Re:The Chinese Typewriter: A History
by realusername on Thursday August 09, 2018 @08:47AM
(#17723717)
> On the contrary, using Chinese characters makes the language more accessible to other Asian learners, due to many having some degree of formal study of the writing system
That's because you picked Japanese as an example. If I pick Vietnamese that's the opposite, the Chinese characters are hiding the similarities of both languages to a non-initiate Vietnamese speaker. Japanese is maybe the only language which benefits from the current writing.
And had Vietnamese used Chinese characters to this day, learning Chinese and vice versa would be easier for those with a full education.
Not using hanzi makes learning language at the elementary level much easier, and many countries dropped use of them to improve literacy rates during their process into developed countries. But once your country is developed and education is good, hanzi has the advantage in that its fairly uniform and lets readers quickly understand new words even in different language.
On the contrary, using Chinese characters makes the language more accessible to other Asian learners, due to many having some degree of formal study of the writing system. And in countries that don't use the latin alphabet, pinyin is no more useful than chinese characters--and if a person actually devotes time to studying, likely worse.
Having learned Japanese, after about a year of study, it's quite easy to guess the meaning of a word just by knowing the meaning of at least one character. As a native English speaker, there are still words that I encounter from time to time and I can't possibly guess what their meaning could be even with context.