> Ask any Chinese person if they think English spelling is logical and they will say no.

I've seen people from all different countries complain about English spelling. But not China. No Chinese person has, in my experience, ever even considered the idea that there's anything to complain about. Rather, they rely on the spelling of English words as a crutch to get English speakers to understand them when their accent gets in the way, for example, by saying something like "Poss. <blank stare from the English speaker> Poss P-A-U-S-E Poss."

And to add to what everyone else is saying, here are some characters using the 丁 component, but not pronounced ding:

打 (da "generic verb", extremely common) 厅 (ting "hall", common) 宁 (ning, used in names, common) 灯 (deng "lamp", common)

Since you mention the /eɪ/ diphthong, in French it can be spelled é, ée, et, ed, er, ai, and many others. What is making the French spelling harder, I think, is that many letters are not pronounced, and some words have the same pronunciation with a different spelling (for example: cou - neck - and coup - hit). I can't think of anything in particular, but it all lies in the fact that many letters are not pronounced. I found this website - in French - where you can have fun testing your French spelling: http://timbresdelorthographe.com/

I could say that in Russian the sound [о] can be spelled ол as in солнце, but that would be bullshit. Russian is a largely phonetic language, it's just that consonant clusters get simplified in pronunciation.

Funny how half of your list are also French words

thought, though, through, tough, trough, plough, and, somewhat questionably, hiccough.

What are the others supposed to be?

I am well aware that Chinese radical phonetic components are not as powerful as a phonetic alphabet. I am impliying no such thing. There are however many characters which carry phonetic information, such as my apparently crude example above. I have found this to be very helpful in remembering pronunciations of characters, even if they are only approximations. HN is a tough crowd.

Further, your experiences with Chinese people are not necessarily the same as mine.

> I can usually guess the pronunciation of new characters. [...] These are all pronounced "ding" [...] because they all have that T-like phonetic component.

(emphasis mine)

This is, quite clearly, saying that you can get the pronunciation of an unfamiliar character from its written form. But you can't; that's incredibly dangerous and is nearly guaranteed to backfire within 2-3 guesses. You use the particular example of characters with the phonophore 丁 ding1. Okay. What's the most common character incorporating that component? It's 打, which you seem to have conveniently glossed over, and which, despite using 丁 as the phonophore, is pronounced da3. You also give 顶, which really is pronounced ding(3), but which is backwards like 切, making it fairly problematic to guess which component is hinting at the sound. (For a nice summary of that problem, 致 and 到 are both characters in the same style, with a sound hint and a meaning hint side by side. But for 致 zhi4, the phonophore is the 至 (also zhi4) on the left, and for 到 dao4 the phonophore is the 刀 dao1 (in a special form) on the right; the 至 component is telling you the meaning. It's much more common to have the phonophore on the right.)

I agree that the structure of the characters, such as it is, can be very helpful in remembering how to pronounce them. But that doesn't speak to reading unfamiliar characters in any way. Some components are quite prolific as phonophores: 交 jiao, 方 fang, and 青 qing come to mind. You're not advised to assume that a character incorporating them is pronounced jiao （校，效，咬）, fang (旁), or qing (精，猜 [cai1!]), though.

Sort of.

The characters you're describing are commonly known as radical-phonetic characters, where part of the character indicates the sound, and the other part implies the meaning or category. It is my understanding that Communist China's push towards character simplification has broken a great deal of phonetic relationships inherent in this class of characters, making the language much more difficult to learn than it used to be, even if it is marginally faster to write.

Additionally, there remain the 10% of characters which don't fit into this mold, a great many of which are very common.

Here is a specific example:

    Traditional Chinese

    車禍 [che1 huo4] (car accident)
    不過 [bu2 guo4] (however, but)

    Simplified Chinese

    车祸 (same meaning/pronunciation)
    不过 (same meaning/pronunciation)

In the Simplified, you lose that relation, because you have the 寸 and 呙 units, respectively.

The phonetic components of Chinese characters don't always give you an exact reading, but they can help you get a good idea of what a character should sound like. There are exceptions, of course.

I studied three and a half years of traditional characters, switched to simplified when I went to China, and then started studying Japanese, which uses a mix. I definitely am glad I studied traditional characters, but I feel at least for me, they are much much harder to learn, but that could be different for different people.

Out of curiosity, have you tried learning both simplified and traditional?

Spelling of French is based on the pronunciation of Old French (from ~900 years ago!) and sometimes mixed with spelling based on the original Latin word from which the modern French word derives (from ~2000 years ago).

AFAIK modern Greek orthography is not that bad, if you disregard the madness that polytonic script (which is solely based on how Greek was spoken/written in Antiquity) was used until the 80s.

Having phonetic components makes it easier (if you like cryptic crosswords), but not easy.

I don't speak a word and felt quite lost in Moscow (Even in Moscow! English doesn't help! It took me twenty minutes to get out of the subway station, I always ended up at some other subway line... after that experience I quickly learned what "entry" and "exit" look like).

But! Walking past a Lufthansa ad and just playfully trying to decipher the letters was fun!

So I pronounced it, letter after letter, all separate, since I still needed to think about every letter, having just learned the cyrillic alphabet days earlier.

Okay. But what could it mean? Let's pronounce it as a word.

"Stewardess". I kid you not. I could actually read quite a few things. "McDonalds", "Subway", "Hemingway Bar".

I felt like the king of the world. :-)

Pardon? Russian spelling isn't "truly phonetic". Why is the common -ого ending not spelled -ово? Why is the first в of здравствуйте not pronounced? Not to mention the phonological rules that must be memorised, like how the ending of words are always devoiced (giving us fun conflicting transliterations like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikhonov_regularization and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonoff%27s_theorem ).

To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness. I've found Hungarian spelling to be more regular, for example.

You can just as well pronounce those and it'll still be valid Russian. It's just that they are commonly omitted, but there's no rule mandating it.

> To be fair, the spelling is far more regular than English, but it still has its share of weirdness.

It does, but again you can pronounce all words letter for letter, and although it may sound a bit strange it'll be valid Russian.

Well technically English has no rules mandating anything, since there is no central institute or authority for the language. Doesn't mean there aren't effectively rules.

Practically, rules that people 50 years ago would never break are routinely ignored now, there are a bunch of things that are grammatically correct but you wouldn't ever say, etc... If something is done one way practically all the time, it might as well be a "rule", whether it officially is or not. Makes no difference to the person who has to learn it.

One implicit rule of Russian is that if you pronounce each word phonetically, it is never wrong (unless you put the stress wrong).

And indeed, when publicly speaking or announcing via speakers in e.g. airport, words are pronounced almost phonetically.

Compare that to English where pronouncing phonetically is impossible and also rather undesirable.

But that doesn't mean that the rules for English orthography aren't insane. There are very few English sentences that can be read by sounding out letter after letter individually (no matter what sound you choose as the basis for each letter.)

http://zompist.com/spell.html

The first step in trying to pronounce an English word is to subconsciously guess its language of origin.

I picked up some comic books in Russian. Tintin is fun, usually the stories are simple and they are available in a wide range of languages. I got Destination Moon in both English and Russian: http://www.amazon.com/Tintin-Russian-Destination-Moon-Herge/...

And promptly learned that there is a slightly different hand-written script vs. newsprint script. I suppose it's similar in concept to how we write lower-case A differently by hand versus printed.

The apparent need to mumble in order to pronounce Russian fluently is probably the hardest thing for me to get over. It helps though that a waitress at a bar around the corner from my place is Ukranian and enjoys helping me.

Heh, I have the opposite problem: I tend to mumble when speaking English (I'm a native Russian speaker). Wanna trade?

So my advice as a native speaker is: speak slowly and clearly. Speak as it is written. And good luck.

Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.

"If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) "

Ha, German people told me the same thing about German when I was in Germany. Guess it depends who you ask. Grammatically, I think Mandarin is pretty simple. Pronouncing it and writing it is another story. Grammatically, I think Japanese is tougher than Chinese, writing is just as hard when using Chinese characters (maybe harder, because many kanji have different, dissimilar readings), but easier when using the kana, and the pronunciation is easy as can be. On another tangent, having sampled various metropolises, I think NY is actually very livable.

English, my native language, has plenty of bonkers exceptions.

Sure, there are radicals. Don't count on them to tell you anything remotely useful. Sure, some characters do tell a proper story with their radicals, but it's laughable to count on them to tell you anything.

I think many people forget that when talking about how the newest generation mistreat their language, or whether foreigner's mistakes can be understood.

heck, sometimes it's funny when a native speaker tells me that I speak X very well (I don't), just because I use some prescriptive form correctly.

It's easier to learn a language that uses a latin alphabet of course, but chinese has almost no grammar, it's so easy to build sentences in the language!

I don't think it's fair to say that chinese is a difficult language to learn when compared to other languages.

But yeah now we have pleco, nciku, sergemelnyks, mgdb...

I do like the simplicity of the grammar, no conjugating, no adj/verb agreement, just naked words. But the simplicity it is compensated for with a variety of grammatical constructions: 要...了, 是...的, 挺...的, etc. (Simple grammar is summarized in the above-mentioned dictionary :)

There are definitely huge differences between learning now and before the advent of smart phones (OCR, handwriting input, pop-up dictionaries). The number of free resources available online is also incredible! I try to contribute and write articles about learning Chinese (thanks for the mention) on http://www.hackingchinese.com

I've also started working on a book. I'll give anyone from HN 10% off once the book is released, just mention HN in the comment when you sign up: http://www.hackingchinese.com/about/hacking-chinese-book-pro...

I think learning Chinese has been interesting at all levels, but for completely different reasons. In the beginning, I thought it was exotic and a bit cool, on the intermediate level, I found it fascinating to be able to start actually communicating with people and on the advanced level I've found that mastering Chinese really is a lifetime project. Naturally, I spend more and more time teaching and writing about Chinese, but I have a lot to learn myself and keep studying as much as I can.

Brendan O'Kane, a translator, said it pretty well: learning Chinese use to be a vocation, something you'd do for your entire life. That's no longer true, which is a good thing.

This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473

In particular, it hits on the two biggest barriers to learning Chinese that I've noticed in my recent experience—the writing system, and the linguistic and cultural distance between the East and West. What it doesn't talk about is how, these days, things are much easier, especially with today's technology.

At about the same time I started learning Chinese, I finally bought myself a modern smartphone, and I've been thoroughly impressed at the features it has for Chinese. Using the phone's built-in pinyin keyboard, I don't have to remember how to draw out a character—I just need to know how to write the pinyin (which is a phonetic romanization of the character), and how to recognize it well enough to pick it out of a list. No more problems with writing notes. Using the drawing input mode, where I actually draw out the character on the touchscreen, renders his complaints about dictionary lookup moot, since I can just sketch the character and feed it into an online dictionary. Hell, recently I discovered the iPhone actually has voice recognition for Mandarin—if I know how to say a word but not write it, I can look up the written character by just saying it in a sentence into the microphone. And if I have the opposite problem, where I know the character but not the pronunciation, I just feed it into MDBG [3] or even Google Translate—Google's translations are not very accurate, but it'll give me the phonetic pinyin and let me listen to the Chinese text-to-speech as well.

And the issues with linguistic and cultural distance? That's harder to get around—you still have to make an effort to pick that stuff up. But these days, you have the internet. You might not know what something means, but you have at your fingertips a repository of all human knowledge and culture, from all around the world. For example: the audiobooks I've been learning from had a note about how you should never give a Chinese man a green hat, since that may imply you're sleeping with his wife. It didn't elaborate on that at all, but a quick Google search later and I found a blog post that explains (in English, no less) how that saying has its origins in an old folk tale.[0]

It's definitely harder than learning practically any other language. Tones can be tricky to get used to, learning the writing system at the same time is like learning two languages at once, one spoken, one written, and an unfamiliar character can be a showstopper for comprehension if you don't have a smartphone or dictionary handy. But it's doable, and some things in the language are actually easier than in Western languages—the grammar, for example, is much simpler, and you don't have to worry about conjugations, or even verb tense as much. Through a combination of Pimsleur audiobooks [1] that I checked out of the library for spoken Mandarin, Memrise [2] spaced repetition software for learning vocabulary and characters, MDBG [3] for looking up translations, and Google Translate for other, random stuff, I've been able to learn pretty well even with the limited time I spare to it. I'm not quite at the level where I can be conversational yet, but I can understand and speak enough that I feel I'd be able to stumble my way around adequately were I to travel to Shanghai tomorrow.

[0] If you're curious: http://an-american-family.blogspot.ca/2010/04/dont-wear-gree...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Mandarin-Pimsleur-Language-Pro... — They're expensive to buy, but definitely worth it if you can get it from your local library. Highly recommended.

[2] http://www.memrise.com/

[3] http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php

I'm from Peking University and I don't really know "how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 'to sneeze'" either. I think it's a general problem in the era of computer and internet, as people input Chinese with pinyin, not with pen and ink. It's going to be interesting to see how Chinese evolve with modern technology.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#B...

Said differently: why do we keep writing English like this, instead of using a phonetic alphabet? Same reason.

In fact, typing this on a pinyin keyboard, I can see why this is the case

Literally, "神" doesn't mean "God", "God" in Chinese is "上帝".

I'm a native Chinese.

On the other hand, IMHO, just IMHO, "God" being translated into Chinese(Cantonese) as "神" is not thoughtful as it introduces confusion.

I'm quite glad that the Chinese of the late 19th/early 20th century often took the Japanese approach of coining semantically meaningful neologisms, rather than trying to transliterate everything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Japanese_vocabulary#Words_...

Incidentally, my tiptoe-around-this-when-in-Japan-because-it-incenses-nationalists opinion as a linguist is that modern Japanese incorporates by reference large portions of English. "Happy" is, for example, a word in modern Japanese. Not the transliteration -- though that is a word, too -- but "happy", itself, written exactly like that. "Happy" is comprehensible to substantially all speakers of the language and appears in many document corpora so frequently that it cannot be excluded from the Japanese language by any rational criterion. There's another few thousand words which superficially resemble English in modern Japanese. (There are also, of course, minimally a few dozen Japanese loanwords in English.)

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/敵性語

Historically, the Japanese people have been very willing to borrow words from other languages.

And yes, you can write "pure" yamatokotoba if you try hard enough (see eg. Shinto prayers), but the end result is as contrived as trying to write English without Latin, Greek or French loans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

电视 (diàn shì), "electricity-to look at", television

电影 (diàn yǐng), "electricity-shadow", movie

电脑 (diàn nǎo), "electricity-brain", computer

Those make it pretty easy to remember if you know the component words. But my personal favourite compound word has to be:

火车 (huǒ chē), "fire-car", train

Because "fire-car" brings to mind all sorts of badass imagery.

"Television" to borrow from the list above is a literal word in English ... if you happen to know Latin, as it's comprised of the words for "far" or "distant" and "seeing". The German (one of those pesky literal languages I had in mind) is "Ferhnsehen", combining the words for "distant" and "seeing". I remember hearing the word "Mehrheit" in a German broadcast, not knowing it, but thinking "Hrm.... 'moreness' -- that probably means "majority" or something like that. It does.

"Movie" is a shortening of "moving picture". Earlier in the technology development path were shadow lanterns and similar slide or silhouette projectors.

"Computers" (a term transferred from those who computed to the machines they used" are also know as "electronic brains" or "thinking machines".

Trains were often called "iron horses", a term sometimes applied to motorcycles (motor + bicycle -> two wheels) today.

The literalness of English is obscured by the many different language roots and influences from which its words are derived: Old German, Celtic, Norse, French, Latin, Greek....

Another example which I found fascinating was the contribution of Arabic to Spanish. The Alhambra comes from the Arabic "Al Hambra", or "the red", for the read clay of the region. From a time when the Arabic Moors controlled much of present-day Spain.

Another fascinating bit of linguistic lore I only learned recently: the Basque language, unrelated to any others in Europe, may be a relic of the Cro-Magnon people. This was an earlier race of humans who occupied parts of Europe and North Africa ~40,000 years ago. Further linguistic analysis (and genetics) have shown relationships with language fragments in North Africa:

http://www.atlantisquest.com/Linguistics.html

Generally, modern Cro-Magnon people can be found in certain parts of Western Europe, North Africa and some of the Atlantic Islands today. Physical anthropologists agree that Cro-Magnon is represented in modern times by the Berber and Tuareg peoples of North Africa, the all but extinct Guanches of the Canary Isles, the Basques of northern Spain, the Aquitanians living in the Dordogne Valley and the Bretons of Brittany; and until lately, those living on the Isle d'Oleron. (Howells, 1967; Lundman, 1977; Hiernaux, 1975, et al.)—this indicated by obviously Cro-Magnoid skulls.

There are other cases of language showing the dispersal and/or subjugation of tribes elsewhere: Jared Diamond includes linguistic evidence showing the sweep of tribes through Africa, and later of words introduced via colonization. Pre-Han populations in China and Taiwan leave traces through language, as do the Roma people, who migrated from present-day India to southeaster Europe.

And while the structure of an airport terminal isn't quite the same as a set of finger quays for a port, there's a certain similarity between the two structures. Both are interfaces, designed for craft to approach closely and transfer cargos to/from the port. They're characterized by a highly crenelated boundary to allow for maximal surface area and transfer region.

It could as well have been proculvision or teleopsis, or why not, proculopsis.

Another important thing that this article did not mention is that every Chinese character has its own meaning. In classical Chinese, characters are treated like words. However, since there is only very limited space to put things into one character, Chinese quickly turned to using compound words.

Here is my theory: In ancient Chinese, strokes are like characters in English, and characters are like words. However, because we limited ourselves to write each character into a square space, we quickly run out of space for single characters --- like in English, no one likes long words. To solve this problem, Chinese used those meaningful characters to construct compound words. This practice is actually common in English esp. in tech world --- words like TCP/IP, PC, BSD, etc. are kind of compound words to me.

Edit: typo.

For example, in the US military, there are a lot of concepts that are clumsy to say - for example, it's pretty silly to refer to the Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization Program seventy times when you're talking about why you need to change a safety protocol, so you just refer to it as the NATOPS. All of these concepts get abbreviated - Physical Fitness Test becomes PFT, Non-Judicial Punishment becomes NJP, Then people turn these into verbs, (Bill got NJP'd yesterday) and those get abbreviated as well, and pretty soon you end up with a totally new language that no one else can understand. I told this story to my girlfriend without even knowing that I was doing it:

"[Name] got caught pencil-whipping a PM on the radar. Top wanted to fix him with "EMI," but the OIC wanted him to burn, so it went to the CO for NJP. The CO is a pilot, so he maxed him out - took his pay, 45/45, reduction to PFC. Then, the SMaj told him he looked fat, so he got sent over to the S3 to weigh in. He's over, and he didn't tape out, so now he's on BCP, too! He's gonna get adsep'd if he keeps going the way he is."

My girlfriend started laughing at me, told me to repeat it, and laughed again. I realized that I was basically speaking another language, and then quickly realized that a bunch of the things I was talking about were alien to her anyway! This 90-second story became a thirty-minute discussion of what exactly "taping out" is, why Extra Military Instruction is a sarcastic term for "told to weed the desert for twelve hours," and what's so bad about the Body Composition Program. All of these concepts have been put into my brain from years of living with them, and describing them to someone else is often really difficult.

The tech world does the exact same thing. So does medicine, laboratory science, theater, band... We all have our own languages, created by common experiences and a need to communicate them to other people.

Compound words in Chinese is something like that. But the good news is: each character in Chinese has its own meaning. So you can sort of guess what's the meaning of words if you know the meaning(s) of the characters.

However, except those compound words, there are lot of common expressions, which we call them 成语, which uses historical stories, poetries and you may never know what people are talking about if they use such expressions (people use them a lot and it is considered as a sign of higher education if they can use those expressions correctly and frequently.)

You claim that 90% of Chinese writing are phonographs. Perhaps this is true to the most technical sense, but to most students this is useless. Try taking that 90% claim into a Chinese language test at university. The teacher will laugh at you as you arrogantly think you can decipher the phonetics of characters just because you know the "radicals". There is absolutely no reliable system for translating radicals to character phonetics, because it's all just so messy and hit and miss.

In the first 300 characters a learner would study, there were about 5 characters with phonetic components. Phonetics don't really start to make a difference until about 2000 characters in.

That is impressive. I took two years of Chinese in college and did not get anywhere close to that ability. How many hours a day did you practice Chinese during that 10 months?