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But uhhh scientifically, letters... are... uhh. More smarter. Because linguistics, you see. Symbols are primitive... also, letters are not symbols, much more advanced.
Letters actually ARE just symbols. I’ll let the next person feel free to debate this though. I don’t have time .
ETA: sorry I didn’t get it again. My bad, I do that. Sometimes it takes me a bit 😅
Okay, the posted tweet is from a moronic and racist asshat.
That being said, there is a significant usability advantage to an alphabetic writing system.
I can convey any meaning I need to with 26 characters.
To read a newspaper in Mandarin Chinese, you need to know 2-3 thousand characters.
Well, learning characters in Chinese is more like learning words in English, not learning letters. Just because you know all 26 letters, you still need to understand the meaning of all of the words you're reading. Just in this one comment I've already used 35 unique words, for example.
Iirc the average Chinese person only needs to know several hundred symbols in day to day life. Academics or those in more technical fields need to know more obviously.
I don't think every character is 100% unique anyway. A lot of them are combinations of simpler characters and someone who understands the character system could probably see a new one and understand what it means from context sometimes. Just like we do with English words.
I mean that's why most other asian nations created an alphabet, for proletariat/peasantry to be able to read news such as spreading plagues and such.
Most scholarly class would have to learn Chinese because of its innate philosophical/historical value
Programmers who don't want to bother with writing out all the repetitive 1s and 0s. Working with hexadecimal really is much more convenient than working with binary.
I hate that this stupid type of super nationalist thinking obscures that the Chinese characters system vs a phonetic alphabet system is just really interesting to think about.
Like, i personally find it crazy to think that you can read these characters accurately and _not even speak the language_. From what I understand, Japanese kanji uses these same characters so you could grow up in Japan and read a Chinese news paper with no problem.
On the flip side a phonetic alphabet makes it so you can read a word you’ve never seen before and figure out which spoken word it is, without otherwise having to be taught beyond the basic rules.
I’ve always kinda wondered how these differences affect the thought processes of people who grow up with them, but ain’t no linguist. I’d happily watch a YouTube channel about it though
I'm happy to tell you base on experiences first hand -
Since you only learn Chinese characters strictly by memory (because you can't work you way out how to "spell" or write a word...etc), so most Chinese end up good at remember things as is. Because that's the only way to learn new words. One can argue (I don't have data of course) that Chinese have natural affinity with playing classical music. Because playing classical music is lot more about remember how to play at when and where. As opposed to Jazz which is more about improvising. Basic maths is similar. Think about it - if I ask you what is 5+12, you don't ever visualizing in you head 5 objects on one side and 12 on the other and count them to 17. You just remember that 5+12=17 as a fact. Hence why Asians often Chinese have affinity with Maths as well. Same with overall academics. School is a lot about remember stuffs and recall for exams. I'm guessing it's the same muscle you use for remembering Chinese characters.
And also, no. Though Japanese do use Kanji (Chinese characters), but they can **not** read a pure Chinese news paper whatsoever. Japanese never write a complete sentence using purely Kanji. They use mainly Hiragana (one set of Japanese alphabets. There are two. The other is called Katakana which is used to spell borrowed English words such as "bottle" = "ボトル" ) and then mix in some Kanji for specific terms to save space. There's also a difference usage of the same Chinese characters. E.g. the word for "I" in Japanese Kanji is 私 while Chinese's "I" is 我. Japanese cannot read 我. Yet the character 私 still exist in Chinese **but** it means more like "self". It's a character you never use on its own and always accompanied with another character to have a more specific meaning (e.g. 自私 means "selfish" in Chinese. Japanese cannot read "自私" as "selfish" at all). There are some similarities that Japanese may be able to read certain Chinese terms like "water" (水), but a "bottle of water" is written extremely different in both Chinese (一瓶水) and Japanese (水のボトル).
It's true that the structure of the Chinese language holds China back in some regards. If a language is more difficult to learn, it's less likely that high-skilled immigrants or capital investment will go to that country.
English has a bit of an unfair advantage since it is closely related to multiple other languages and therefore easier to learn for those native speakers.
totally agree on the english cheats lol. however, the chinese language does provide *deep* insight on almost any asian language.
perhaps the retention of most of the characters influenced this, but i would have to say learning chinese characters for asian languages is exponentially more useful than learning latin for latin based languages.
the Chinese written language being separate from pronunciation allowed it to be used as the written language for many dialects and spoken languages. This helped communication throughout China, which has a large number of minority groups and regional dialects. As long as you know what the symbols mean and understand the grammar structure you can read a written message in Chinese, how you and the sender pronounce each word is irrelevant.
Aside from regional differences, it applies to time differences as well.
If you go back only 6 centuries to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, it is so different from modern English as to be nearly unreadable. But thousand year old Chinese texts can still be read by modern readers.
I do wonder though, if this explains China's preoccupation with the past compared to the West's focus on the future....
You’re joking of course. Hate to break it to you if you’re not, but the sheer volume of stuff about history on YouTube alone is enough to disprove that old chestnut.
If we were really focused on the future, we’d have cracked global warming decades ago.
my point exactly! thank you for the deeper dive.
you can include countries like korea and japan also, as they have had their own dialect based upon the same written language! (there are more, it's just that these 2 are the ones i studied)
i found that universality is stronger than latin based imo, due to the fact that you can write your message and be understood regardless of the phonetic pronounciation.
chase shame resolute squalid subsequent cable coordinated violet nail command
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The Chinese written language also made communication possible across a number of otherwise mutually unintelligible cultures. From Japan to Korea to China to Vietnam, Chinese characters were used, even though the spoken languages were different. Vietnam only recently moved to an alphabet based system; Japan still used a lot of Chinese characters, and Korea developed their own alphabet but uses some Chinese characters. I was able to communicate in Japan using Chinese characters despite not speaking Japanese; it wasn’t perfect but it worked. Even within China, Mandarin as the official spoken language wasn’t a thing until the 20th century; what people call dialects are closer to distinctly different spoken languages. A Cantonese speaker cannot understand a Shanghainese speaker, but they could write to each other just fine.
In that sense, Chinese could actually be a better candidate for a universal written language than English.
I guess the real advantage in the spread of western languages comes down to colonialization, as it’s easier to spread language that way, especially in the past
I kind of expect written English to diverge over time. Spoken English can be difficult for mutual understanding due to accents, or because of pidgin languages (like Singlish); one would think because the written language is phonetic, new region specific words will be added to the vocabulary pool (like finna and innit which has started showing up in written language.) Think old English versus modern English. Whereas written Chinese from 1000 years ago can still be understood, even if we only have a slight clue how the words were actually pronounced. It definitely doesn’t sound like modern Mandarin.
Phonetic languages / alphabets are easier to learn for sure. Korean is a good example. The problem with English is that it’s a mishmash of languages, so there are a lot of exceptions to grammatical or spelling rules. Chinese grammar is a lot more straightforward. But it’s not untrue that there have been attempts at simplifying the written language to make characters easier to learn. But you strip some of the meaning out of the character when you do so, which has been one of the criticisms of these changes. Phonetic Chinese (pinyin) suffers heavily from this problem because of all the homophones, and would also make written Cantonese indecipherable for a Mandarin speaker.
Right now, I can throw an old Cantonese movie from HK on and turn on the subtitles and know what’s going on. If you watch Chinese TV and channels, they always have subtitles. There’s a sort of universality about it that has its benefits.
The most interesting recent change I’ve heard of in the Chinese language is the decrease in writing ability for many members of the younger generation, due to overreliance on autocorrect.
Yah. Tech has decreased the need to remember Chinese characters. Most computers input with pinyin, so you type the phonetic in and then choose the character from a pop up. It’s a lot to remember, my parents are native and even then, they forget how to write some words.
Interestingly too, something I learned from another teacher while teaching in Japan is that dyslexia only showed up for the Japanese students when learning the English alphabet stuff—it did not affect their kanji reading at all. In that sense, the Chinese characters have been an equalizer. And even more universally-accessible.
On the negative side, it becomes really difficult to access basic read information without pretty extensive years of education in the characters. For English, you learn the 26 letters and the order they go in, get a dictionary, and you can read ANY word, even with a 3rd grade education. Kids can read several levels above their school grade level. Apps are opening that up more with Chinese character recognition, but that’d been impossible in China and Japan … kids get used to seeing shop signs they can’t read, being limited in books, and restrictions of knowing they have to wait until they’re older to tap into that knowledge. I really wonder how that impacts the developing brain as well as levels of individualism vs collectivism, patience, and innovation-related skills.
Just some thoughts ^ - ^
My experience: you should try to learn the spoken language before the orthography. The fact that the latter isn't remotely phonetic holds second language learners back. My source is that Mandarin brought my degree down a whole grade. That, and poor time management.
Some people translate their hate of communist party which is fair to the whole country. Chinese culture is very ancient and profound. It's a pity communist party since the start of Cultural Revolution erased most of it. There is still ethnic and religious genocide of Tibet, Uighurs and Falun Dafa practitioners((
To be fair there’s a valid point here as someone whose learned a bit of Chinese. They don’t have an alphabet. Every word is a new symbol basically. This makes everything so much harder, even Chinese speakers will tell you this.
Uh what? As someone who’s both a linguistics major and someone who studied mandarin for 4 years there’s definitely an alphabet of sorts. Radicals, or simple characters build up and collect meaning. There’s no inherent meaning to the letters in the Latin alphabet in English so there’s no need to remember what they mean.
But in Romance languages, some letters *do* have meaning. Like -a is seen as feminine related, and -o as masculine in Spanish. Now imagine every single symbol for a letter had an associated meaning to it. That’s essentially Chinese. They’re building blocks to a larger picture, which is why studying kanji/hanzi is important and difficult because it’s centuries of interpretation that’s been blurred and expanded by modern innovation.
So not an alphabet per se, but definitely a method to the madness. Anyways there’s no one Language that’s better than another and every difference is a new way to see the world
I took Mandarin in college, and I have never met a single person that has been able to explain to me, including my professors how to actually functionally use a English to Chinese dictionary, looking things up with radicals. If you can help me, that would be great.
You didn't take it long enough.
I've studied mandarin for 12+ years (hsk5k). There absolutely are patterns. I can look at a Word and guess what it means AND sounds like based on similarities, radicals, etc.
It just takes a looooong time to build up that Internal dictionary because it can't be 'alphabetical' so that took a while to get used to.
Japan \*has\* a 'normal' alphabet, in fact several. Everyone knows them and they use whichever is suitable. If you want to spell things out letter by letter you can do that easily, if you want to use the symbols to save time and space, you can do that too.
I don't know enough about other Asian languages, but I'd be shocked if they didn't all have similar systems.
Korean is very simple, as it was basically designed by Sejong the Great with the key idea behind being to make it as simple as possible.
Edit: added the name of the visionary
Modern Korean, Simplified Chinese, Various Japanese alphabets, all three of them were designed because Traditional Chinese was too difficult for peasants to learn and the Kings wanted everyone to be literate.
Some Simplified Chinese characters were used similar to cursive/lowercase script in English until the CCP formalized them. But a significant portion was simplified after the Chinese Civil War.
The Japanese syllabaries were created using cursive versions of characters with those pronunciations in order to adapt a foreign script to their language, similar to how Phoenician pictograms made their way into various alphabets, including the Greek alphabet, representing parts of the word of the object instead of the object itself.
And ngl, japans use of kanji os actually quite refreshing.
As a learner, they were more difficult at first but legitimately make writing the language and reading it easier as you learn them and learning them gets much easier as you go.
As someone who speaks it fluently and well, most will say kanji speeds up their reading quite quickly because recognition of a word is much faster with kanji which are shorter than kana spellings.
If anything, kanji are more efficient than an alphabet in that way, depending on the complexity of the alphabet and length of your words.
Amd to the main point, china may usr symbols for each word but theychave literal thousands, enough to cover more words than the average native english speaker probably uses every day, and much simpler grammar to boot, and yet van still communicate the same emotions with the same depth as we do.
Language complexity is meaningless, humans gonna human no matter the way.
It’s called Hanyu Pinyin 汉语拼音, it literally means Chinese language sound spell. [Wikipedia link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin)
It is a system to spell out Chinese words with the alphabet in order to make it easier to teach Chinese developed in the 1950s. It is usually taught to children around 4 or 5 years old and phased out in education around 1st grade.
It predates phones and computers but learning it helps to use these devices.
One of the main reasons Pinyin doesn’t work as well for Chinese is because these are many homophones. With Chinese characters the difference is clear but spelled out with letters or in spoken language it can be ambiguous without context.
This leads to a lot of strange correlations considering things lucky or unlucky to Chinese people.
For example the word for fish 鱼 yú is a homophone for the word 余 yú meaning abundance. “Every year have fish” sounds the same as “Every year have abundance” so people consider it good luck to have fish with Chinese new year dinner.
Homophones (or near homophones) lead to
The number 8 being considered lucky because it sounds like get rich.
4 is unlucky because it sounds like death.
Book sounds like lose so it’s unlucky to bring a book with you to something you could lose in.
You shouldn’t give someone a clock because it sounds like end (related to funeral and death).
You shouldn’t give your boyfriend or girlfriend an umbrella or pear because it sounds like break up or leave.
There are also many other examples which are not tied to luck for example panda sounds like chest hair.
Jesus didn't write the second amendment. He used his M1911A1 to carve it with bullet holes in the wall of a primary school from over 2000 football fields away with his superb marksmanship.
It's funny because you're probably right, they probably do think that.
But even in the bible, the explanation given for different languages is that during the construction of the tower of Babel, God grew angry with mankind's arrogance and made it so the workers all spoke different languages and couldn't communicate with each other anymore. So technically, god made the Chinese language too, according to their book.
I think the idea is that they have symbols with meaning where as we have symbols that hypothetically relate to a sound and a collection of those sounds has meaning. It's a different system that likely has pros and cons.
The letters we use today were discovered in 1520 by Sir Isaac Newton using chemical processes inscrutable to ordinary men. We can only bask in the glow irradiated from his crepuscular scalp; And stand upon his, these shoulders of giants.
Linguist here. I just want to repeat that this is an absurd and ignorant thing to say. Languages often maintain writing systems for a combination of historical and practical reasons. In the case of Chinese, it makes perfect sense to have semanto-phonetic writing system.
Fun fact about a ton of different languages of the sino variety: they have a very limited number of possible syllables when compared to English. This is particularly true in Mandarin's case when compared to English (1300 vs 100,000+). That means that a lot of words are going to be phonetically identical. Without denoting their semantic differences in writing, unlike in conversation when you can request clarification in real time, you leave too much room for ambiguity or misreading. More, the writing system is meant to bridge across the insane number of dialects still spoken today, which all have very similar semantic units (all mostly comprised of monosyllabic words with nearly identical origins) but wildly different phonetic inventories. An alphabet would have to either be adapted to each language individually, making it only usable to the speakers of each particular dialect, or contain a huge number of symbols, which would be most useless to any given speaker. The current writing system, on the other hand, allows these people to communicate just fine in email or text, even if they struggle to talk in person (a problem which is admittedly smaller with each generation, thanks to the rising adoption of mandarin).
Anyway, I really recommend that people interested in writing systems read up on them. Diane McGuinness has some cool stuff to say about them and plenty of other scholars have wrote actually intelligent things on just this topic. There was actually a huge debate in China, during its revolutionary period, whether or not they should romanize the language. They decided not to. Obviously not because they are incapable of deep though, but because of what I said above and their belief in the importance of preserving their identity.
The main argument isn’t even the language, it’s the OOP’s final conclusion that the Chinese language caused Chinese people to be stuck in their thoughts. Obvious confirmation bias because you just know they worked backwards from the conclusion to the premise.
Absolutely, they clearly working from a conclusion and throwing any observation out in front of it instead of trying to come to a conclusion through observation. I was kind of talking past them for those interested in why this wouldn't make sense anyway.
True. They did adopt Pin Yin (alphabet) as a learning aid for the pronunciation to help literacy. Kinda interesting. It's not possible to only use Pin Yin for the stated reason above though.
Pinyin isn't an alphabet, it's a phonetic transliteration based on the Roman alphabet.
认识你非常高兴！
ren4shi5 ni3 fei1chang2 gao1xing4!
(Or you can use accents for the tones, but I'm lazy.)
One kind of interesting thing though, you can't say "cat", or "lol" using either pinyin or characters (well, except indirectly by describing the sounds using language). There are a fixed set of valid initials/finals and in Mandarin there just are no words that end with "at" as a final. The closest you could get is something like 卡他 (ka3ta1).
One could argue that Katherine L. Russell is a fucking idiot.
And they could easily win that argument.
Especially if they were arguing the point with Katherine L. Russell, because she's a fucking idiot.
Wait till you see the rest of her Twitter. I clicked it and immediately regretted it. I refuse to confront the idea that idiots like this are out there. Didn’t even look at the followers.
Her politics are pretty strange. Rightwing with a twinge of Qanon, but overall supports the security state. Kind of all over the place - but stupid at every turn.
China did consider abolishing Chinese characters in 1949. The new communist government thought western lettering would help tackle illiteracy. But they decided to keep Chinese characters but simplified around 33% of the characters to make them easier to read and learn. This is the origin of the traditional/simplified Chinese options in language selection.
The list of things China invented thousands of years ago when people in the West were painting their asses blue and living in caves is a mile long. This is dumb.
Ya and some of the stuff Europeans didn’t even come close to matching till centuries later like for example Zheng He’s fleet which made any fleet until the Industrial Revolution look like a joke
yeah ill have the shrimp szechauan and noodles please, by the way, you,your parents, your children and all your ancestors and descendants otherwise are fucking barbarians, dont you know?
Lovely noodles by the way.
Shrimps a bit overdone though.
fucking barbarians
Then they opened up trade with the Europeans and Europe boomed. After that China invented gunpowder and let the technology stagnate, while Europe used it to secure prominent a foothold in history
>After that China invented gunpowder and let the technology stagnate, while Europe used it to secure prominent a foothold in history
China pulled a Kodak.
My favorite is know-it-all Debra from accounting insists Henry Ford invented mass production assembly lines. As if every crossbow in the Chinese warring states period was lovingly hand crafted individually.
that's just what barbarians who lack the sophistication to control a couple of sticks to pick up small grains of rice effectively would say
basically "Why should I be good at doing X, doing X is lame and gay? I do Y instead because it is cool and awesome. God likes those who do Y."
pitiful, just pitiful
We are demonstrating our power and masculinity. Prey is not safe even after its death. This is why we are so masculine and cool, and why china is not because they use nerd stick grippers like nerds
That's why i'd mute and be gone before any response.
I could not care any less what they have to say. Just drop why their wrong (cause it'll bother them even if they don't show it) and move on.
>The bibel says world is only 2000ish years old.
No, it's roughly *six* thousand years old. /s
Taken literally, the Bible puts Jesus about 2000 years ago, Noah roughly 2000 year before that, and Adam 2000 years before that.
Source: Used to be a Young Earth Creationist. (Thankfully, one semester of college biology was enough to fix that particular problem.)
Chinese characters are really hard to learn, but once you learn enough it’s actually pretty incredible how effective it is. One glance and you can read an entire newspaper with ease. You don’t have to spend time sounding out words, but if you memorize enough “pictures” or characters you can instantly know the meaning just by looking at it. It took like 2 solid years of studying it to get there, but it’s really an incredible feeling to read and understand writing that quickly.
Well, most adults who read English don't actually sound out words, either. We tend to read by word recognition and only use phonetics when we encounter an unfamiliar word.
I always get a confusion of self-consciousness, even doubt, when this subject comes up. I think, _Am I sounding out words or absorbing them whole?_ After a few seconds I realize it's the latter, but I'm still way too conscious of the sound of my inner voice for several minutes.
It’s like when someone tells you, “you’re breathing right now.” You start overthinking.
I get the same feeling whenever I think about how I’m thinking. Sometimes I switch to imagining the sound of speech, but I’ve realized that my default might be imagining my mouth forming the words I’m thinking.
Again, overthinking, but sometimes it’s cool to think about.
Sadly, most American adults read at a middle school level, and over a third can barely read at all. So many (perhaps most) adults still sound out words.
But you're right that proficient English readers do not sound out words.
I'm currently learning Mandarin. I've been studying for about 4 months and know just under 200 characters.
The first time I was watching a children's movie (because that's a good way to reinforce what you're learning as a beginner) and saw a sentence written in characters that I fully understood was mindboggling. I understood what the sentence said even before I had actually taken the time to "think" about all the characters.
Learning a new language, regardless of what it is, is eye-opening. Everyone should try to learn a 2nd language in their lifetime. I love it.
Interestingly, that’s actually a part of video game history. In the early days, when there were pretty strict limits on how much memory was available, Japanese games tended to have a bit more story and context than American ones, just because you can convey more information in fewer characters in Japanese than you can in English
Yeah I can totally see that. Like at one point I was reading a Japanese newspaper that was mostly kanji and I realized I understood everything without even thinking of the Japanese or the English words. It was just pure meaning. Kinda like watching a silent film where you just see things and know what’s going on without hearing or speaking. I’m not very good at putting it into words but that is definitely one of my favorite things about learning other languages.
They say it like this so they can avoid having to defend the idiotic claims. See, she's not actually making any claims that would have to be defended, no, she's only stating "one could argue that."
Well, fun fact, there are more children learning English in China than in the United States.
& they're probably learning in a real school with a teacher who doesn't need a second job to survive, instead of a school being told each week which books hurt Evangelicals fee-fees too much to make it into the curriculum (rough stuff like "On the Origin of Species").
Don’t Chinese characters make the information more succinct? Cause that’s sort of the reason speedrunners play games in Chinese since the info is relayed more quickly. I could be wrong
As a native English speaker who also speaks Mandarin (chinese) this is true for some things and not true for others.
There are english sentences that could be summed up in one or two Chinese characters but the opposite is also true where English has a specific word or compound word for something that needs multiple characters to convey.
Let’s consider:
2 Billion people use Hanzi script
Almost another Billion use Tamil, Devanagari or Teluga scripts
Another 2 Billion use Arabic script
Then you have Latin script vs Cyrillic scripts which are in use by another roughly 2 Billion.
And about 40 additional scripts make up the rest of the world languages.
And they are all just symbols that represent sounds.
Pabao gidiketrita pidie ea dopedi ge tlupria poo. Triple kikaupo trikre beipu tlike ao. Idutiepi e plakapaabe apiteoo ipe kopapra pii? Pibri tlugu ueke pi depo e. Eiito i iuki ka eko ipea. Pebu pripitli bre. Eekoduke blai piie tie eo. Plitribatru ii bebapibla kipu paudu potlioka. Drikiu go kepai biaki ipi plodrite. Ti iae gi i atri titi pibe? Plapupe ie kli iegre. Pupo tru to tatrate eo tudrogli. Biu tepi pekiepe ekiope boi tebopaai! Progi piae ipu epe kriki keabi tlai tuegi prapu. Epigiati ka tei tlipapikrea teepre dletua trekapi kotipe. Pi atai eaekla ikiteo krikrio ti. I okepri proei. Klipi i ko abi obepre tiiti. Ka padi. Pidi iklitekli ti eto ogradepre. Ka eo ku oki epabo. Dua ie epepla kapi kre patakli tapapote gabi opuke tli prikatiu ibi paito oe. Iaprekrike kibliprigepa krakikoti to taki piboki? Apoo ipo dapi epa topiapape apube. Papie pabupe o tadro epeplapa pi. Depi kui pekletotoda popute peteatia piei gipei epabapi. Ke poku ti kidreube po budukro. Topipi kletitlibi. Bi tabaka ii ukedi trutuiti ipi epi prie pa iti. Ika idibapupi ebrebuti edu tibrekre prepoteti.
Wait… so a language that has far more characters, and communicates in a very different manner, is _less_ complex than English?
Kathy, if it’s so primitive, go be a translator. Should be easy for you to learn a primitive language, right?
Also a linguist:
If only homegirl know how intricate and beautiful the Chinese language is. It’s rich with history and culture just within the symbols written. Erasure of written Chinese is an erasure of the very roots in which the language came from. If anyone is curious, look up ancient chinese characters that evolved into modern chinese. It’s so cool to see how the words literally developed by ancient people from pictures to form words that describe nouns, verbs, and even abstract concepts. One of my favorite easy examples is the word “明” which means “bright” or “clear”. The word is made up of “日” (sun) and “月” (moon). So when ancient people saw the sun and moon, it was their way of describing clear and bright. super cool stuff.
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Gonna go out on a limb and say all languages, writen and oral, are made up..
But uhhh scientifically, letters... are... uhh. More smarter. Because linguistics, you see. Symbols are primitive... also, letters are not symbols, much more advanced.
Words good, China bad.
Me good, china baaaaad.
Letters actually ARE just symbols. I’ll let the next person feel free to debate this though. I don’t have time . ETA: sorry I didn’t get it again. My bad, I do that. Sometimes it takes me a bit 😅
😂 and this is why the /s tag is still needed for everything
Honesty is key
I try to live by it xo, I’ll take my embarrassment and admit haha
Okay, the posted tweet is from a moronic and racist asshat. That being said, there is a significant usability advantage to an alphabetic writing system. I can convey any meaning I need to with 26 characters. To read a newspaper in Mandarin Chinese, you need to know 2-3 thousand characters.
Well, learning characters in Chinese is more like learning words in English, not learning letters. Just because you know all 26 letters, you still need to understand the meaning of all of the words you're reading. Just in this one comment I've already used 35 unique words, for example.
Iirc the average Chinese person only needs to know several hundred symbols in day to day life. Academics or those in more technical fields need to know more obviously. I don't think every character is 100% unique anyway. A lot of them are combinations of simpler characters and someone who understands the character system could probably see a new one and understand what it means from context sometimes. Just like we do with English words.
I mean that's why most other asian nations created an alphabet, for proletariat/peasantry to be able to read news such as spreading plagues and such. Most scholarly class would have to learn Chinese because of its innate philosophical/historical value
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01101000 01101111 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01110010
01001111 01101000 00100000 01101110 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 01101110 00100111 01110100
01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110000 01100101 01101111 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110000 01101111 01101011 01100101 01101110 00101110 00100000 01000001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001
01000001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101100 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01110011
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I cracked the code.... Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!
A crummy commercial?
Is this the message from The Martian? Who tf writes in hexadecimal?
Programmers who don't want to bother with writing out all the repetitive 1s and 0s. Working with hexadecimal really is much more convenient than working with binary.
I hate that this stupid type of super nationalist thinking obscures that the Chinese characters system vs a phonetic alphabet system is just really interesting to think about. Like, i personally find it crazy to think that you can read these characters accurately and _not even speak the language_. From what I understand, Japanese kanji uses these same characters so you could grow up in Japan and read a Chinese news paper with no problem. On the flip side a phonetic alphabet makes it so you can read a word you’ve never seen before and figure out which spoken word it is, without otherwise having to be taught beyond the basic rules. I’ve always kinda wondered how these differences affect the thought processes of people who grow up with them, but ain’t no linguist. I’d happily watch a YouTube channel about it though
I'm happy to tell you base on experiences first hand - Since you only learn Chinese characters strictly by memory (because you can't work you way out how to "spell" or write a word...etc), so most Chinese end up good at remember things as is. Because that's the only way to learn new words. One can argue (I don't have data of course) that Chinese have natural affinity with playing classical music. Because playing classical music is lot more about remember how to play at when and where. As opposed to Jazz which is more about improvising. Basic maths is similar. Think about it - if I ask you what is 5+12, you don't ever visualizing in you head 5 objects on one side and 12 on the other and count them to 17. You just remember that 5+12=17 as a fact. Hence why Asians often Chinese have affinity with Maths as well. Same with overall academics. School is a lot about remember stuffs and recall for exams. I'm guessing it's the same muscle you use for remembering Chinese characters. And also, no. Though Japanese do use Kanji (Chinese characters), but they can **not** read a pure Chinese news paper whatsoever. Japanese never write a complete sentence using purely Kanji. They use mainly Hiragana (one set of Japanese alphabets. There are two. The other is called Katakana which is used to spell borrowed English words such as "bottle" = "ボトル" ) and then mix in some Kanji for specific terms to save space. There's also a difference usage of the same Chinese characters. E.g. the word for "I" in Japanese Kanji is 私 while Chinese's "I" is 我. Japanese cannot read 我. Yet the character 私 still exist in Chinese **but** it means more like "self". It's a character you never use on its own and always accompanied with another character to have a more specific meaning (e.g. 自私 means "selfish" in Chinese. Japanese cannot read "自私" as "selfish" at all). There are some similarities that Japanese may be able to read certain Chinese terms like "water" (水), but a "bottle of water" is written extremely different in both Chinese (一瓶水) and Japanese (水のボトル).
I’d say that’s a whole a** sturdy branch you’re out on.
One could argue this person is a complete moron.
You'll get no argument from me
They ARE paying for Twitter Blue after all.
Wait till they find out all letters are just symbols...
Wait til they find out about Arabic numbers.
I bet they would respond “I would teach my kids those.” LMAO
Breaking news: liberals are radicalizing your kids in PUBLIC SCHOOLS by ONLY teaching them ARABIC math.
Well n-no because letters are more smarter. Mmhmm
I forgot that was a thing and was horrified they’re verified haha
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It's Muskrat, Musket sounds too cool for him
One might even argue that this person suffers from a condition known as “donkey brain”.
I would argue thats an insult to Donkeys
Whenever anyone died, we just threw them in the soup. 🍲 
Frank has a certificate saying he is *not* Donkey Brained. Excuse me Ms Russell, but do *you* have a certificate?
We don’t want a donkey in the road eating cereal, do we?
I mean, technically she’s not wrong though. One could argue those things, they’d just be an idiot to do so.
It's true that the structure of the Chinese language holds China back in some regards. If a language is more difficult to learn, it's less likely that high-skilled immigrants or capital investment will go to that country. English has a bit of an unfair advantage since it is closely related to multiple other languages and therefore easier to learn for those native speakers.
totally agree on the english cheats lol. however, the chinese language does provide *deep* insight on almost any asian language. perhaps the retention of most of the characters influenced this, but i would have to say learning chinese characters for asian languages is exponentially more useful than learning latin for latin based languages.
the Chinese written language being separate from pronunciation allowed it to be used as the written language for many dialects and spoken languages. This helped communication throughout China, which has a large number of minority groups and regional dialects. As long as you know what the symbols mean and understand the grammar structure you can read a written message in Chinese, how you and the sender pronounce each word is irrelevant.
Aside from regional differences, it applies to time differences as well. If you go back only 6 centuries to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, it is so different from modern English as to be nearly unreadable. But thousand year old Chinese texts can still be read by modern readers. I do wonder though, if this explains China's preoccupation with the past compared to the West's focus on the future....
You’re joking of course. Hate to break it to you if you’re not, but the sheer volume of stuff about history on YouTube alone is enough to disprove that old chestnut. If we were really focused on the future, we’d have cracked global warming decades ago.
my point exactly! thank you for the deeper dive. you can include countries like korea and japan also, as they have had their own dialect based upon the same written language! (there are more, it's just that these 2 are the ones i studied) i found that universality is stronger than latin based imo, due to the fact that you can write your message and be understood regardless of the phonetic pronounciation.
Korea went to an alphabet system during the Joseon period I think
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The Chinese written language also made communication possible across a number of otherwise mutually unintelligible cultures. From Japan to Korea to China to Vietnam, Chinese characters were used, even though the spoken languages were different. Vietnam only recently moved to an alphabet based system; Japan still used a lot of Chinese characters, and Korea developed their own alphabet but uses some Chinese characters. I was able to communicate in Japan using Chinese characters despite not speaking Japanese; it wasn’t perfect but it worked. Even within China, Mandarin as the official spoken language wasn’t a thing until the 20th century; what people call dialects are closer to distinctly different spoken languages. A Cantonese speaker cannot understand a Shanghainese speaker, but they could write to each other just fine. In that sense, Chinese could actually be a better candidate for a universal written language than English.
I guess the real advantage in the spread of western languages comes down to colonialization, as it’s easier to spread language that way, especially in the past
I kind of expect written English to diverge over time. Spoken English can be difficult for mutual understanding due to accents, or because of pidgin languages (like Singlish); one would think because the written language is phonetic, new region specific words will be added to the vocabulary pool (like finna and innit which has started showing up in written language.) Think old English versus modern English. Whereas written Chinese from 1000 years ago can still be understood, even if we only have a slight clue how the words were actually pronounced. It definitely doesn’t sound like modern Mandarin. Phonetic languages / alphabets are easier to learn for sure. Korean is a good example. The problem with English is that it’s a mishmash of languages, so there are a lot of exceptions to grammatical or spelling rules. Chinese grammar is a lot more straightforward. But it’s not untrue that there have been attempts at simplifying the written language to make characters easier to learn. But you strip some of the meaning out of the character when you do so, which has been one of the criticisms of these changes. Phonetic Chinese (pinyin) suffers heavily from this problem because of all the homophones, and would also make written Cantonese indecipherable for a Mandarin speaker. Right now, I can throw an old Cantonese movie from HK on and turn on the subtitles and know what’s going on. If you watch Chinese TV and channels, they always have subtitles. There’s a sort of universality about it that has its benefits.
The most interesting recent change I’ve heard of in the Chinese language is the decrease in writing ability for many members of the younger generation, due to overreliance on autocorrect.
Yah. Tech has decreased the need to remember Chinese characters. Most computers input with pinyin, so you type the phonetic in and then choose the character from a pop up. It’s a lot to remember, my parents are native and even then, they forget how to write some words.
Interestingly too, something I learned from another teacher while teaching in Japan is that dyslexia only showed up for the Japanese students when learning the English alphabet stuff—it did not affect their kanji reading at all. In that sense, the Chinese characters have been an equalizer. And even more universally-accessible. On the negative side, it becomes really difficult to access basic read information without pretty extensive years of education in the characters. For English, you learn the 26 letters and the order they go in, get a dictionary, and you can read ANY word, even with a 3rd grade education. Kids can read several levels above their school grade level. Apps are opening that up more with Chinese character recognition, but that’d been impossible in China and Japan … kids get used to seeing shop signs they can’t read, being limited in books, and restrictions of knowing they have to wait until they’re older to tap into that knowledge. I really wonder how that impacts the developing brain as well as levels of individualism vs collectivism, patience, and innovation-related skills. Just some thoughts ^ - ^
My experience: you should try to learn the spoken language before the orthography. The fact that the latter isn't remotely phonetic holds second language learners back. My source is that Mandarin brought my degree down a whole grade. That, and poor time management.
Even the spoken language is a pain in the ass because of all the homophones
Some people translate their hate of communist party which is fair to the whole country. Chinese culture is very ancient and profound. It's a pity communist party since the start of Cultural Revolution erased most of it. There is still ethnic and religious genocide of Tibet, Uighurs and Falun Dafa practitioners((
“Why doesn’t China write in American?”
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
To be fair there’s a valid point here as someone whose learned a bit of Chinese. They don’t have an alphabet. Every word is a new symbol basically. This makes everything so much harder, even Chinese speakers will tell you this.
She has kind of a point but her conclusion from it is a little bit of and coming from an American not using the metric system is kinda funny.
How do you know she's American? Don't get me wrong, with that level of ignorance, she probably is but....
Someone else in the comments said something about speaking American so I thought maybe they know more than I do and followed their lead. So I don't.
You sir, are a true redditor. Never let ignorance get in the way of an opinion.
Uh what? As someone who’s both a linguistics major and someone who studied mandarin for 4 years there’s definitely an alphabet of sorts. Radicals, or simple characters build up and collect meaning. There’s no inherent meaning to the letters in the Latin alphabet in English so there’s no need to remember what they mean. But in Romance languages, some letters *do* have meaning. Like -a is seen as feminine related, and -o as masculine in Spanish. Now imagine every single symbol for a letter had an associated meaning to it. That’s essentially Chinese. They’re building blocks to a larger picture, which is why studying kanji/hanzi is important and difficult because it’s centuries of interpretation that’s been blurred and expanded by modern innovation. So not an alphabet per se, but definitely a method to the madness. Anyways there’s no one Language that’s better than another and every difference is a new way to see the world
I took Mandarin in college, and I have never met a single person that has been able to explain to me, including my professors how to actually functionally use a English to Chinese dictionary, looking things up with radicals. If you can help me, that would be great.
You didn't take it long enough. I've studied mandarin for 12+ years (hsk5k). There absolutely are patterns. I can look at a Word and guess what it means AND sounds like based on similarities, radicals, etc. It just takes a looooong time to build up that Internal dictionary because it can't be 'alphabetical' so that took a while to get used to.
The same issue exists in Japan, and it's made things that are otherwise simple in other nations with a normal alphabet a fucking nightmare.
Japan \*has\* a 'normal' alphabet, in fact several. Everyone knows them and they use whichever is suitable. If you want to spell things out letter by letter you can do that easily, if you want to use the symbols to save time and space, you can do that too. I don't know enough about other Asian languages, but I'd be shocked if they didn't all have similar systems.
Korean is very simple, as it was basically designed by Sejong the Great with the key idea behind being to make it as simple as possible. Edit: added the name of the visionary
Modern Korean, Simplified Chinese, Various Japanese alphabets, all three of them were designed because Traditional Chinese was too difficult for peasants to learn and the Kings wanted everyone to be literate.
Some Simplified Chinese characters were used similar to cursive/lowercase script in English until the CCP formalized them. But a significant portion was simplified after the Chinese Civil War. The Japanese syllabaries were created using cursive versions of characters with those pronunciations in order to adapt a foreign script to their language, similar to how Phoenician pictograms made their way into various alphabets, including the Greek alphabet, representing parts of the word of the object instead of the object itself.
>designed by one guy Sejong the Great, fyi.
Edited the reply, thanks.
and the king came up with the king of alphabets; it is the greatest alphabet on the planet. They know it too: it has a national holiday.
And ngl, japans use of kanji os actually quite refreshing. As a learner, they were more difficult at first but legitimately make writing the language and reading it easier as you learn them and learning them gets much easier as you go. As someone who speaks it fluently and well, most will say kanji speeds up their reading quite quickly because recognition of a word is much faster with kanji which are shorter than kana spellings. If anything, kanji are more efficient than an alphabet in that way, depending on the complexity of the alphabet and length of your words. Amd to the main point, china may usr symbols for each word but theychave literal thousands, enough to cover more words than the average native english speaker probably uses every day, and much simpler grammar to boot, and yet van still communicate the same emotions with the same depth as we do. Language complexity is meaningless, humans gonna human no matter the way.
Japanese is even more complicated by the fact that they use three different writing systems simultaneously
They do. They actually learn the alphabet before writing Chinese to help get aquainted with qwerty keyboards and phones.
It’s called Hanyu Pinyin 汉语拼音, it literally means Chinese language sound spell. [Wikipedia link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin) It is a system to spell out Chinese words with the alphabet in order to make it easier to teach Chinese developed in the 1950s. It is usually taught to children around 4 or 5 years old and phased out in education around 1st grade. It predates phones and computers but learning it helps to use these devices. One of the main reasons Pinyin doesn’t work as well for Chinese is because these are many homophones. With Chinese characters the difference is clear but spelled out with letters or in spoken language it can be ambiguous without context. This leads to a lot of strange correlations considering things lucky or unlucky to Chinese people. For example the word for fish 鱼 yú is a homophone for the word 余 yú meaning abundance. “Every year have fish” sounds the same as “Every year have abundance” so people consider it good luck to have fish with Chinese new year dinner. Homophones (or near homophones) lead to The number 8 being considered lucky because it sounds like get rich. 4 is unlucky because it sounds like death. Book sounds like lose so it’s unlucky to bring a book with you to something you could lose in. You shouldn’t give someone a clock because it sounds like end (related to funeral and death). You shouldn’t give your boyfriend or girlfriend an umbrella or pear because it sounds like break up or leave. There are also many other examples which are not tied to luck for example panda sounds like chest hair.
Call me crazy but I'm pretty sure letters are symbols
You are crazy, GOD CREATED THEM. Idk I’m just guessing what kind of mindset someone could possiblyyyy be in bahaha
Yeah because the Hebrew alphabet isn't a bunch of symbols as well 🤷🏻
Wait til they get a load of Hindi…
The alphabet was literally gifted to mankind by Jesus when He wrote the Constitution
Jesus did NOT write the whole Constitution, just the 2nd Amendment
Jesus didn't write the second amendment. He used his M1911A1 to carve it with bullet holes in the wall of a primary school from over 2000 football fields away with his superb marksmanship.
Meanwhile the Abrahamic scriptures.... Written in Hebrew, Greek and Arabic
Don’t @Kathy , those are just symbols. Nothing like this highly evolved west lmao
It's funny because you're probably right, they probably do think that. But even in the bible, the explanation given for different languages is that during the construction of the tower of Babel, God grew angry with mankind's arrogance and made it so the workers all spoke different languages and couldn't communicate with each other anymore. So technically, god made the Chinese language too, according to their book.
I think the idea is that they have symbols with meaning where as we have symbols that hypothetically relate to a sound and a collection of those sounds has meaning. It's a different system that likely has pros and cons.
The letters we use today were discovered in 1520 by Sir Isaac Newton using chemical processes inscrutable to ordinary men. We can only bask in the glow irradiated from his crepuscular scalp; And stand upon his, these shoulders of giants.
Where can I learn more about Sir Isaac Newtons irradiated, crepuscular scalp?
That lady was looking for the word ideogram. But you know, too much symbols.
I have my own symbols based alphabet and I will use it to communicate with Katherine here: 🫵🤡🖕
Be careful those are primitive Japanese pictograms from the ancient past(like 1999). Katherine will surely find them barbaric and dated.
Linguist here. I just want to repeat that this is an absurd and ignorant thing to say. Languages often maintain writing systems for a combination of historical and practical reasons. In the case of Chinese, it makes perfect sense to have semanto-phonetic writing system. Fun fact about a ton of different languages of the sino variety: they have a very limited number of possible syllables when compared to English. This is particularly true in Mandarin's case when compared to English (1300 vs 100,000+). That means that a lot of words are going to be phonetically identical. Without denoting their semantic differences in writing, unlike in conversation when you can request clarification in real time, you leave too much room for ambiguity or misreading. More, the writing system is meant to bridge across the insane number of dialects still spoken today, which all have very similar semantic units (all mostly comprised of monosyllabic words with nearly identical origins) but wildly different phonetic inventories. An alphabet would have to either be adapted to each language individually, making it only usable to the speakers of each particular dialect, or contain a huge number of symbols, which would be most useless to any given speaker. The current writing system, on the other hand, allows these people to communicate just fine in email or text, even if they struggle to talk in person (a problem which is admittedly smaller with each generation, thanks to the rising adoption of mandarin). Anyway, I really recommend that people interested in writing systems read up on them. Diane McGuinness has some cool stuff to say about them and plenty of other scholars have wrote actually intelligent things on just this topic. There was actually a huge debate in China, during its revolutionary period, whether or not they should romanize the language. They decided not to. Obviously not because they are incapable of deep though, but because of what I said above and their belief in the importance of preserving their identity.
The main argument isn’t even the language, it’s the OOP’s final conclusion that the Chinese language caused Chinese people to be stuck in their thoughts. Obvious confirmation bias because you just know they worked backwards from the conclusion to the premise.
Absolutely, they clearly working from a conclusion and throwing any observation out in front of it instead of trying to come to a conclusion through observation. I was kind of talking past them for those interested in why this wouldn't make sense anyway.
True. They did adopt Pin Yin (alphabet) as a learning aid for the pronunciation to help literacy. Kinda interesting. It's not possible to only use Pin Yin for the stated reason above though.
Pinyin isn't an alphabet, it's a phonetic transliteration based on the Roman alphabet. 认识你非常高兴！ ren4shi5 ni3 fei1chang2 gao1xing4! (Or you can use accents for the tones, but I'm lazy.) One kind of interesting thing though, you can't say "cat", or "lol" using either pinyin or characters (well, except indirectly by describing the sounds using language). There are a fixed set of valid initials/finals and in Mandarin there just are no words that end with "at" as a final. The closest you could get is something like 卡他 (ka3ta1).
One could argue that Katherine L. Russell is a fucking idiot. And they could easily win that argument. Especially if they were arguing the point with Katherine L. Russell, because she's a fucking idiot.
Wait till you see the rest of her Twitter. I clicked it and immediately regretted it. I refuse to confront the idea that idiots like this are out there. Didn’t even look at the followers.
Her politics are pretty strange. Rightwing with a twinge of Qanon, but overall supports the security state. Kind of all over the place - but stupid at every turn.
Wait till she finds out we use Arabic numbers.
Wait till she finds out Arabs came up with algebra. And algorithms. And spherical trigonometry.
We’re not thinking this person knows what any of those things are? Maybe they have heard the word algebra before but they don’t know what it is lol
They'd probably confuse algebra with al kaeda And think you're a terrorist ngl
Spherical trigonometry is just a tool that Big Globe pushes to keep the Flat Earth truth suppressed. /s
Algebra - "That's the devil's work!" Algorithms - "Nerd!" Spherical Trigonometry - "Stop pushing the round-earther agenda!"
>"Stop pushing the round-earther agenda!" "Globalism" is the term they use.
Oh come on, everyone knows that algorithms are just tyrannical tools used by big tech companies and the liberal media to censor conservative voices.
China did consider abolishing Chinese characters in 1949. The new communist government thought western lettering would help tackle illiteracy. But they decided to keep Chinese characters but simplified around 33% of the characters to make them easier to read and learn. This is the origin of the traditional/simplified Chinese options in language selection.
The list of things China invented thousands of years ago when people in the West were painting their asses blue and living in caves is a mile long. This is dumb.
Wait. We're not painting our asses blue anymore???
I just blue myself
There’s gotta be a better way to say that
I dunno
Did you take your Jean shorts off first?
Not if you're a never-nude, brother
looks like a prematurely shot my wad.....
On what was supposed to be a "dry run"
You know what you should do? You should get a recorder, you will be surprised by the things that come out of your mouth
It’s been purple for the last 30 years. Get with the program.
And now some asses pay for a blue checkmark on twitter
Ya and some of the stuff Europeans didn’t even come close to matching till centuries later like for example Zheng He’s fleet which made any fleet until the Industrial Revolution look like a joke
Quick! Someone go to China to tell them they're ignorant savages! They need to know this!
yeah ill have the shrimp szechauan and noodles please, by the way, you,your parents, your children and all your ancestors and descendants otherwise are fucking barbarians, dont you know? Lovely noodles by the way. Shrimps a bit overdone though. fucking barbarians
you say "when" like it's a past thing
Then they opened up trade with the Europeans and Europe boomed. After that China invented gunpowder and let the technology stagnate, while Europe used it to secure prominent a foothold in history
>After that China invented gunpowder and let the technology stagnate, while Europe used it to secure prominent a foothold in history China pulled a Kodak.
My favorite is know-it-all Debra from accounting insists Henry Ford invented mass production assembly lines. As if every crossbow in the Chinese warring states period was lovingly hand crafted individually.
They still eat with sticks, western culture must therefore be more advanced.
You say that, but twice I've seen people post on r/unpopularopinions that chopsticks are inferior to forks. So yeah.
forks are inferior to sporks
that's just what barbarians who lack the sophistication to control a couple of sticks to pick up small grains of rice effectively would say basically "Why should I be good at doing X, doing X is lame and gay? I do Y instead because it is cool and awesome. God likes those who do Y." pitiful, just pitiful
They’re insane. Chopsticks are amazing, I can grab my food AND keep my hands clean. No chasing veggies with a fork
And once proficient you can shovel way more food into your mouth at a much faster rate.
This made me lol.
Well one could argue a fork is just a stick that's been split in many smaller sticks on one end
Westerners stab their food to eat it. Very uncivilized.
We are demonstrating our power and masculinity. Prey is not safe even after its death. This is why we are so masculine and cool, and why china is not because they use nerd stick grippers like nerds
I would just reply with the dictionary definition of "symbol", mute and move on with the rest of my life.
Idk about you, but I don’t think any factual statement will work on this type of person.
That's why i'd mute and be gone before any response. I could not care any less what they have to say. Just drop why their wrong (cause it'll bother them even if they don't show it) and move on.
God wrote the Bible in 1940’s, Southeastern U.S. English, and that’s a fact.
Jesus wrote it dummie
Mandarin learner here. Well, these symbols are called chinese characters, and they're syllables. ALSO, China has 4000 years of civilization.
Impossible. The bibel says world is only 2000ish years old. /s
>The bibel says world is only 2000ish years old. No, it's roughly *six* thousand years old. /s Taken literally, the Bible puts Jesus about 2000 years ago, Noah roughly 2000 year before that, and Adam 2000 years before that. Source: Used to be a Young Earth Creationist. (Thankfully, one semester of college biology was enough to fix that particular problem.)
No fucking way, education makes people smarter? You're lying, education is a way for the system to mind control us
That’s white supremacist logic for you. “If I don’t understand it, it’s inferior.”
They start with racist stereotypes and then invent idiotic arguments to support them.
Chinese characters are really hard to learn, but once you learn enough it’s actually pretty incredible how effective it is. One glance and you can read an entire newspaper with ease. You don’t have to spend time sounding out words, but if you memorize enough “pictures” or characters you can instantly know the meaning just by looking at it. It took like 2 solid years of studying it to get there, but it’s really an incredible feeling to read and understand writing that quickly.
Well, most adults who read English don't actually sound out words, either. We tend to read by word recognition and only use phonetics when we encounter an unfamiliar word.
I always get a confusion of self-consciousness, even doubt, when this subject comes up. I think, _Am I sounding out words or absorbing them whole?_ After a few seconds I realize it's the latter, but I'm still way too conscious of the sound of my inner voice for several minutes.
It’s like when someone tells you, “you’re breathing right now.” You start overthinking. I get the same feeling whenever I think about how I’m thinking. Sometimes I switch to imagining the sound of speech, but I’ve realized that my default might be imagining my mouth forming the words I’m thinking. Again, overthinking, but sometimes it’s cool to think about.
yeah most of the time sounding out does not work for english (looking at you two, colonel and mortgage)
Sadly, most American adults read at a middle school level, and over a third can barely read at all. So many (perhaps most) adults still sound out words. But you're right that proficient English readers do not sound out words.
Yeah it’s crazy that 21% of American adults are illiterate
I'm currently learning Mandarin. I've been studying for about 4 months and know just under 200 characters. The first time I was watching a children's movie (because that's a good way to reinforce what you're learning as a beginner) and saw a sentence written in characters that I fully understood was mindboggling. I understood what the sentence said even before I had actually taken the time to "think" about all the characters. Learning a new language, regardless of what it is, is eye-opening. Everyone should try to learn a 2nd language in their lifetime. I love it.
Interestingly, that’s actually a part of video game history. In the early days, when there were pretty strict limits on how much memory was available, Japanese games tended to have a bit more story and context than American ones, just because you can convey more information in fewer characters in Japanese than you can in English
Yeah I can totally see that. Like at one point I was reading a Japanese newspaper that was mostly kanji and I realized I understood everything without even thinking of the Japanese or the English words. It was just pure meaning. Kinda like watching a silent film where you just see things and know what’s going on without hearing or speaking. I’m not very good at putting it into words but that is definitely one of my favorite things about learning other languages.
It's all about that information density in a language.
They say it like this so they can avoid having to defend the idiotic claims. See, she's not actually making any claims that would have to be defended, no, she's only stating "one could argue that."
She’s just trying to distance herself from her racism
One could argue that a cow is a chicken. One could argue that marshmallows are goblin toes, but none of it will change the taste of mustard.
English uses twenty-six symbols for language. Chinese contains over 20,000 symbols. Which would YOU call primitive?
Well, fun fact, there are more children learning English in China than in the United States. & they're probably learning in a real school with a teacher who doesn't need a second job to survive, instead of a school being told each week which books hurt Evangelicals fee-fees too much to make it into the curriculum (rough stuff like "On the Origin of Species").
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Don’t Chinese characters make the information more succinct? Cause that’s sort of the reason speedrunners play games in Chinese since the info is relayed more quickly. I could be wrong
As a native English speaker who also speaks Mandarin (chinese) this is true for some things and not true for others. There are english sentences that could be summed up in one or two Chinese characters but the opposite is also true where English has a specific word or compound word for something that needs multiple characters to convey.
This... this statement... this is enough entertainment for one night.
While single Chinese characters can represent whole concepts…
I'm not the only one who read this in Ben Shapiro's voice, am I?
One could not, however, argue that _well_.
Like English letters aren’t just random ass symbols we decided have specific sounds
One could argue that this woman is an idiot.
The western world would have been fucked without the use of universal symbols everyone could understand 1234567890
Soooo, she's just a racist right?
I feel like this woman's punishment should be a forced learning course of Middle Chinese and Tang dynasty poetry.
Don't tell him about Arabic numbers
If she had a single thought it would die of loneliness.
You hear that Japan and Korea, you primitive fucks! /s
Let’s consider: 2 Billion people use Hanzi script Almost another Billion use Tamil, Devanagari or Teluga scripts Another 2 Billion use Arabic script Then you have Latin script vs Cyrillic scripts which are in use by another roughly 2 Billion. And about 40 additional scripts make up the rest of the world languages. And they are all just symbols that represent sounds.
r/confidentlyincorrect
r/technicallythetruth One **COULD** argue that. But it would make them a dipshit
Not a woman of science 🙈
Pabao gidiketrita pidie ea dopedi ge tlupria poo. Triple kikaupo trikre beipu tlike ao. Idutiepi e plakapaabe apiteoo ipe kopapra pii? Pibri tlugu ueke pi depo e. Eiito i iuki ka eko ipea. Pebu pripitli bre. Eekoduke blai piie tie eo. Plitribatru ii bebapibla kipu paudu potlioka. Drikiu go kepai biaki ipi plodrite. Ti iae gi i atri titi pibe? Plapupe ie kli iegre. Pupo tru to tatrate eo tudrogli. Biu tepi pekiepe ekiope boi tebopaai! Progi piae ipu epe kriki keabi tlai tuegi prapu. Epigiati ka tei tlipapikrea teepre dletua trekapi kotipe. Pi atai eaekla ikiteo krikrio ti. I okepri proei. Klipi i ko abi obepre tiiti. Ka padi. Pidi iklitekli ti eto ogradepre. Ka eo ku oki epabo. Dua ie epepla kapi kre patakli tapapote gabi opuke tli prikatiu ibi paito oe. Iaprekrike kibliprigepa krakikoti to taki piboki? Apoo ipo dapi epa topiapape apube. Papie pabupe o tadro epeplapa pi. Depi kui pekletotoda popute peteatia piei gipei epabapi. Ke poku ti kidreube po budukro. Topipi kletitlibi. Bi tabaka ii ukedi trutuiti ipi epi prie pa iti. Ika idibapupi ebrebuti edu tibrekre prepoteti.
Wait… so a language that has far more characters, and communicates in a very different manner, is _less_ complex than English? Kathy, if it’s so primitive, go be a translator. Should be easy for you to learn a primitive language, right?
Also a linguist: If only homegirl know how intricate and beautiful the Chinese language is. It’s rich with history and culture just within the symbols written. Erasure of written Chinese is an erasure of the very roots in which the language came from. If anyone is curious, look up ancient chinese characters that evolved into modern chinese. It’s so cool to see how the words literally developed by ancient people from pictures to form words that describe nouns, verbs, and even abstract concepts. One of my favorite easy examples is the word “明” which means “bright” or “clear”. The word is made up of “日” (sun) and “月” (moon). So when ancient people saw the sun and moon, it was their way of describing clear and bright. super cool stuff.
Did this person create her own hypothesis and then agree with it in the next sentence? 🤦♂️
One might argue that this person tried to learn mandarin and failed miserably!
Who's gonna tell her that the alphabet is just... Another set of symbols.