Re:Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
by adrianratnapala on Saturday June 18, 2016 @03:17PM
(#11930140)
"Assuming you already know them" is a big deal. Chinese people who went to school do mostly know them. And some other people know about corner cases.
Re:Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
by thaumasiotes on Saturday June 18, 2016 @03:39PM
(#11930254)
Yes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is.
But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text.
The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.
My point was not to claim that they're all unique, simply that they are all learnable.
Re:Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
by thaumasiotes on Saturday June 18, 2016 @02:51PM
(#11930031)
They're not all learnable. The common character 赢 is infamous -- among Chinese in China -- for being difficult to remember. And there are much worse ones.
What do you mean by "learnable"?
Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize.
They are easier to read, assuming you already know them, because they encode significantly more information than a phonetically-based script does. That's a fairly straightforward example of more work up front allowing less work later, much as encoding wikipedia into a decompressor allows the compressed version of wikipedia to be very small.