A Vietnamese lady who does my wifes nails sinks every dollar into her children and still lives in an apartment and eats rice mainly despite owning a business. When they first came FOB we invited them to Thanksgiving dinner about 8 years ago so we know them pretty well and remained friends. Today both children, boy and girl, are in Medical school.Man. I wish my Chinese were better. Then I could understand more than half of what you guys are saying...
The woman writing the article is kind of right. Chinese parents do give up everything to give their children the best chance at life. It's not uncommon to hear about people who starve themselves so they can afford meat for children who are in athletic training. But the discipline thing is also only partly right. I once overheard a conversation between two of my aunts competing over which of my cousins was the more spoiled.
Having lots of money isn't everything. But having no money is.
Smart people have money. But wise people have time and money. It's philosophical. It's deep. Something most parents don't teach their kids.
我同意。我認為日语比較難學。
Good example(s)我認為英文很難學。“colonel"怎麼發音？"through","tough","cough" 怎麼發音？為什麼它們發音不一樣？還有你們ATOT的人都不知道怎麼用“they're","there"或"their".
It may be the tones. Japanese has 2 but certain Chinese dialects can have up to 7. The thing that intidimate Westerners the most about Chinese/Japanese is the character system. They have thousands. But once you've mastered that (and read repeatedly so that you do not forget, it becomes very easy to write/remember. But the grammer is nice and simple. If you took a book that was well translated from English to Chinese and Japanese. The Chinese one would be thinnest, followed by Japanese and then English. The thing about Japanese is that you have the worst of all worlds. English-like grammar, Chinese-like character set, and 4 alphabet sets to truly understand everything (漢字、ひらがな、カタカナ、and Roman). Japan has over-engineered it's language.The opposite is true. I've read articles about studies that were done and Chinese kids take twice as long to become compentent in their language than English speaking kids because Chinese is so difficult. Also, the Chinese character system is inefficient.
Chinese is very easy to learn. It doesn't have the complex grammer system like English or Japanese. TBH, Chinese is more efficient because of the lack of the complex aforementioned systems.
Well, (on the mainland) they did modernized the language somewhat. They could give it another go. Chairman Mao really wanted to simplify Chinese even further but the people voted him down.I guess....but watch most people still fail at certain grammar particles like 了, even native speakers (although, to be honest, most people fail at their own language's grammar anyways)．
It actually annoys me is that there is no grammar. After English, Spanish and Arabic, I'm used to conjugating my verbs....In chinese you have to pull it from context sometimes, ie: look at when it happened "Yesterday" "Last Week", etc. I can't fucking turn that character into the future or in the past; instead you have other characters that are supposed to be markers like 了，要，會，正，著，etc etc and often these guys are dropped and/or used inconsistently....trust me, it can be its own bitch. At times like those you want to say, "ARRRGH. HALBO HABLAS HABLE HABLAMOS, HABLAN. ALL PRESENT TENSE, SEE HOW EASY THAT WAS!"
我認為英文很難學。colonel"怎麼發音？"through","tough","cough" 怎麼發音？為什麼它們發音不一樣？還有你們ATOT的人都不知道怎麼用they're","there"或"their".
Good example(s)
It may be the tones. Japanese has 2 but certain Chinese dialects can have up to 7. The thing that intidimate Westerners the most about Chinese/Japanese is the character system. They have thousands. But once you've mastered that (and read repeatedly so that you do not forget, it becomes very easy to write/remember. But the grammer is nice and simple. If you took a book that was well translated from English to Chinese and Japanese. The Chinese one would be thinnest, followed by Japanese and then English. The thing about Japanese is that you have the worst of all worlds. English-like grammar, Chinese-like character set, and 4 alphabet sets to truly understand everything (漢字、ひらがな、カタカナ、and Roman). Japan has over-engineered it's language.
Well, (on the mainland) they did modernized the language somewhat. They could give it another go. Chairman Mao really wanted to simplify Chinese even further but the people voted him down.
How far up did you go in Japanese? The shit get more difficult as you go along. For example, the grammatical rules racthet up a notch or 3 in second and third year Japanese. It isn't difficult but complicated. Annoying. Also, Japanese would not transfer to a purely phonetic system considering that most sounds are a, i, u, e, and o. It would be a huge disaster. Context is extremely important when speaking and writing in pure hiragana. As for Korean, I haven't learned it but I heard it's similar to Japanese grammar-wise. However, I don't understand where they got that strange script from.eh, Chinese dialects can go up to 7....Taiwanese is 8. But let us be serious here: no one is running out learning the multitude of Chinese dialects (I always wondered what would have happened if China fractured into its linguistic boundaries considering that the languages are often mutually unintelligible...). Everyone is learning Mandarin - and that has just 4 tones.
I never found the japanese system to be too hard to learn; i don't know it now, but back when i had too much time in highschool it picked it up in about 2 weeks or so. I think there were discussions in the 20th century about moving to kana, but that didnt go over well since there is pride attached to knowing kanji...and i have no idea how well japanese would lend to a purely phonetic system. chinese would be a massive fail in that regards, although Korean did come out okay when they finally switched to their phonetic system that was trashed by the elite for hundreds of years lol.
I prefer traditional as well. It's how I first learned and there is beauty in the complexity. Also, as you say, there is a clear pattern in writing so the complexity becomes internalized quickly.Lol was it really modernization? Some of them could said to be more simpler to write, like the water radical 請　ｖｓ　请
But on others, they try to copy homophones rather than just meaning....and the meaning of the character can be different. Consider the example below, bother of the first characters have their own meaning, but at least look similar (although in simplified it now carries a ice radical)....but the bei4 is completely different...and has a completely different meaning
準備　　ｖｓ　　准备
another good example is
計劃　　　vs 计划
sure maybe we can see the simplification in　言, but the latter just makes a person want to face palm and say "JUST BECAUSE IT SOUNDS THE SAME DOESN'T MEAN ITS A GOOD IDEA"
This is what I've learned at the end of the day after studying both (I end up choosing traditional in the end)
Traditional isn't harder at all. Any claims are just laughable...it only LOOKS harder.
It looks harder because you see more strokes, but really, those strokes will appear time and time again and you'll notice a lot of characters are combinations of certain shapes...
so you don't think "shit that is a 20 stroke character" 讀 (to study), you look at that and say "oh, 言(mouth) on the side, and 賣 (sell) on the right, and 賣　is just 士 (uhh..knight/honorable dude?)　and 買 (sell). So it looks extremely complex, but my mind already just sees two parts (and that is because i've already internalized 'to sell' as its own, otherwise it could be three parts...but you see how each character just uses a lot of similar parts?).
Same thing with: 解釋(to explain,explanation), where the first character's right side is often used, and the second character's left side is also another shape that you can see in 番茄(tomato). Same thing in 翻譯 (to translate, translator, translation) you can see that tomato part come in...and on the second character you can see that the right side is shared with the second character's right side f the previous word.
Lots of common shapes and strokes makes traditional a lot easier than you might think...and if you understand the meaning of some of those shapes番(foreign/raw...kinda ethnocentric if you actually go in deeper to see how foreign and raw get paired together)，then you can start to understand the characters really well.
And that is something that I would argue becomes slightly difficult in simplified because the simplifications didn't necessarily consider meaning at all. Chinese has been under doing simplifications and changes since day 1, so I think its stupid to argue from the perspective that you can't change he meaning....but it would at least be a better argument when simplifying characters if they still had logic and meaning attached to many of them.
and ultimately, the funny part is that many other chinese characters didn't get simplified...so you have to learn those shapes anyways...might as well as learned the initial way to write it lol
Of course, what simplified has entirely on traditional is that you write it faster....a LOT faster (although it seems everyone who writes traditional has their own short hand script that they use anyways). when i'm writing for speed, i'll throw in the simplified version a lot....兒　ｖｓ　ㄦ　,　幾　ｖｓ　几　
How far up did you go in Japanese? The shit get more difficult as you go along. For example, the grammatical rules racthet up a notch or 3 in second and third year Japanese. It isn't difficult but complicated. Annoying. Also, Japanese would not transfer to a purely phonetic system considering that most sounds are a, i, u, e, and o. It would be a huge disaster. Context is extremely important when speaking and writing in pure hiragana. As for Korean, I haven't learned it but I heard it's similar to Japanese grammar-wise. However, I don't understand where they got that strange script from.
I prefer traditional as well. It's how I first learned and there is beauty in the complexity. Also, as you say, there is a clear pattern in writing so the complexity becomes internalized quickly.
Interesting.ah, my bad, i didn't mean to sound patronizing at all if you already knew it all haha.
Actually chinese characters and meanings have changed a LOT....interestingly enough Korean (well...for those who still know the korean adaptations of the characters),Japanese, Vietnamese (again...they moved to a phonetic alphabet lol) all preserve the original character meanings a LOT better than Chinese because they were isolated longer.
My teachers back in college said that the best students in their classical chinese classes were always the japanese because a lot of characters still share the same meaning and they still used characters
I said just writing characters Never learned how to speak as I lost my interest....
But yes I heard Japanese Grammar is crazy stairs. Maybe I should try it to see how it compares to Arabic (also crazy stairs grammar with so many rules...no one speaks it right, but everyone still understands perfectly each other lol)
Some Korean guy invented Hangul 500 years ago or so. The funny part was that it was rejected for the longest time and trashed as lower class writing, stupid writing, women's writing, etc. etc by the Koreans themselves. Unless I'm wrong, it was only once the Japanese invaded that elite Koreans started to pay more attention to hangul (cause everyone else was pretty much illiterate)
I actually think its kinda intuitive, some Korean girl was teaching me to write my name and I figured out how to read things. Basically, each little 'box' contains a sound, and that sound can be composed of up to 2-3 parts.... so "Han" has a marker for a H, an a, and a n. "Ji" has a marker for J and i. So something like Bulgogi (oh...so good) would be "B U L" "G O" "G I" where each set gets its own little box, and the first sound gets priority position, etc.
I hate conjugation. It's probably more efficient, it's consistent, etc. But I still hate it. And plus, you start getting so many tenses if you add in active and passive, subjunctive vs indicative vs imperative vs interrogative etc. you still end up sometimes confusing tenses, or having to use context to pick out meaning. And in that case it's worse, because you're not expecting it.I guess....but watch most people still fail at certain grammar particles like 了, even native speakers (although, to be honest, most people fail at their own language's grammar anyways)．
It actually annoys me is that there is no grammar. After English, Spanish and Arabic, I'm used to conjugating my verbs....In chinese you have to pull it from context sometimes, ie: look at when it happened "Yesterday" "Last Week", etc. I can't fucking turn that character into the future or in the past; instead you have other characters that are supposed to be markers like 了，要，會，正，著，etc etc and often these guys are dropped and/or used inconsistently....trust me, it can be its own bitch. At times like those you want to say, "ARRRGH. HALBO HABLAS HABLE HABLAMOS, HABLAN. ALL PRESENT TENSE, SEE HOW EASY THAT WAS!"
假如碰到一個你不認識的字，你自己怎麼拼？　你也要猜，對不對．每一個字都需要被下來．
Hangul was created by a guy named King SeJong. Basically when china occupied Korea, everyone had to learn Chinese, which was a bitch as you all know, and basically almost nobody could speak, read or write ever because no one knew Chinese. So this guy made a system that extremely simplified the Chinese language into less than 40 characters, rather than the thousands upon thousands of characters in Chinese. Also, there is no need for fancy drawing skills as everything is pretty easy to draw.
But you have the right idea for Hangul. It's extremely simple because each syllable is its own contained box.
Of course, what's annoying is that even now, many Korean texts still use Chinese letters "hanja" which makes it a pain for me to read because I have NO idea what they are, but my parents can read them just fine.
ah, my bad, i didn't mean to sound patronizing at all if you already knew it all haha.
Actually chinese characters and meanings have changed a lot....interestingly enough korean (well...for those who still know the korean adaptations of the characters),japanese, vietnamese (again...they moved to a phonetic alphabet lol) all preserve the original character meanings a lot better than chinese because they were isolated longer.
My teachers back in college said that the best students in their classical chinese classes were always the japanese because a lot of characters still share the same meaning and they still used characters
我的意思就是：英文字也都要背因為拼寫和發音很多次不同（不像西班牙，拼寫和發音都一樣）。
Korean moms are Chinese moms on steroids.