Another interesting aspect of traditional Chinese characters is that complex words are expressed by combining simpler symbols. For example, the Chinese word for computer is 電腦. The first character represents "electricity", and the second character represents "brain". Which is really what a computer is, an electric brain. Similarly, a computer programmer is 程序員, where the three symbols are "rule", "order", and "person" - one who orders rules.
An interesting consequence of this is that you only need to learn around 3000 symbols to read a Chinese newspaper, just like how you can ascertain the meaning of an unfamiliar English word by having knowledge of a small set of Latin/Greek roots.
This is not a good result. Learning 3000 characters could take years, and even then there would still be some you don't know. To read an English newspaper you only need to learn 26 symbols. Yes you need to learn the words, but you also have to do that for Chinese which is separate from learning the symbols for each word. It's a hugely inefficient way to write.
Furthermore, while combining smaller words to represent a more obscure word is an improvement over introducing a new character (and is a step towards an alphabet), the examples I've heard are very one way. You might look at 程序員 and think "one who orders rules" makes sense for "programmer." But that sequence of characters could just have easily meant any number of other things (lawyer, politician, etc).
Agreed. Remindeds me of an anecdote from David Moser:
"I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??"
Regarding the grandparent's point of joining characters, my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey.
> my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey.
Turkeys are not native to Asia so it had to be added late to the language, which is why it doesn't make much sense.
The problem with Chinese is that when you have a new thing like turkeys you have to either create a new character, which then people have to memorize forever, or you have to string together sort-of related ideas into a compound word that has only some tangential relation to its parts. When you have thousands of words that are only somewhat related to their parts, the parts lose their meaning and become not much more than a really large and complicated alphabet.
Chinese was over-engineered to work great for maybe a few thousand words, but the world keeps getting bigger and bigger and every new thing makes the Chinese language worse.
> To read an English newspaper you only need to learn 26 symbols.
Replace English with any other language using the latin alphabet and this doesn't hold up as there is no indication of meaning. For that matter, there's not a strong indication of pronunciation. I may know English and French but that doesn't help me understand Hungarian or Swedish.
I do not know Chinese but my understanding is those 3000 characters are not only glyphs, they are elements of meaning. Incidentally, that is the same order of magnitude of words one needs to know to read an English paper, with the difference that in English, there is a portion of the meaning that is encoded in grammar, ie. the relation & order of words. That a cognitive overhead we take for granted in our language system.
That's the point though. To learn Hungarian or Swedish, you'll have to learn the spoken language, and then reading and writing comes essentially for free.
In Chinese, you have to learn the spoken language, and then you have spend just as much time (if not more) to learn the written language.
Many Chinese characters do contain elements of meaning and elements of pronunciation, but that doesn't mean that you don't have to learn them.
"Dilapidated" contains elements of its meaning in the root lapis = stone, but you'd be hard pressed to deduce the meaning from it.
English has 52 characters including both cases. Moreover, the ways in which these are combined to form words are highly inconsistent and idiosyncratic.
Chinese characters are made by combining 214 radicals, and most of the characters are written by combining two of these. Most words are created by combining two such characters. It's not really that much more difficult than remembering how to spell an English word.
程序 means program. 程序员 builds on this, not the individual parts of the constituent words.
Chinese is actually a very logical language. The writing system is arguably more complicated than it needs to be (see Victor Mair and his quixotic crusade for romanization), but it conceals a language with very flexible morphemes and simple grammar. I recently had to translate 照顾着 and 被照顾着 for an app, and I had a hard time coming up with concise and decent translations that mirrored the simple relational antonymity of the Chinese.
Characters do give a lot of semantic information than an alphabet and it's definitely easier to learn new words through context if you can see the characters vs just hearing them.
Knowing Chinese characters is closer to knowing not only the alphabet but also understanding most basic English words plus Latin/Greek stems like auto (self), locus/loco (place), -ous (possessing or full of -), etc. From that base it's pretty quick to learn longer words and there are tons of clues to help you remember them.
I think "hugely inefficient" was meant not so much in terms of space requirement or number of strokes, but rather in terms of cognitive load and time required to master it.
While English might be among the worst alphabetic writing systems (compared to, say, Spanish, which has a wonderful correspondence between what is written and what is spoken), it is certainly a more efficient writing system than Chinese, in that fewer years of school have to be dedicated to just learning to read and write.
Furthermore, as highlighted by someone else, it is not uncommon for writers of Chinese to just completely forget how to write a word.
In English, you might misspell it, but it'll be rare that you can't render it at all.
What traditional character using place are you speaking of? In Taiwan, programmer is 程式設計師 and in Hong Kong, it's 程式設計員. I had thought 程序 was basically a mainland-only variant.
Also, FWIW, I couldn't read a paper at 3k characters. It's more like 4-5k if the goal is reading rather than slogging through with a dictionary.
Isn't that the same in most languages though? For instance in English "electronic mail" became "e-mail", which became "email". "Web log" became "weblog", which became "blog". "Cellular phone" became "cell phone".
And indeed in older books and articles it is not unusual to see people writing "electronic brain" to refer to a computer.
A lot of non-English words for computer terms in various languages are translations of outdated English terms for the same that stuck around after the English terms changed.
English tends to sneakily disguise its words with Latin or Greek. So you may not think about the literal meaning of a word like "predict", while in German "vorhersagen" (to say before) is the exact same thing, just more obvious.
> Another interesting aspect of traditional Chinese characters is that complex words are expressed by combining simpler symbols. For example, the Chinese word for computer is 電腦. The first character represents "electricity", and the second character represents "brain". Which is really what a computer is, an electric brain.
That's nice, but I think most languages do this. It's not particular to Chinese. The word "computer" comes from "com-" (with/together) and "putare" (to reckon). Or "composition"; to position together. "compile"; to pile together, etc.
Right, but when learning English as a second language, they don't teach you "com" and "putare", because the roots are too far away and too diverse (Latin, Germanic) whereas in Chinese, it's often immediately obvious. Well, more often than in other languages. Most of it is still random-looking.
Well, that's the cool thing about Chinese - it's the Latin/Greek of East Asia :) It's to Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese what Latin/Germanic are to English, so there are less indirections.
An interesting consequence of this is that you only need to learn around 3000 symbols to read a Chinese newspaper, just like how you can ascertain the meaning of an unfamiliar English word by having knowledge of a small set of Latin/Greek roots.