News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Chinese character system is a brake on development by TazeTSchnitzel on Friday January 22, 2016 @05:09AM (#10951854)
If you're going to spoit nonsense about how writing systems hold people back, you might as well attack Japanese, since its use of the same characters is much more complicated. Chinese is pretty simple: one character, one syllable, one pronunciation. Japanese kanji? One character, many pronunciations, context-sensitive.
Re:The Chinese character system is a brake on development by Grue3 on Friday January 22, 2016 @08:17AM (#10952487)
At least Japanese has a phonetic syllabary to supplement the kanji. If Chinese had adopted Bopomofo [1] it would've solved a lot of problems (and no, pinyin is not a substitute since it sticks out like a sore thumb in writing).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

Re:The Chinese character system is a brake on development by mystikal on Friday January 22, 2016 @05:28AM (#10951924)
Some Chinese characters are pronounced differently depending on the surrounding characters. Example: sometimes in Mandarin a 4th-tone character is changed to 2nd-tone because saying two 4's in a row is hard.
Re:The Chinese character system is a brake on development by TazeTSchnitzel on Friday January 22, 2016 @06:02AM (#10952032)
Mandarin does do that, but it's not quite the same thing.
Re:The Chinese character system is a brake on development by yen223 on Friday January 22, 2016 @06:24AM (#10952109)
Lots of Mandarin words have multiple context-sensitive pronunciations too.

And yeah, all the problems with Mandarin are very much present in Japanese as well.