You see, in English there are a few words that sound the same but have multiple meanings, such as their, there, and they’re.. This can be confusing to a learner of English as a second (or 3rd, 4th) language. Now imagine AN ENTIRE FREAKING LANGUAGE MADE UP SOLELY OF WORDS LIKE THAT. Tada! Chinese. Chinese needs many different characters because THERE ARE ONLY 1600 or so “WORDS” IN CHINESE. 56 total sounds (21 initials and 35 finals – combine to make a total of 413 different “sounds”, plus 4 tones = just over 1600. Even if you know 3000 characters and can read a newspaper in China, it doesn’t change the fact that 50% of those words, no matter what the character is, are GOING TO SOUND THE SAME as another word. There are some words that even have 20+ meanings, all defined by the character. Chinese is difficult to learn because you need to hear the sound in context of other sounds to know what the hell it’s supposed to mean, and because Chinese has ZERO room for growth (ie, there won’t be “new” characters), any new word needs to be made of of existing characters and sounds.

So, Chinese characters will never go away because the language can’t be represented in pinyin accurately. It REQUIRES characters, otherwise its incomprehensible.

Don’t tell me the authors who probably never learned to speak/write Chinese fluently support with these nonsense.

DeFrancis, J. (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press.
Hannas, Wm. C. (1197) Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press.

It really is not useful to claim that because a foreigner does not have native speaker competence s/he is incapable of knowledge about the Chinese writing system or of commenting meaningfully on it.

The points which Froog and Brendan make are supported by some of the world’s leading experts on Chinese. By the way, much of the pioneering work on Chinese writing has been carried out by Westerners such as Karlgren and Wieger. Being a learner forces one to scrutinise the writing system in a way which native speakers do not need to do as they master the spoken language first and then, for the vast majority of characters, simply link already familiar phonetic elements to known words.

I suggest you read the above books and then get back.

English is obviously more ‘difficult’ and I am sure you can pick out many grammatical mistakes or misuse of words in the posts of this blog.

I still have headaches in grammar. I’d appreciate it if you could help identify a few for me.

Thank you for commenting and good luck with your efforts in learning Chinese.

I really don’t see any way an alphabet would work with Chinese aside from a supporting roll like Pinyin. The number of homophones would be huge trouble in a situation like that.

When I was a kid in school, Chinese was rarely an option for foreign language study, but things are really changing in that regard. Chinese, in its current, un-alphabetized form is gaining popularity. If there was ever a language for the future, Chinese has to be in the running for the title.

I can only partially agree with you: Russian is very diffult to learn due to its complicated conjugations. But it can be argued that Arabic and Chinese are difficult. An American who worked in foreign service told me learning Abrabic was a thousand times easier than Chinese.

I strongly disagree with your claim that English is a simple garbage language and not comparable with Chinese, which is the “prime language”. How did you come to that conclusion?

In fact, any language is difficult for non-native speakers. What I am trying to say in this post is: Chinese will never abandon its writing system and use an alphabetical system.

We can all write Chinese characters, and it is one thing we should be very proud of.

我们都能写中文，这是一件很值得骄傲的事。

非常感謝你。：-〉

Sorry but I have to tell you that your vision is so superficial and stupid, since there are two truths, the first is that Chinese, Russian and Arabic are the most difficult languages to learn that are admited by the Global, second truth is that there’s no any capacity for simple language, such as English, to compare with any prime language.

Thank you very much.

Writing Chinese used to be difficult, but now it has never been easier: anyone who knows pinyin can quickly type, rather than write, Chinese on a computer screen. I have personally taught Americans typing Chinese within five minutes.

The pinyin input programs can ease the burden of foreigner learners to memorize the individual strokes. All they need to learn in order to type is the shape of the characters.