Why are there so many Chinese characters?
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- Опубліковано 29 кві 2024
- #chinesecharacters #chinese #uspresident
Why are there so many Chinese characters? How many characters do you need to learn?
And finally, what do they call American presidents in Chinese?
Special thanks to Yining Guo and Joel Laity!
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After many years of studying Chinese I came to realize it's really hard to describe the nature of Chinese characters in one word.If we consider Chinese characters "logosyllabic", which means each character doesn't only represent a syllable, but also has a meaning attached to it, there are some exceptions like 蝴蝶 which means "butterfly" but each of the characters 蝴 and 蝶 don't have any meanings when taken separately, but these kinds of characters still make a very small percentage out of the total numbers of Chinese characters, so you might think "logosyllabic" is the closest you can get.However, when we consider that Chinese characters are used across different languages in East Asia, things get more complicated.For example, in Japanese, many Chinese characters are used to represent words with more than one syllable, so it's not logosyllabic anymore, but the general relation between character and meaning is still there, so I would define Chinese characters as "logographic" instead of "logosyllabic".Anyway, the fact that Chinese characters are so flexible in their relation to their meanings and pronunciation makes them really hard to put them into a specific category.
Actually, you can say 蝶 by itself, like “蝶在丛中飞”. But 蝴 should always be said with 蝶
@@toitoi2019 Thanks for correction.Anyway, my point is that some Chinese characters don't have a meaning of their own so it's not accurate enough to put all of them in the logosyllabic category since logosyllabic characters have both a meaning and a syllable attached to them.
@@deacudaniel1635 as a Chinese speaker I still wonder about so many of the words describing things especially in nature, a lot of them just have the radical describing the idea and then random parts that I don’t understand
@@Alter-Ego545 你可以舉個例子嗎？漢字的結構大概都可以解釋得很合理。
@@user-kz8fr4du3g 但是是基於它們的本義,當下許多字的用法都和它的本義完全没關係了
I want to note that children in China do not start from pinyin. They start with the characters themselves, and know already hundreds of characters before starting pinyin.
In Taiwan, Zhu Yin Fu Hao (注音符號；a kind of pinyin system) is taught in the first grade in elementary school. As far as I know, the first ten weeks are spent on it. Then we learn words...
@@kong8631 Yeah, same in China pinyin is taught starting in elementary school, but there's already a lot of exposure to reading characters beforehand
I was not sure of my exposure to words or not before being a 7-years-old kid. At that time, most parents in Taiwan spent more time in making money, and didn't or couldn't teach their children. But I attended a kindergarten, so maybe I was taught some words during 5-7 years old.
This is not true, they teach pinyin to children in mainland china
i recently watched a video showing a children's Chinese textbook. They learn pinyin first! That really blows my mind.
Actually, the way that children in Hong Kong learn Cantonese is through directly following how teachers speak, instead of using pinying. It is because pinying in Cantonese is rare and not common. Plus Cantonese is a diglossia. The way we write and speak is totally different. Thoese reasons largely increase the learning threshold of Cantonese.
The standard of literacy is 1500 characters, and a well-educated native speaker can recognize 4000-4500. If not for interest or major in ancient Chinese, very few people know more than 5000 characters. 8000 is too much, 通用规范汉字表（General Standard Chinese Character List）only contains 8105, many of which are only used in names, places, or very specific fields.
其實一般母語使用者基本上都會認得7000個以上的字了，社會上常用也差不多7000。而高中學歷應該可以認得7000～10000個字區間了。
再來大學主修或有研究則可以接近13000個字了。
@@user-bk3ng8zv3h is it 7000 separate characters or 7000 characters and their combinations? (Are words that are made of 2+ characters in this 7000?)
@@alexalexeich7329 7000 separate characters
@@user-bk3ng8zv3h 😵
@@alexalexeich7329 其實並不算太多或太困難。反觀英語要記幾萬個單詞才行，更加的困難。
而中文的詞彙都是由這些字組合而成，所以當你已經會這些字時你學習詞語時會變得更加快速。
Very informative and lot of work & research went in this video. 👏 Awaiting next video
Sanjay
Love the simplified explanation! But for your next video , could you maybe add (and expound) that Chinese characters on their own can represent not only a syllable, but also an idea or object hence the sheer amount of characters created.
(you may take my words with a grain of salt as I do not speak a Chinese language and I got this information from wikipedia and omniglot along with beforehand knowledge, I simply take orthography as a hobby)
There will be more videos about the Chinese characters. The next one will explain how the characters were chosen and how new ones are created. Indeed, many characters in the Old Chinese were merely schematic pictures of real objects. But this system is terrible to scale for a human language, so the Chinese language had to come up with some tricks that I am going to cover in the next video.
Thanks for the comment - and see you next time!
I love your videos, keep making them ❤
Thank you! Will do!
This question is basically equivalent to “why are there so many words in English”. Think about it.
So delightful video! And the comparison with English makes it really easy to perceive information
Дякую! Наступного разу поговоримо про фонетику :)
@@AuthLing чекатиму)
Comparing to English is not ideal, because English writing system is old and dumb. There are many languages without heteronymes and homophones.
@@Nhkg17I haven’t said it is ideal
As a native Chinese, I think Chinese is a language for native need to understand every character as an individual like different souls with different feelings and implications then learn how to put them into words naturally(daily life). But I don’t think you need to learn too much because we Chinese people mostly don’t know those because it’s useless but useful for authors write in traditional Chinese style
As an Indian who is learning Mandarin Chinese, I found this video really helpful in my Chinese learning
Thanks for watching! Greetings from Australia! I speak some Hindi, and what is your native language?
@@AuthLing My native language is Hindi
And That's great if you know some Hindi
@@atharv_bajpai21
印度豬
@@atharv_bajpai21 main hindī sikh raha hūn, lekin, main devanāgarī nahīn jānata
@@nathanannabell-hansen5627 That's great, more Power to you
As a Native Hindi Speaker, devnagri script is not that hard, you can easily find several UA-cam videos and you can easily learn Devnagri script in a few days.
All the Best 👍🏻👍🏻
Still looking forward to the second part! :-)
Concise explanation + complicated things made simple = the ease of perception, thumbs up, my friend!
Thanks, Fred! I've planned more videos about the Chinese characters and pronunciation, so stay tuned!
This could be one of the GREATEST language chanels, keep yourself working, I like watching these videos, greetings from Mexico :)
Thanks for your kind words! Spanish was the language that motivated me to study linguistics. Greetings from Australia!
How Chinese children learn characters is an interesting question, but I’m quite sure that not everyone learns pinyin or zhuyin (a more traditional type of pinyin) first. I myself was able to read characters before learning zhuyin, and I found it annoying reading textbooks in 1st grade, which are all written in zhuyin rather than characters.
However, zhuyin still plays a very important role in teaching. Many Chinese characters are so complicated that they have to be written in a certain stroke order. If a student tries to write a character before knowing its stoke order, it often turns out to be unreadable and slow. So many experienced elementary school teachers use zhuyin to “mask” those untaught characters.
One thing that is worth mentioning is that children in Hong Kong start learning the characters straight away without the aid of pinyin or any other types of phonetic system. Though people start encouraging the use of Jyutping (粵拼) in daily life use
I think hongkongers learn cantonese or more now kongese from our parents not pinyin and not sure what you meant jyutping.
@@Phebe920 Jyutping is a kind of Cantonese phonetic systems promoted in Hong Kong recently, though it’s not officially used by the government. There are channels using Jyutping more frequently e.g. ‘咩啊_Ofiicial’ for Canto contents, and some such as ‘道理書 dou6lei5syu1’ even state their name with Jyutping together
Cool channel bro keep it up
Thanks! Did you come here from my old channel (Antipodean Polyglot)?
@@AuthLing nope, just saw a random vid
In Taiwan you must know 4800 full form (standard) characters to be literate. You won't be able to read much knowing only 2500 characters.
Mainland China's character simplification not only made the character shape simpler, but also merged different characters into one, for example 裏，裡 and 里 are all written as 里 in simplified, 髮 and 發 are all simplified to 发 etc, thus decreasing the number of characters needed for basic literacy from 4800 to 2500-3500.
Those merged characters don’t make up thousands of them. Those merged characters are minority
@@deacudaniel1635 So now you can't really tell whether it's "inside" 裡 or "village" 里, "hair" 髮 or "beginning" 發 commies made already complex system even more chaotic and challenging to learn, and you don't even recognize "drying" 乾 from "fucking" 幹, because you change two words with different meanings and pronunciations (!) to a meaningless 干. Try to write and read in classical language using this kind of flawed script, and you'll find most of the texts simply illegible, and don't tell me people don't use classical language nowadays, because in Taiwan we still do in many situations, and it is part of every middle school curriculum.
No need know so much word for reading
@@quyenluong3705 Otherwise how do you explain there are far fewer characters required for basic literary in Mainland China than in Taiwan?
This video briefly brushes against topics that engage me more: how do they choose which characters to spell foreign names with? and what is inventing characters like?? I'm so used to Japanese which invented an auxillary alphabet to bypass both of these challenges... my jaw dropped when I saw Oganesson represented by a singular hanzi.
I like how you make a point of showing "English has this too". I'm a European and have an interest for Asian languages, and of course hear a lot of "it's so weird, I don't understand how anyone can understand this" comments from people around me. What they don't realize is that their own languages have plenty of similar things happening too. We just never notice when we've known the language since childhood, but in the end, every language is just a communal effort of humans to build a tool of sharing ideas and thoughts. No language would be intentionally "difficult". Once you switch the perspective and start seeing the ways how a language _helps_ the speakers, it all becomes much friendlier.
视频很好，讲的不错👍
3:06 well… same goes to cháng (long) and zhang
A in zhang suppose to have a v on top
U mean 长 in 长度 or 生长？haha for us chinese character users it was indeed a big problem when we were young and trying to memorize all these characters. And btw, if you are using a PC keyboard but don’t know how to type the tones (like ā á ǎ à) , one way we use is to add a number behind pin yin to indicate the tone. So you can say chang2 du4 to present 长度, and sheng1 zhang3 for 生长
@@Satyagraha_52 I’m on mobile
What a surprise to see a video about Chinese 👍👍👍
Ohhh now I want that follow-up video where you explain how Chinese characters are made! This is a really good video
Wow, I didn't know that they continue to create more and more characters.
Truly fascinating! I wonder since Chinese is a tonal language (or should I say Chinese languages are tonal, or Mandarin is a tonal language), does it affect estimating the number of syllables in use, or what counts as a homophone?
Thank you! There are about 1300 syllables when tone is included. There are 4 main tones plus the neutral (or fifth) one. There are 400 syllables when tone is ignored.
@@AuthLing Thanks!
Just saying, names like Washington would make more sense if pronounced using older pronunciations or other sinitic languages that do preserve those sounds. Modern Mandarin is a VERY young language and many words would sound quite different a century ago.
(Modern) Mandarin is NOT a young language. It dates back to at least Qing Dynasty. Many words would sound quite diferent not because it has been a century but the translators that day just didn't speak (mordern) Mandarin themselves.
@@HAITAIIO Qing dynasty is literally the last Chinese dynasty
It's nice when you give example words from English with the same linguistic phenomena so people can intuitively understand what exactly you mean
it interests me why some characters look different and have different meaning, for example 'kou+er' gives a hanzi meaning 'brother', and also there are 2 separate hanzi which are to be used together to form the word 'roach'
this question is same as "why are there so many english vocabulary?"
english is so difficult , the word "abroad" means foreign but “aboard” means take a the boat or plane!!!so difficult for me to remember ! just a letters change the location the meaning totally changed!!!! there so many word like this!!!!
@@sunflower553
很，恨，狠，痕，拫，佷，鞎
Hěn, hèn, hěn, hén, hén, hěn, hén
Very, hate, cruel, scar, turn fast, cruel, front carriage decoration
-_-
@@sunflower553 Yeah, you're right, English is full of them. They're called anagrams, and I didn't really consider how they might make the language harder to learn. A lot of English-speaking writers will actually use anagrams as a kind of game by hiding them in books. For example, if there are two characters who are really one character in disguise, it is a fun trick to make their names anagrams.
cant compair, the latin alphabet has 27 chars, the arabic has around 35. Everything else is a combination of these. Compairing it with asian languages which have thousand of characters to learn its bs.
@@cca9837 English has about 1 million words. Good luck learning that. You need to learn 8000 words for advanced conversation… same as Chinese.
Been speak Chinese my whole life but still quite stutter when it comes to writing, if you don't write regularly it's easy to forget how to write certain character.
The oxford English dictionary also has more than 200 000 words. It contains so many characters, because it's trying to be unabridged and list all words that have a character associated with them.
character and the word not the same
26 alphabet
1:52 ok it doesn't sound that similar because its probably from cantonese pronunciation "waa4 sing6 deon6" which sounds like wa-sing-ton
ROC children still use Zhuyin/Bopomofo/Mandarin phonetic symbols with Traditional characters
PRC children now use Pinyin with Simplified characters
American Chinese children used to learn Traditional Chinese characters and Classical Chinese, with regional pronunciation, in racially segregated schools because they weren't allowed in White schools. They were much better educated in traditional chinese culture than modern counterparts mainly because they stuck to themselves in their own ethnic enclaves, and they really had no choice because the greater society put so many restrictions on them. So, teaching them Chinese was a way for parents to send the kids back to the motherland and find opportunities there... or just a spouse.
The Chinese people don't start learning Chinese by using pinyin... We straight away start by recognizing the characters that are easy and widely used (such as 爸爸 father and 妈妈mother)
And then pinyin is introduced in primary school to help children learn the pronunciation of harder words
Jefferson: 杰佛逊？
汉字注重字义轻视发音，各地对同一个字词发音不同，字义大致相同。尤其是文言文，拥有统一书写模式，即使发音不一样。白话文改变模式由单字转换词组，使其简单组合适应更多词汇，更加简单表达更多意思。
中文了解部首与结构，能够大致了解发音与词意，除了专业主持人与AI没有口音，即使你带着很重口音对话，不是单个词组发音，大部分人能够听过大部分意思。
In mainland China, kids learn Pinyin first, so that mandarin can be taught. China is a large country with many dialect. The only way to teach mandarin at school is to setup a standard of pronunciation first.
汉字的本质是：词素（8成以上）+单词（1成多）！❗️👍😄
不同时期的比例不同罢了😂
The vast huge majority of characters in that dictionary are obsolete or unused, remaining mostly in historical or ancient texts
Very interesting...
@00:30 ???? One letter, one sound? Have you ever even SEEN English orthography? :)
Chinese has been developing for thousands years from Wenyanwen( a type of writing in ancient China) to modern Chinese(Mandarin) , so the meanings of a character may change or there may be new meanings in the character.
Generally, words in Wenyanwen combine 1 character, and 2 in mandarin.
For example, “country” is 国家 in mandarin and 国 in Wenyanwen。“although” is 即使/虽然 in mandarin and 虽 in Wenyanwen，“start” is 开始 in mandarin and 始 in Wenyanwen
Wenyanwen=literary Chinese
the 'nutaikou' hanzi also means 'first' as in Qin Shi Huangdi
文言文是中國古代書寫用的語文，白話文是ㄧ般說話用的語文。
Compared with the number of words in English, there are way fewer characters in Chinese. Average native speakers masters about 4000 characters, while you need to master about 20,000 words to reach the level of native English speakers. The memory burden of Chinese is way lower.
Your last point is wrong. Actually, no new Chinese characters have been created for a thousand year, except for a little new chemical elements found in the last century, which also happens in other languages including English.
If Pinyin is so simple, taught before characters and even used to type in phones, what keeps the characters alive apart from tradition?
Maybe it's the dialects, that people from Shanghai read the characters and pronounce them their own way?
The whole number of Hanzi (Chinese characters) is more than 100 thousands.
But for most Chinese people and Chinese learner, 3,500 common characters are enough to cover 99% situation.
Chinese since the 1960s actually learn their language using the Roman alphabet spelling
called "Pinyin" before starting to learn Chinese Characters.
ni hao "hello"
wo ai ni "I love you"
zai jian "goodbye"
All vowels are "short" sound vowels.
Me as a Hong Kong student, write that much Chinese characters is a piece of cake
More examples of Eng heteronyms: record, red, project
I wish these ‘linguists’ would use traditional Chinese aka the PROPER Chinese characters especially when lecturing us about the origins and history of the language.
Simplified chinese should only exist in note taking or maybe some in calligraphy (because some simplified characters do originate from 草書 or 行書, but their problem is highly unrecognisable to the general public, since almost each writer/calligrapher could and had different iteration of them)
Why doing things complicated while you already know you can do it simple?!
There are so many Chinese characters, but it's still better than so many vocabularies in English
As a chinese person sometimes i wonder about some chinese words, such as the word for cucumber, 黄瓜. 黄 means yellow, although cucumbers are not yellow.
Often a reason for words becoming silly with time is that the thing they describe used to be that way. Maybe cucumbers looked yellowish green in china long ago, and changed over time. Theory
coz cucumber is also called 青瓜 , also called 胡瓜 when first introduce to China from India, which is yellow in color.
wikipedia says
"黃瓜原產印度，西漢時期張騫出使西域時將其引入中原，稱為「胡瓜」。一說因隋煬帝忌諱胡人，將其改為「黃瓜」；另一說五胡十六國時後趙皇帝石勒忌諱胡字，漢臣襄國郡守樊坦將其改為黃瓜。"
(Cucumber is native to India. During the Western Han Dynasty, Zhang Qian introduced it to the Central Plains during his mission to the Western Regions and called it "cucumber". One theory is that Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty was taboo on Hu people, so he changed it to "cucumber"; the other is that during the Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms, Emperor Shi Le of the Later Zhao Dynasty tabooed the word "Hu", and Fan Tan, the governor of Xiangguo County of the Han Dynasty, changed it to "cucumber".)
AS A CHINESE, I DO NOT KNOW PINYIN
PINYIN MEANS CHINESE PHONICS. IT IS THE COPY OF THE WESTERN PHONICS WRITING IN THE 20 CENTURY
At its origin, each Chinese character is a word. Each character has its own meaning. Nowadays, things have change and mandarin has a lot of two syllable words. But that’s not always the case for other Chinese dialects.
You can compare each Chinese character to each English word. Learning Chinese character is like learning English vocabulary. What Chinese doesn’t require is learning an alphabet on top of learning the vocabulary. I think Chinese therefore should be easier.
Only if that's what one begins with. - Studying a language doesn't necessarily help one to understand, read, or speak it. What is needed is interaction with the language when spoken by native speakers that use proper diction, pronunciation, and enunciation. - There are also colloquial terms and phrases that aren't taught in formal education...
@@DanSchallerforPOTUS yea as long as one understand and be able to interact, then why is there even a discussion on alphabet being easier than not having an alphabet when in the end you need to learn each language’s specific vocabulary to interact anyway?
Well, it's actually difficult to remember how to write the words
@@StarryBlue782 you think english is easy to spell? If so, they don't need to teach kids how to spell cuz you can just know from knowing the alphabet.
One can guess the pronunciation of a word in English.
When calculating the number of possible syllables in Chinese, were the tones taken into account? A syllable with the same consonant/vowel combination can be pronounced using 4 different tones in Mandarin which effectively quadruples the syllable count.
There are about 1300 different syllables when tone is included and about 400 different syllables when tone is ignored.
The word "kit' has 3 letters, I can see and count that. But it has 3 sounds??? WTF!!! I hear only one sound!!!
二維的文字語言，遇到三維的語言文字。
Lol oganesson in Chinese - "ow!"
九and酒are homophones in Mandarin but not in some other dialects. Most importantly they were not homophonous when characters were coined. 九 ”nine” belongs to the velar series and began with a *k- in Old Chinese; 酒 ”wine” was either an affricate or a liquid depending on which authority you ask.
Other Chinese languages*
Do you understand the word homophonous?
WHY THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY ARE SO MANY ?
此木为柴山山出 因火成烟夕夕多 这个对联多少可以管窥中華文字之精妙。
Traditional Chinese has more words. Simplified Chinese has been cut down a lot.
AS A CHINESE, I JUST KNOW ABOUT 500 CHINESE CHARACTERS BUT THAT IS ENOUGH
can one navigate in china knowing only pinyin?
HELL NAWWWW
A total nightmare
From Bangladesh 🇧🇩
Welcome to my channel!
It is not at all helpful to relegate chinese characters to being just homophonic syllables. Instead the closest analogue to Chinese characters in English would be Latin roots. A character may appear in many words, and by doing so it colors the words all in roughly the same way. Thus "Telephone", "TV", "Film", and "Computer" all have the "electricity/lightning" character in them, as they're all historically "electric" things. Just as one or more Latin roots may appear in many English words, and color them as well.
Tells you about the Chinese! Sanskrit has alphabets which are phonetically pronounced and easy to write. No need to draw pictures and then figure out what the pictures mean! LOL!
Don't explain the large number of characters.
We Taiwanese use ㄅㄆㄇnot only PRC people use han words
I’ve spent about 100,000 hours studying English humor and Western culture, and about 100,000 hours studying Chinese culture. My native language is Chinese. I teach Chinese in humorous way and with cute pictures.
Hope my videos can reach those who want to learn Chinese. Sorry to take your space.
i am glad that i am using chinese words everyday XD ( I AM A HONGKONGESE )
THE CHINESE CHARACTERS ARE HARD TO LEARN ?
NO, I DON'T THINK SO
I have the Chinese KJV Bible app on my Samsung cellphone, yeah I don't know how many Chinese character it has but anyway it's the King James Bible in Chinese instead of English.
I think it was originally meant as a secret way of communicating between rulers and just later became what everyone was using.
It was originally used to communicate with spirits
it was originaly used to be written on bones
你的视频真的是太棒了！
谢谢！ 汉字很有意思，有不有？
@@AuthLing actually we use 是不是 or 有没有, but we never use 有不有😂
Most chinese characters are like $¥€¢£% they are symbol of meaning, and english depend a lot on such symbols
Homophones can have another meaning.
I didn’t know it was possible to create new characters
If you equate character with word or vocabulary, then the concept isn’t hard to understand. You see new words created in English, why not new characters/words in Chinese?
One thing wrong is that not only is each character a syllable, it is also a word. Chinese words are monosyllabic.
獨立語、曲折語、黏著語。
Chinese children don't learn with pinyin.
Mandarin Chadnese
f(nova）日々輝学園
Why are there so many words in English? It's the same thing. When you read an English word, you don't go letter-by-letter, you memorise the entire word instead. Thousands of them. Chinese characters are also composed from a small set of "atoms" (called radicals), I'm no expert but I think there are bout 50 of them. And you simply learn the characters just like you learn the English words.
not true, in latin, arabian, cyrilic alphabets where u have only a few chars in the alphabet u are able to reproduce the sound of every word, u knowing the meaning or not. This is impossible in these asian languages. Impossible, u either know the sound of every single one of the thousand characters or get rekt.
@@cca9837 I think you misread my post. My point was that when you read an English word, you don't read it letter by letter. Instead, your brain had memorised the word in its entirety when you were learning how to read for the first time. And I mention the Chinese radicals not because they can help in reading Chinese (they don't, obviously) but only to dispel the misconception that Chinese characters are completely hand-made one by one. They aren't. Bottom line is that both an English and Chinese reader has memorised thousands of "images" in order to read them at a comfortable speed.
@@cca9837 knowing 1 sound component is enough to know how to read 2 hundred of them. So basically, if you know 400 sounds, you can read 80,000 characters. And you WILL know the meaning, because there's only around 200 radicals or something, and they all tell you the meaning.
@@cca9837 knowing the sound doesn’t make you understand the meaning. It’s the meaning that help you communicate.
@@danielantony1882 Not sure what you mean by "sound component" but just knowing the sounds and the radicals won't tell you how to pronounce characters or know their definitions. It will only help in some cases.
The dialectics of the 17th century philosopher Sum Dum Fuk explains it well. It makes for interesting reading.
and the one of Shundou Fuxi from Fukeguo is auwl worth rea'ding.
Such a good explanation however English comes from ENGLAND not the USA. Wrong flag. Ping Ying is so un-phonetic ! For an English speaker trying to read it is so frustrating with letters not representing the basic phonetic sounds of the letters. English isn't much better with so many variations so I suppose it's almost as difficult for a Chinese person to learn English.
Pronouncing words written in pinyin is actually very straightforward - once you have learned the basics of Mandarin Chinese phonetics and its pronunciation rules. It's the same effort you have to make when learning any other language written in the Latin script, such as French, German, Polish, Vietnamese etc.
I've always wondered why Chinese speakers don't just switch to something much easier like the Latin alphabet since they have to study that also...!!!
Why don't just let people all over the world only speak English? Then nobody need to learn a foreign language
Because you really don’t need pinyin to learn Chinese. It was created to facilitate foreigners to learn Chinese.
Because pinyin doesn’t capture Chinese language and creates a lot of problems with homophones.
Because pinyin slows down reading speed.
Because pinyin loses the meaning of words which distorts abstract ideas.
Welcome to Japan😂
Pinyin is just a recent invention by the current Chinese govt. I wonder if it was invented for the sake of foreigners or the computer age. You used their newly created simplified characters which is not authentic Chinese, sadly to say. There are also dozens of dialects and Chinese people from different regions cannot understand each other ! 😂😂😂
80% of this video is misleading
yes, they no explain wy tere so many hanzi
I don't understand why China and Japan (and other countries) use nonsensical old writing systems that force people to learn unnecessary things and make their lives more complicated. This is partly true for English as well. In a proper system, a person only needs to know how to pronounce a word whose meaning they don't know to be able to write it, and vice versa.
Languages evolve, but writing systems have been in most languages with minimal changes for several centuries...
There is nothing nonsensical about chinese characters and your comment is extremely ignorant. Chinese characters have been a huge part of their lives for almost 4000 years and they perceive their writing system in a completely different way compared to us. Chinese characters are logical and beautiful, if you don’t realize that, then that means you know nothing about them and shouldn’t even be making any comments here.
@@user-kz8fr4du3gYes, and horses have been part of my ancestral culture for thousands of years too. Horses are beautiful and living animals. Does that mean I shouldn't use modern means of transportation and ride a horse?
This is because Chinese maintains a core idea that each character needs to have a nearly unique meaning and correspond to a single syllable, but Chinese only has 1300 syllables.
Therefore, Chinese has carried out a simple method: 80%~90% of the characters are composed of radicals (basic 200 characters) to indicate meaning + additional characters to indicate sound. For example: water_Bāo=(Means Bubble and pronounced Pào)
Therefore, trying to Latinize Chinese is actually to delete 80%~90% of the characters that represent their meaning. Changing the original water_Bāo to Bāo is just silly (although Simplified Chinese does have a slightly similar modification to speed up writing).
Chinese actually has a problem that many of these added prompt sounds gradually become inaccurate over time. Most people actually try to simplify Chinese characters and what they end up doing is not much different from English spelling reform.
@@Nhkg17 you can’t compare languages with horses. You can replace horses with modern transportation with little consequences. But if you replace writing systems, you have to reeducate all people in the country. also the current government documents, literature and historical writings in current language script would be incomprehensible in future generations. Otherwise you can also attempt to convert all documents to the new writing systems from books to billboard signs. But that would also be very costly.
This logic goes the same as convincing US citizens to adopt metric system instead of imperial system. It sounds ideal but really really hard to implement.
@@CHOCOLATIONZ Both Japan and China have a writing system that is considerably simpler and most of the population is familiar with this system. The problem, I think, is that it is based on the Latin alphabet and not the local script.
And the US switching to the metric system would be great. The US introduces a lot of nonsensical standards into the world that make life difficult even for people outside the US.
Why are there so many Chinese characters? Simply because they refuse to develop a decent real alphabet like other languages. They are too proud of their logographic writing system, so they are and will be stuck forever in the stage of ancient civilizations (think of Egyptian hieroglyphs). This applies to Japanese as well, and their problem is much worse.
no, japanese has hiragana and katakana, also why ommit korea?
@@equilibrum999 yes they have them but they use them in an extremely stupid way. They mix them in incoherent way with the chinese characters. But that's another topic.
Koreans used to be like this, but eventually they developed Hangul, which is an advanced and robust writing system. It showed that moving away from ancient relics is totally possible. Koreans and Veitnamese did this successfully.
According to your infographic the English language is.....American?
WTF? The United States of America make up just one of the countries with English speakers around the world. But it's origin is still England.
Chinese language should be deleted
Which one?
OK racist.
chinese is not a language... or you are referring to mandarin
@@user-vb3ur2ec9i yea, btw how old are you when you learn mandarin and construct a sentence