cr88192 wrote:
> spoken Chinese, well, this is a little harder than Japanese (major
> problems: tones, large levels of variation, and very ambiguous word
> semantics).
AFAIK, there was recently some investigation about tonal languages and
Europeans, and the result was that about 30% of Europeans have a hard time
to grasp that. The other 70% are fine with tones.
And for the "large levels of variations": Apart from Cantonese, most
Chinese
dialects are not more different than German dialects. South Chinese
typically omits the difference between sh and s (pronouncing everything as
s), similar to north Germans which often use s for sh, and southwest
German, where sh often replaces s. People find ways to disambiguate words,
even though. E.g. 10 is "****", and 4 is "se", which both sound the same in
southern Chinese. Solution: 10 is "yise", "one-ten", constructed like 20
and above.
I haven't found the ambiguous word semantics much of a problem; this is
more
in classical written Chinese as in actual spoken Chinese.
> as for writing, note that even for the Chinese culture's very high
> emphasis on education, illiteracy is still a major problem in that
country
> (in the US, it is assumed that almost everyone can read, and there, it
is
> not too far from the reverse).
Illiteracy is mostly a problem of the generations that didn't go to
school.
Nowadays, the remaining problem is that some people can't afford sending
their children to school.
> English is difficult to pronounce, and our spelling rules and grammar
> arguably suck hard, but at least the alphabet is easy...
With the spelling rules, however, it's not as easy as it could be ;-).
> technically, afaik, English is one of the hardest languages to learn (in
> general), but the Chinese writing system is the hardest writing system
to
> learn...
Indeed.
> take note of Vietnam, which dropped the Chinese writing system in favor
of
> the Latin alphabet (nevermind the bizarre accents...).
Remember that the Chinese writing system prior to 1919 was ancient
Chinese,
not spoken Chinese, it would be somehow like writing Latin in England for
Vietnam (as opposed e.g. to writing Latin in Italy for China). People
started writing actually spoken Chinese after the last Emperor resigned,
and Vietnam decided to break with written Chinese even before that (syntax
and vocabulary of Vietnamese differs significantly from Chinese; though
there are quite a number of Chinese words and idioms in that language).
The "bizarre accents" are a result of the tonality of this language (6
tones); once you managed tonal languages, they make sense.
> in this respect at least they are probably a little better off than
their
> Chinese friends...
>
> however, China has another big problem (limiting full-on applicability
of
> the latin writing system, aka, pinyin), which is that it has too many
> "dialects", which would in effect make a phonetically-based writing
system
> almost useless (pretty much everyone would have to learn a common spoken
> language, for example, Mandarin, before a phonetic system would be all
> that terribly useful).
In effect, every computer user has to learn Mandarin, because the way you
write Chinese on a computer is by pinyin plus menu selection (for
disambiguation). Fortunately, it's fairly easy to learn that for the
population, because it's on TV. And as I said, most dialects are not so
different from Mandarin. Cantonese is the major exception; I'd say
Cantonese is a different language, not a dialect. It even uses quite a
number of different (composed) words and also sometimes the syntax is
different.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
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