Compared to German (which I know) / Japanese (which I've studied) / aforementioned exotic languages Chinese grammar is trivial.
There may be many inconsistencies (and difficulties when you encounter literary Chinese), but grammar rules are pretty basic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415
Suffice it to say that Chinese grammar is NOT "trivial" to anyone who digs into it deeply. No linguist would say so. Chinese grammar, being based in large part on word order and function words, rather than on inflection, is friendly to native speakers of English, and that is one of the reasons I preferred learning Chinese to learning Russian at university while I was taking courses in both. But there is plenty of grammar in Chinese, and plenty of misunderstanding of grammar among Chinese persons that impairs understanding among people who speak differing Sinitic languages.
English, due to its unique development history, has lost most of its inflectional forms, it used to be heavily inflected. So, in that sense its basic grammar is said to be simpler than, say, Ancient Greek or French.
Why not give an example of a grammar point that you think I am missing?
An example I often bring up to English speakers who are learning Chinese is that they have to learn that the Chinese verbal system is based on aspect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect
rather than on tense. Many native English speakers misspeak Chinese as a second language because they struggle to impose their sense of tense on a tenseless language, and meanwhile get Chinese aspect marking all wrong. That can lead to misunderstandings in either direction, as my extensive acquaintance with persons who speak both languages often shows.
Chinese grammar is trivial.
Likewise with grammar. I'd imagine many of the complexities related in said books are due to attempting to list distributed evolved usages rather than what legitimately constitutes formal grammar. But I'd also like to know if I'm wrong.
Kindly define that. As a student of linguistics, I observed some very broad approaches to researching formal grammars of natural languages. Grammar of natural human languages includes much more than just the features of word accidence you would learn about in a course in Latin or Greek.
I would have just downvoted for disagreement, but you wrote, "But I'd also like to know if I'm wrong," and I can only cheer that willingness to learn. Chinese grammar is expressed largely through different means (word order and function words) from those through which Indo-European grammar is expressed (inflection of word endings), but end result is still that the language has many fussy, arbitrary distinctions constrained by historical accident (or possibly by information theory) that allow for miscommunication among speakers of Chinese who are not all native speakers.
I'll have to think for awhile if I want to come up with a formal definition for formal grammar. If you still care, email me in a couple of days.
Although there are numerous Chinese languages, the characters are basically the same. Although there are many variants in text, the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.
In the past, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages. But, you know, they are from different language families.
I already mentioned above that I have seen counterexamples--written Chinese that was incomprehensible to many of the people who might reasonably be expected to read it--in several daily life situations in various parts of China.
Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages.
No, strictly speaking they were reading Chinese text in Chinese (possibly with mind's-ear pronunciation of the Chinese characters reflecting influence from their native languages), which they acquired as a second language while learning literacy. The full details to respond to the point of view you have put forth can be found in
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
(P.S. I can read some current Japanese too, and of course current Japanese writing shows plainly that Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, as you correctly note. I had occasion recently to read a brush painting of bamboo with some Chinese characters on it hanging in the office of a physician, who is a man of Korean-Japanese heritage. We could both sight-translate the Chinese characters into English. I didn't ask him on that occasion how he would pronounce them.)
If one is illiterate and cannot recognise any written word, it is nothing to do with writing system. It is about education.
The news article (xinhaunet) you given is about spoken languages, nothing do with written language.
Yes, they read characters in their native languages, not in any modern Chinese languages. Characters are just symbol with meaning. It pronunciation varies from language to language. It does not matter you say "一" in /jat1/, /yi1/, /qit/, /ichi/, /itsu/, /hitotsu/, /hitotbai/, /hajime/, or /il/ and it basically means one.
I think the parent was speaking historically about how Chinese characters were read (and written) by Koreans and Japanese before they were adapted for writing Korean and Japanese. In a sense you are both correct, since Japanese kanji have both a "Japanese" and "Chinese" reading, and I believe the same is (or was) true for Korean hanja. In both cases "literacy" was nearly synonymous with "literacy in Chinese" in Japan and Korea for quite a long time, during which those languages adopted thousands of Chinese words. (Part of the resistance against other writing systems, including simpler phonetic ones, in Japan and Korea came from the assumption that any serious person would aspire to Chinese literacy, and a simpler writing system that was not a door to Chinese would only be of use to "stupid people" and women -- people who did not aspire to full literacy.)
Even today the distinction between "Japanese" and "Chinese" readings is used when teaching Kanji, and Koreans are much more commonly aware of the distinction between words of Chinese and native Korean etymology than English speakers are aware, say, of the distinction between words of Romantic and Germanic origin.
Correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orthography_for_the_Korean_...
North Korea in particular has gone to great lengths to de-Sino (and de-foreign) their version of Korean. So much so that they've introduced many, often cumbersome description words to replace more elegant Chinese (Korean pronounced) or other loan words like 전자 계산기 (Mechanical Calculating Device) instead of 컴퓨터 (Computer).
Most south Koreans can likewise tell you immediately if a word is of Chinese origin (usually because they know the Hanja for it) vs. of purely Korean origin. Like 공룡 (Dinosaur) which is pronounced almost the same as 恐龍 vs. 피 (Blood) instead of 血.
Again, I invite you to look at
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
to see why that is not quite true. A newer book,
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...
is very good for explaining the neurological reasons why NO writing system could possibly operate that way.
To say that Chinese characters unify a nation of high illiteracy whose citizens in many cases cannot converse with one another in person or on the telephone
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
is much like saying that writing in Latin unifies the continent of Europe by providing a common means of communication among scholars from Basque Country to Finland. Each statement is about equally true, and each is about equally irrelevant to current language policy.
That's only partially correct though. Often as not, before Hangul was introduced in Korea, or Latin alphabets were modified for Vietnam, many people wrote their venacular using Chinese logograms, with the meaning known, but the word order and pronunciation adapted for their own language. Korean in particular has a whole class of special characters to capture the particulars of Korean grammar and language when written with Chinese characters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
Most Koreans will likewise pronounce Hanja using Korean words not Chinese ones. Like 'Dae' (대) for 大, 'In' (인) or 'Salam' (사람) for 人, 'Sal' (쌀) or 'Bap' (밥) for 稻.
You are right that, in the old days, because of the nature of the political ties betweem 韓國 and 中國, it was expected that formal government documents were written, read and pronounced in Chinese. But in general, most Koreans today do not know how to read Chinese out loud in a way that a Chinese speaker would understand. Most of the time Hanja is just used to clarify homophones from Koreanized loan words from Chinese.
I can confirm the truth of this example, which is one of the examples I had in mind in some of my earlier comments.
Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial
He didn't say that, because Chinese is chock-full of difficult grammar. Take a look at the page count (847 pages) of the book A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. His book is thorough, but by no means exhaustive. Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (713 pages) is familiar to many English-speaking students of Chinese. It too is far from exhaustive. Many of the mistakes made in speaking standard Chinese by second-language speakers that impair understanding are GRAMMAR mistakes, and that is true even of native speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") who don't know Modern Standard Chinese as a first language. And almost half the population of Chinese, according to a survey by the Chinese government, self-rates as unable to converse in Modern Standard Chinese.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
Moreover, despite what that article says, written Chinese characters are frequently a barrier to understanding among Chinese citizens from different regions too. There is first of all the problem of high rates of illiteracy in China, because of the old-fashioned writing system Moser mentions. Many literate Chinese persons tend to write in the regional vocabulary and grammar--there is that again--of their native Sinitic language when they write, and I have seen numerous occasions of Chinese people traveling out of region and not being able to read hand-written signs at markets or even printed official signs posted by the local government.