Some Oxford-educated English man claims in his blog that China should use an alphabetical writing system, and China’s failing to do so in history partly resulted in the high level of illiteracy. He goes like this：
[China failed to invent stuff] Like an alphabet. Really, how hard is that? The Koreans managed to transform their character-based system into a very serviceable syllabic alphabet nearly 600 years ago. Amongst the reasons why China still hasn’t achieved a high level of literacy….
It is not the first time westerners point a finger at Chinese culture and claiming it backward, outdated or lacking creativity. Well, China has to ‘disappoint’ them for yet another time, because China will never use an alphabetical writing system. Koreans designed their square-shaped writing system, Vietnamese reverted from Chinese characters to French alphabets after being colonized and Japanese are using half-Chinese and half-syllables. But these examples do not mean that China, the inventor of its unique writing system, will follow suit just because an Oxford man can’t learn it.
The reason is very simple: Chinese writing system is part of Chinese culture, and it has been a very stable and mature writing system over the past 2,000 years. Its earliest appearances date back to 1,000 B.C. A remarkable treasure of cultural heritage has been preserved by this consistent writing system, and this is part of the reason that Chinese conquered the barbaric conquerors from the North. To claim that China should discard its unique writing system is tantamount to a cultural genocide, something western colonists excelled at. Just look at the whole American continent!
The writing system of Chinese, in all its uniqueness, perpetuated and preserved our culture. It is China itself in one sense.
The value of Chinese writing system aside, I am going to explain in simple words why Chinese are actually easier to learn than English and other major European languages:
- Chinese grammar is an ideational grammar. It is very straightforward with an intense focus on ideas rather than grammatical forms which are commonplace in European languages. Translated literally, Chinese goes like this: I EAT-le THREE APPLE. No conjugation and no plural form. To express a past tense just add the universal “le” at the end of the verb. The plural form of APPLES is semantically redundant because the word THREE said it all. The economy of grammatical forms and the focus on ideas make Chinese simple to learn yet powerfully expressive, a hallmark best exemplified by Chinese poems.
- Chinese uses symbols very efficiently, and knowing about 3,000 Chinese characters is more than enough to read extensively in modern China. Ideas rarely exhaust the combination of a few thousand everyday Chinese characters, and a learned person in China is not judged by how many characters he knows. To read extensively in English, one would learn about 20,000 words to say the least. A simple example is suffice to show the difference : In English you say January, February, March etc, but in Chinese you simply say Month 1, Month 2 … I have been learning English for over ten years and I still come across new words more often than not. While Americans have to take the GRE test to enter graduate schools, Chinese students are poring over English glossaries in order to pass the qualifying English test for a master’s program in Chinese Literature. What an irony.
- Contrary to the widespread superstition that Chinese characters are difficult to write, writing a Chinese character is not difficult at all. Even a Gecko caveman can do it. Sounds too good to be true? Just install Microsoft Pinyin on your computer, change into Chinese language input method, and type “woaizhongwen” without the quotation marks. Do you see it? You have just written 我爱中文 which means I love Chinese language. Admittedly, it takes some training to write Chinese characters by hand, but it is not difficult for Chinese kids at all. It is in their blood, remember? Besides, fewer and fewer Chinese write by hand today because typing characters into a computer screen is so easy and fast.
Ignorance of a foreign culture is always pardonable, but passing judgment about a country’s writing system with quarter-knowledge passes for stupidity.
Hi, Thinkweird,
I like a lot of your points here, but I wonder if your earlier claim to have got beyond being “fenqing” is completely true. In this post you still have a lot of those markers that make people uneasy – making extreme claims, introducing points that are not relevant to the original argument, stooping to personal abuse.
A few points to take note of:
1) The post of mine you start from was A JOKEY ONE, sending up the kind of remarks more extreme, unthinking Chinese blog-commenters make (and sending up the more extreme responses that foreign bloggers like me sometimes produce). Did you get that context?
2) Almost all of your subsequent points are about whether spoken Chinese is hard to learn, not about whether the writing system is hard to learn. Writing Chinese is becoming easier with modern technology (but that may further erode the basic ability to write it or read it), but it still requires an enormous input of time to learn even the basic minimum of 3,000 characters. The Roman alphabet (and Greek and Russian and Korean hangul, etc.) only require you to learn to recognise a few dozen forms – not thousands!
3) This –
“Chinese writing system is part of Chinese culture, and it has been a very stable and mature writing system over the past 2,000 years. Its earliest appearances date back to 1,000 B.C. A remarkable treasure of cultural heritage has been preserved by this consistent writing system, and this is part of the reason that Chinese conquered the barbaric conquerors from the North. To claim that China should discard its unique writing system is tantamount to a cultural genocide, something western colonists excelled at. Just look at the whole American continent!
The writing system of Chinese, in all its uniqueness, perpetuated and preserved our culture. It is China itself in one sense.”
is fenqing nonsense.
Be proud of your culture, by all means. But don’t be proud of the fact that it hasn’t changed for thousands of year – and especially not just because it hasn’t changed for thousands of years. A culture that doesn’t change has died.
I feel a lot of sentiment for the Chinese writing system. It is unique and strange and sometimes beautiful, and I admire a lot of the calligraphic styles.
But in raw, honest, practical terms – for a ruthless, modern society – is it practical? NO. My prediction: in a hundred years or so, the Chinese writing system will be dead. It’s not a question of when, but how. And I think that will be good for China, overall. And I really hope the writing system survives as an artform.
I am not ignorant. I don’t hate China. This is just a point of view you’re not familiar or comfortable with.
And I accept I may be wrong. It’s just an opinion, just a prediction.
It’s a starting point for discussion; not for abuse.
Hi froog,
1) I retract the words in my post that refer to you personally. They do sound a little extreme.
2) You are NOT clear about the difference between alphabets, words and Chinese characters. Yes, English alphabets are not many, but they combines into thousands of words, creating an overwhelming burden for the learners, even native speakers.
One the other hand, 3,000 individual Chinese words/characters (NOT alphabets), are enough to handle extensive reading materials. So the calculus here is:
3,000 Chinese words versus 20,000 English words for educated communications. Which one is easier?
Just don’t mix words with alphabets. Chinese doesn’t have alphabets. Chinese typically combines common individual words to convey new concepts, and no new words are created in this way. For example, if you know three Chinese words: Police, Woman, Man, you can easily express the concept by saying “womanpolice” and “manpolice”. English language usually has to form a new word from its alphabets for a new concept.
3) Please re-read that part of my post. I said ‘consistent’ not ‘unchanged’. The form of Chinese characters did evolve over a long period, but it remains consistent to the point that a high school student can read scripts written two thousand years ago without much difficulty. That’s what’s remarkable about Chinese writing system.
4) No, you will not see the demise of Chinese writing system in the next millennium. Chinese has become one of the most used languages on the Internet, and there is fast-growing number of Laowai learning both writing and speaking Chinese.
5) Learning a foreign language, no matter what it is, is always difficult. But learning a native language, no matter how daunting a task it appears to foreigners, is very easy for natives. This is how our mind works.
By the way, I keep forgetting how to write Chinese characters on paper. It is because I type Chinese mostly on a computer and I use English more often than I do with Chinese. But it doesn’t mean the ‘modernity’ will make Chinese a fossil language in a hundred years as you imagined.
Empty arguments will not come to any point. Learn some Chinese and you’ll know what I mean. It is really not that difficult as you assumed. I know too many Laowai who speak and write good Chinese.
Regarding point 2, I think you’re being a bit too simplistic here: Chinese is not a monosyllabic language, and so “words” do not equate to “characters,” as the majority of Chinese words are disyllabic or longer, and a knowledge of the constituent characters of a word doesn’t necessarily mean an understanding of the word itself.
As for point 3: I agree that the overall constancy of the Chinese writing system has allowed people access to the wealth of China’s literature across incredibly long spans of time, but: (a) if we’re talking about characters, then we’re talking about script, not language, and alphabetic scripts haven’t changed all that much over the past couple of millenia either, and (b) I would argue that Chinese people can, by and large, not read classical texts with full comprehension unless they’ve already been trained in Classical Chinese; the texts schoolchildren “understand” are almost invariably presented with a modern Chinese gloss to allow for comprehension, and so people tend to interpret the texts in terms of the gloss rather than in terms of the text itself. The sheer number of books with titles like 《老子究竟说什么》 and 《论语心得》 should be evidence enough of this.
5) I’ll have to go back and dig up the studies on this, but there are two points: firstly, it is generally not particularly easy for children to learn their native language, no matter what it might be — as shown by any number of studies on child language acquisition. Secondly, and more importantly, you’re conflating writing with language again: by the time Chinese children begin to learn how to write, they’re already perfectly proficient speakers of Chinese. And going from my own experience as a foreign learner of Chinese, it’s sometimes easier, or at least quicker, for foreign adult learners of Chinese to gain literacy than for Chinese primary school students, in part because of the differing ways in which characters are taught.
It is the worst tragedy when a culture does NOT have their own, unique, language system and has to barrow from others. Japan, Korea, and other countries without their own language system, my heart goes out to you guys.
Sorry, that should be “borrow.”
The government is even thinking about reverting back to traditional chinese; although I doubt that would happen.
Using traditional characters might be easier in this computer age. Since simplified Chinese has been widely accepted, it is a hard thing to do. The needs of other ethnic groups have to be considered too.
How do the needs of other ethnic groups come in to play? As far as I know there haven’t been any studies showing any significant difference in literacy rates between simplified and traditional character systems, once factors like economics and educational investment have been adjusted for.
Hi Thinkweird,
An alphabetic system makes it relatively easy to learn an almost unlimited number of new words. Many English speakers have a vocabulary of 100,000+ words, and do not find it at all difficult to learn more new ones. With a character-based system, each new word requires a major effort to memorise not just its meaning but its appearance. And, as you admit, it’s very easy to forget a character that you don’t use regularly. I seldom or never forget either the spelling or meaning of an English word, even if I haven’t used it for years. The huge advantages of an alphabetic system are witnessed by evolution, by the fact that almost every other language in the world developed one hundreds if not thousands of years ago.
Most of the Chinese students I have worked with at high school and university level complain that classical Chinese is extremely difficult for them to understand, and say they did not enjoy having to study the old literature. I agree it would be great if the “consistency” of your writing system made these old works more accessible to the modern generation, but from what I’ve heard, it isn’t true: classical Chinese uses too many characters that are uncommon or obsolete in modern Chinese, and many that have changed radically in their meaning. And it is possible – a little difficult, but not overwhelmingly so – for modern English speakers to read Shakespeare, Chaucer, Beowulf, etc.
I take issue with your comment that it is “natural” for Chinese to learn this writing system, or as you said in the original post “in their blood”. The fact that they are surrounded by this writing system in their cultural environment will make it easier for them to learn, but there is no genetic predisposition (many overseas Chinese I know, who’ve grown up with little or no Chinese in the home, complain about how hard they find it to learn Chinese when they begin study in their teens or twenties or later; in fact, I think they complain more than most other foreigners; I hope you’re not going to tell me they must have “mixed blood”). One of the arguments that has been made against the character system (by Chinese critics, not by me) is that it undermines the rest of the schooling system because of the disproportionate amount of the timetable it consumes. I have been told that Chinese takes up around 40% of the timetable, at least in junior and middle school – is that right?? In the UK, we probably only spend about 10% on English.
I was also objecting to the tone of the passage in the middle of your original post, with its angry defiance of foreign “criticism” and its accusation of “cultural genocide”. Making such extreme and inappropriate comparisons to attack your opponents – that’s classic fenqing hyperbole.
I think the rise of the ‘keyboard culture’ and the use of pinyin input systems is the death-knell of the Chinese writing system. (Most Chinese I know older than about 30 claim that they prefer alternate input systems based on categorizing characters by their radicals, stroke number, and so on – as in a Chinese dictionary, I guess. But younger people all seem to be using pinyin.) If people are “thinking” in pinyin all the time, and forgetting how to write the characters, there really won’t be any point in continuing to try to read them; people will just start reading pinyin too (or, hopefully, a more elaborate Roman alphabet system that allows more subtle and accurate representation of the pronunciation and tones). When this happens, the Chinese language will not only become easier for everyone to learn, but it will acquire much more freedom and flexibility, it will be able to grow and develop as a modern language much more quickly. I think that is an exciting and very positive prospect.
It is natural to feel sentimental about the past, about long-standing aspects of one’s culture; but one can’t cling on to the past forever. In a thousand years, quite possibly the Roman alphabet will have been replaced by some other writing system. I think it is absolutely certain that the Chinese character system will be replaced, and in much less than 1,00o years.
@froog,
Our debate is going nowhere because you don’t know Chinese, and you are pretending you know about it very well. If I pass for fenqing, then you are no less a fenwai.
I know many native English speakers who can speak Chinese fluently. Once you learn pinyin, you can easily ‘write’ Chinese on a computer within 5 minutes. How difficult is that?
If I were you living in a different country, I would definitely study its language — even it is Russian!
You know that the CCP, in developing pinyin, originally planned that it should replace the character-writing system? Of course, there’s never been any attempt to draw up a timetable for implementation, so that idea has been sidelined for 50 years; but I believe that it is still, in theory, an ‘official policy’ of the Chinese government.
That’s another reason why I believe the abandonment of the characters could happen quite soon. When the CCP says “Make it so”, it happens! Once the Party leadership is convinced of how sensible this move would be, it could be implemented very quickly; resistance to the idea from ordinary people won’t much matter. Not many other governments in the world have this capacity to institute sweeping changes – in disregard of any foreign or domestic criticism.
@froog
Your claim that the Chinese government wanted to change the character based system into a pinyin system is simply absurd. Just imagine how difficult it would be reading a all pinyin book, trying to guess the tones. Pinyin was developed to make learning Chinese easier, and it has done that.
Do you have any reference to back your claim or is it just hearsay?
John, I’d refer you to ‘Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems’ by John DeFrancis, as well as the works of Zhou Youguang, or for that matter the Wikipedia page on Hanyu Pinyin.
However, the replacement of Chinese characters by Hanyu Pinyin or any other system of romanization has not been official or unofficial government policy since at least the mid-50s — though legally Pinyin enjoys the same status as characters.
Anyone who knows a little pinyin would agree using pinyin as the writing system is totally unimaginable, because Chinese language has so many homophones.
The grand plan froog referred to did exist, but one has to put it in a historical context. That was the time when ‘they’ even planned to use Slavic alphabets for Chinese writing system, as suggested by the soviet cohort.
Things can be planned, but implementing them is a different story. froog, have you heard about China’s plan to surpass Britain and U.S. with 15 years?
froog, since you are in China, why not learn some Chinese first and then make your judgment? It is really not that difficult since a billion people have already done that.
I agree about the inadequacies of pinyin, and not only because it fails to address the tones. I think some earlier transliteration systems did rather better than this, but I’m no kind of expert about this and can’t remember the names of them. Perhaps Wikipedia would help. If you check my earlier comments, you’ll see I didn’t actually suggest that pinyin should replace the characters; I just predicted that something would (and I hoped it would be something better than pinyin).
I admit my communicative level in Chinese is very poor and I am a little bit embarrassed by that, but I do know quite a bit of the language passively (in being able to recognise it when I hear it or see it) and I do know quite a lot about it (through having lots of friends, both Chinese and foreign, who I love to discuss this with, and having been for many years interested in linguistics). And one doesn’t need any knowledge of Chinese to form a judgment on these issues: is the writing system impractical, are there arguments for change, what do you think is likely to happen in the next 50 or 100 years?
Yes, I’ve admitted that I play at being fenwai sometimes, but not in too extreme or provocative a way, I hope. I’m only out to have fun and generate an interesting discussion. Here I am quite earnest: I do respect the character system’s place in Chinese culture, and I hope it survives as a form of art – but as a way of writing the language it is very impractical, and I think it will – as a natural, inevitable process – die…. quite soon.
I think China’s already surpassed Britain’s economy. Or will this year! My understanding was that 2050 was the target for surpassing America, though that may have been moved forward because of current circumstances.
My point about the CCP’s (historic) commitment to replacing the character system was not really about pinyin but about the practicality and conceivability of such a big (and unpopular and difficult) change happening in China in a short space of time. If the CCP embraces such a policy, it can and will happen. And I think it will, perhaps within a few decades; certainly within a century or so.
Pinyin actually can replace characters given that the actual rules of the system (word boundaries, suffixation, etc) are adhered to — even without tone marks, if a few spelling changes are made to common monosyllabic function words. Whether or not it should is another story. You may also be thinking of Gwoyeu Romatzyh (Guoyu Luomazi or 国语罗马字), a truly Byzantine romanization system invented by the great linguist Y.R. Chao/Zhao Yuanren/赵元任 that attempted to incorporate “tonal spelling.” It never caught on, and probably with good reason.
I return and look at your last comment, TW, and see that you are being a bit fenqing again – which is to say, not participating in the debate, just resorting to personal attacks.
Do you accept there are certain impracticalities about the Chinese writing system?
Do yo accept that it is conceivable the Chinese government could change this very quickly if it chose to do so?
Do you accept that a lot of Chinese don’t share your view that Chinese is easy to learn, or that the Chinese classic literature is easy to read?
Do you accept that the ease of writing in pinyin on a keyboard is likely to undermine the the recognition and use of characters by young Chinese people over the next decade or so?
If not, why not? Do you have any arguments to make against any of these points that I raised?
The debate is “not going anywhere” not because I don’t know enough about Chinese, but because you appear to be incapable of replying to what I’ve said.
Q: Do you accept there are certain impracticalities about the Chinese writing system?
A: No. It is so practically used in China. What are the impracticalities you are referring to?
Q: Do yo accept that it is conceivable the Chinese government could change this very quickly if it chose to do so?
A: No. Not only this is a very hypothetical question in the sense that there is NO official indication that the current writing system is impractical, it is also extremely difficult to do. There is a limit to anything.
Q: Do you accept that a lot of Chinese don’t share your view that Chinese is easy to learn, or that the Chinese classic literature is easy to read?
A: A lot? How many? Did they also tell you that English or any foobar language is difficult to learn? Or they claim learning English is quiet easy. Any Chinese with a high school education can read the Four Classics of Chinese literature without much difficulty. Poems from Tang and Song Dynasties are taught to three-year old kids, and they recite very well. I am not saying ALL classics, but many classics are approachable by a vast majority of Chinese.
Q: Do you accept that the ease of writing in pinyin on a keyboard is likely to undermine the the recognition and use of characters by young Chinese people over the next decade or so?
A: No. All standard tests in China require examinees to write by hand. High school kids, if they want to enter college, must write on paper. I forgot to write many Chinese characters because I use English more than I do with Chinese. (Is it more grammatical to say “I use English more than Chinese”?)
Q: If not, why not? Do you have any arguments to make against any of these points that I raised?
A: You really need to learn some Chinese to debate on this topic. Have you read Ryan’s and John’s response to your earlier comments? They know some Chinese and they are more on my side.
“The debate is “not going anywhere” not because I don’t know enough about Chinese, but because you appear to be incapable of replying to what I’ve said.”
I just replied. Learning ANY foreign is difficult, and to be very efficient on one may take ten plus years. Chinese is so different from European languages, but that does not mean it is more difficult than them. Please talk to more Laowai who are learning Chinese and ask their opinion.
Did you also take notice of what I said earlier? Learn to write Chinese characters is NEVER a problem for school kids and college students. Their headache comes mainly from their English courses.
Hi ThinkWeird, only recently was turned on to your blog, and really enjoy it.
Great post, and as an armchair (swivel chair?) learner of Chinese, I agree with most of it. I also agree with froog that you did delve back into the fenqing role for a bit there (the fenqing post was actually the post that lead me to your site).
The part that always irritates me in any debate is when Chinese bring up anything, anything about the “barbarians” to the north. The Chinese were, numerous times, defeated by barbarians – Wei, Liao, Jin, Yuan and one of the longest “Chinese” dynasties, the Qing, had China ruled by “barbarians” for nearly 300 years. That the writing system survived is impressive, but played any part in conquering the barbarians that so often conquered China? I just don’t see it.
I don’t share foog’s prediction that characters will be done away with though – as I think the sheer number of homonyms would make written Chinese (literature, anything online, signage) without the visual differences from characters extremely difficult to understand.
froog, you mention that pīnyīn doesn’t do well to illustrate tones, but it surely does – at least as well as any of a number of languages do in illustrating phonetic accents. There are some exceptions (ie. 2 third tones makes first a second tone, etc.) that need to be remembered, but largely pīnyīn does a decent job of telling you how something should sound – provided, of course, you have some basic pīnyīn phonetic lessons.
The limit with pīnyīn is that there is a total lack of meaning attached to the words. It may be that chunks of meaning could be inferred if the majority of the passage is understood, but it is by no means easy – certainly not to a level where pīnyīn or anything like pīnyīn would replace hanzi.
Generally speaking languages aren’t “invented”, there is no eureka moment, no light bulb. They are evolutions. Natural linguistic selection at its finest. And so for a language to change so drastically in the next hundred years, we would surely be able to envision an alternative now. It may not pass and become common practice, but it should be visible, right?
So what could it be? What would allow an logogram-based language to morph into a phonographic language? Could Korea and Japan serve as examples? Or does the fact that they still use hanzi prove that it’s not possible? I don’t know enough about either language to say, but I am curious what you guys think.