What is your opinion on Chinese characters?

[curupira]

What is your opinion on Chinese characters? To be truly fluent, one must be familiar with over a thousand characters. Besides they leave room to ambiguity.

Some can be really more difficult to write such as:

"flourish" (zheng):



"biang" (a kind of noodle):



"taito" ("the appearance of a dragon in flight"):



The number of characters is truly large...

Number of characters in Chinese dictionaries
YearName of dictionaryNumber of characters
100Shuowen Jiezi9,353
543?Yupian12,158
601Qieyun16,917
997Longkan Shoujian26,430
1011Guangyun26,194
1039Jiyun53,525
1615Zihui33,179
1675Zhengzitong33,440
1716Kangxi Zidian47,035
1916Zhonghua Da Zidian48,000
1989Hanyu Da Zidian54,678
1994Zhonghua Zihai85,568
2004Yitizi Zidian106,230[71]

Number of Chinese characters in non-Chinese dictionaries
YearCountry Name of dictionary Number of characters
2003JapanDai Kan-Wa jiten50,000+
2008South KoreaHan-Han Dae Sajeon53,667

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character

[Shkembe Chorba]

Found it very unpractical.

[curupira]

Leibniz take on Chinese characters:

The advantage of Chinese characters, of which Leibniz had learned in German libraries and through correspondence with Jesuit missionaries, over the Latin alphabet was its provision of “a system of signs that directly represent things (or, rather, ideas) and not words, in such a way that each nation could read them and translate them into its own language” (Couturat writing about Leibniz’s ideas in La Logique de Leibniz).

Leibniz later dropped the idea of using Chinese as the foundation for a universal language based on the reasoning that “their pictures […] are not reduced to a fixed alphabet… with the result that a tremendous strain on the memory is necessary, which is the contrary of what we propose”. (Leibniz, On the Art of Combination).

http://rescen.net/blog4/?p=231

[curupira]

Especially for the Chinese, who invented it and have used it for so long, it is so intertwined with their culture that I understand it being very hard to give it up, otherwise it would mean, to some extent, to give up a significant part of their heritage.

Still, at first glance, since I'm no expert, it does not look very practical. Just have a look at this chart of the 2,230 most common Kanji used in modern Japanese, organized by Halpern KLD index number (2,230 symbols to achieve some fluency!):



This is a Kanji with 29 strokes: 鬱!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_stroke_count

Kanji (漢字; Japanese pronunciation: [kandʑi] listen) are the adopted logographic Chinese characters (hanzi)[1] that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana (ひらがな, 平仮名), katakana (カタカナ, 片仮名), Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet. The Japanese term kanji (漢字) for the Chinese characters literally means "Han characters"[2] and is written using the same characters as the Chinese hanzi (simplified Chinese: 汉字; traditional Chinese: 漢字).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

[ABest]

I suspect that one of the reasons why East Asians score so high on IQ tests is the fact that they start learning such an intricate alphabet at a very young age!

Anyway, I find their alphabet amazing and I really want to learn Chinese or Japanese in the future!

[Comte Arnau]

Once you really know something about them, you can't but feel amazed. They are impressive, full of connotations, useful for intercomprehension between the different Chinese languages, and a work of art. It is what really makes their language special. If they ever left them for pinyin or Latin, they'd commit the most stupid action ever in their cultural history.

[Szechuanese]

Asians are very visual. Often times we (I'm Chinese) don't know how to say something but we can write it.
Visual persons tend to be good at math, but not so good at music etc.

[rashka]

I don't like them. I wonder how it got invented instead of one scratch per sound as in other languages.

[Geni]

I think the same

[Furnace]

Unnecessarily complicated, but very fascinating at the same time.