Correct. Dictionary apps makes it easy to look up characters, however.
>* You may have to learn a different language. Written Chinese is written Standard (a.k.a. Mandarin) Chinese. If you happen to have grown up speaking Cantonese, you'll have to learn a related, but different language.
This is a regional/cultural thing and has nothing to do with the Chinese (Mandarin) language. French isn't a bad language because the Swiss also learn German.
>* Traditionally, the "proper" written language is classical, and by 'classical' I mean old. Imagine speaking modern French or Italian and writing in classical 1st century BC-1st century AD Latin.
What? Nonsensical and incorrect. Mandarin evolves like every other language in existence.
>* Many characters have a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. That might help, right? You could sort of sound things out. That is, if you were into historical phonology---like every other written language, the sound component as written was frozen when the character entered the language.
Again, what? 90% of Chinese characters are phonetic compounds where the component on the left modifies the sound of the main component.
In general, these types of ideas that the Chinese/Japanese/other non-alphabetic languages are inferior are strongly culturally biased (what exists in my own culture is correct, other cultures are wrong) and has hints of /r/iamverysmart (you actually have no idea what you're talking about).
>What? Nonsensical and incorrect. Mandarin evolves like every other language in existence.
The person you're responding to is contrasting Classical Chinese with Mandarin. Recall that it wasn't until the Republic of China that Classical Chinese was abandoned as the written standard and that it is quite a bit more divergent from Mandarin than Latin is from Italian. The spoken language changed plenty but any educated person could read pretty much the entirety of the Chinese canon because the only writing in the vernacular was what was perceived as popular dross for peasants and women. Much as almost all scholarship in Europe up to the 1700s was written in Latin, anything for an educated audience in China was written in Classicak Chinese.
Mandarin(普通话) is a lot more divergent from Classical Chinese than Cantonese is, not that any modern Sinitic language is particularly close.
Total agreement on the boring and stupid assumption of superiority of lots of writers from languages with alphabets. The massive and unnecessary complexity doesn't do any harm to anyone except foreigners trying to learn a language who can't speak it already. Removing it would be uprooting a people from it's culture, like Vietnamese.
IIRC, he reports several actual difficulties in learning to read and write:
* You have to learn many, many characters. And using a dictionary is non-trivial. (IIRC, the key is stroke order.)
* You may have to learn a different language. Written Chinese is written Standard (a.k.a. Mandarin) Chinese. If you happen to have grown up speaking Cantonese, you'll have to learn a related, but different language.
* Traditionally, the "proper" written language is classical, and by 'classical' I mean old. Imagine speaking modern French or Italian and writing in classical 1st century BC-1st century AD Latin.
* Many characters have a "sound" component and a "meaning" component. That might help, right? You could sort of sound things out. That is, if you were into historical phonology---like every other written language, the sound component as written was frozen when the character entered the language.