Some questions regarding the languages of China.

[OinkBoink]

Okay, I might be completely wrong about this (because my knowledge regarding this is next to zilch), but some people have told me that every symbol in Chinese languages like Mandarin and Cantonese represents an idea, like an object or a verb or things of that nature.

For instance, in English the letters A,B,C,D....etc. mean nothing in and of themselves. When you put them together, for instance C-H-A-I-R, then they mean something.

But in Chinese languages you have a single symbol to represent an idea like "love" for instance: 爱

In other words, words (concepts, objects etc.) are represented by symbols.

Do you not have letters which form words in these languages?

If what I've heard is true, then isn't it cumbersome to learn and write the symbols for most of the human concepts and things which we think of on a day to day basis? I mean, you'd have a symbol for father, one for mother, one for mountain, one for joy, one for sorrow, one for eating, one for walking, one for sky, one for earth etc. This would run into a huge number of symbols.

So how exactly does this work? And also, with such a large number of symbols, how do you represent all of them on a Chinese keyboard?

 

[Oyeve]

IMO, there is no chines language. I think its all made up and when people are talking to each other in Chinese they are making it up as they go along. Just nodding and gesturing as if they understand but have no clue what they are saying.

 

[DesiPower]

I have little knowledge, but we had a Chinese student in our group in school and she said the same thing, there are no letters, just symbols and picture. so Oink must mean something in Chinese and then they can draw that symbol and boink the same, and you can spell you name buy combining the two. If oink does not mean something then you are out of luck... Now this maybe a language of one of the areas or province in China, iirc there are two major languages in China, this might apply to one of them

 

[Murloc]

it's cumbersome indeed, they have to learn hundreds of symbols.

Some symbols are used phonetically as well.
When foreign words can't be translated in meaning (like brands and countries), they make up something that sounds similar, by using symbols that are pronounced like that, this creates a secondary effect that you can either read it as the name, or you can read it as if it was a chinese word, so you focus on the ideas and not the sounds.
This creates funny effects, like some chinese scholars were offended when they discovered that Europeans call their continent Asia, which translitterated to chinese and written with their ideograms also means secondary if you read the chinese text without knowing that it's a translitteration.
International brands can choose the translitteration (the pronunciation is always raped anyway so you might as well go along with it) so that it has a positive meaning.

To write with keyboards, they use pinyin which is a roman transliteration system, so they write like everybody else, the software then transforms the text into the appropriate symbols. I guess this has gotten easier and easier now that we have wordflow and swiftkey.

 

[Eug]

Actually, it's thousands of symbols that need to be memorized to be able to read a newspaper.

Remember, Chinese began as a pictoral language, sort of like Egyptian heiroglyphs. So basic words like mountain originally began as a picture of 3 mountains. See below. On the left is mountain, and on the right is wood. The large picture is the ancient character. The small typeface is the current version.

However, as concepts evolved, so did the characters. In fact, some simple characters (or versions of them) are used as parts of new characters.

---

While it becomes extremely difficult to learn to read and write the language, some argue it is more efficient once you know the characters, since if you look at one or two characters, you know the meaning. Furthermore, there is no verb conjugation or stuff like that. You don't say "I went to the store yesterday". You say "I go store yesterday". Also, artists claim the calligraphy looks nicer.

Interestingly, Korean, which originally used Chinese, changed to use a system that mimics Chinese characters in look, but with an alphabet. "Letters" are combined in such a way so that they look like individual Chinese characters.

Then there's Japanese, which is exceedingly complex IMO. They use Chinese characters and two separate syllabaries in the same sentence. Furthermore, each Chinese character can be pronounced in many different ways in Japanese, depending upon the context. Think of it this way, for English, it'd be like using Chinese characters, the English alphabet, and the Russian alphabet all in the same sentence.

 

[maddogchen]

Yes, when China conquers the world, everyone will be able to read Chinese while speaking their own native language.

 

[DaWhim]

i recommend you this book if u want to understand the chinese language. there is simply no alphabet.

http://www.amazon.com/Swallowing-Clouds-A-Zee/dp/0295981911

keep in mind that chinese language was developed for record keeping for the 1%, not the 99%. that's why it is most difficult.

 

[Eug]

So how exactly does this work? And also, with such a large number of symbols, how do you represent all of them on a Chinese keyboard?

It should be noted that the original Chinese typewriters had only one key, but thousands of characters. You had to move that one key around to type the right character.

I guess that was easier than a typewriter with thousands of keys. <-- That was a Simpsons episode.

Computers, along with phonetic transliteration systems, changed everything though.

 

[sdifox]

It's monosyllabic. So words are not assembled with letters. Instead you have characters that form bases of more complex words.

 

[sdifox]

i recommend you this book if u want to understand the chinese language. there is simply no alphabet.

http://www.amazon.com/Swallowing-Clouds-A-Zee/dp/0295981911

keep in mind that chinese language was developed for record keeping for the 1%, not the 99%. that's why it is most difficult.

Err no it was not developed for the one percent. It's just that historically only the one percent cans afford to learn it. Rest of the people were busy working.

 

[dighn]

Being bilingual in both languages I can offer a somewhat objective comparison.

Characters like &#29233; are closer to words in English. These characters are actually composed of standard components called strokes, which are analogous to letters in English. Instead of a 1 dimensional sequence of elementary symbols, Chinese uses a 2 dimensional composition of elementary symbols. Yes you do have to memorize the 2 dimensional placement of the symbols, but it's not so different from having to remember the sequence of letters in a word.

Now you could argue that a 1 dimensional sequence is easier to remember, especially when it is closely associated with the pronunciation (even if with many exceptions), and you are probably right. I do think the 2 d system does offer some advantages, being more compact and perhaps faster to read.

 

[Mai72]

I'm currently taking a course on Chinese thru Coursera. It's hard.

 

[Reasonable Doubt]

I was planning on learning Mandarin using Fluenz. I bought the Spanish version and was happy with it so I was planning on trying the Mandarin one.

http://www.amazon.com/Fluenz-Version-F2-Mandarin-Navigator/dp/B00310UXQW

 

[Reasonable Doubt]

I'm currently taking a course on Chinese thru Coursera. It's hard.

Thanks for this. I'm going to check out Coursera for learning Chinese.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I'm Chinese but grew up in the US. I can speak and understand it more or less fluently.

Took a Chinese course for three years in college.

Still can't write or read it. I didn't have the patience or interest to memorize all those different characters while in college. Now that I spend quite a bit of time in China, I have the interest, but the patience might still not be there.

My recommendation is to learn to type it first (using pinyin) and also learn to recognize characters. Knowing how to write down the characters from scratch with pen and paper is becoming less and less useful. Most people type it anyway, and if you can read it, you'll be fine navigating around China and such.

Speaking and understanding verbal Chinese is most important though.