Russian news agency, where one guy's entire job was keeping track of the correct transliterations for people and places. I imagine the internet makes it somewhat easier now, but it's still a nightmare.
Seconded. I started learning Mandarin some years ago. The written language remained opaque for a very long time since you need to learn a rather long list of hanzi before you can read anything interesting. And there's little guarantee you'll be able to pronounce any of it anyway.
Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.
Well, when it comes to Arabic, the short vowels should be written out as accents of sorts. However, they are quite often missing in actual written text. However, even as a native Arabic speaker I will struggle with text written like that and it will take me a while to read it. That's because most Arabs(at least the Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptians I've mostly been exposed to) do not speak the written Arabic. Rather, we speak a colloquial language that will differ from one region to another. These are visibly descended from the formal, written, Arabic but they are not at all the same language. They have many different words, a completely different grammar, and very different pronunciation. So as far as most Arabs I know, the written Arabic is pretty much yet another foreign language they learn rather than their native language. The similarity between the written and spoken is similar to the difference between say Latin and languages that were descended from it(such as French).
