Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[Ian_Lee]

It is just like sometimes I forget a seldom-used 12-letter English word. After looking up in the dictionary, the memory is refreshed.

That is hardly illiterate.

In fact, most of the time in Chinese we just need about 2,500-3,000 characters for daily use. I don't know why another poster suggested we needed to learn 5,000-6,000 characters.

During the 12 school years, in average we learn about 200-250 characters annually (Of course, we learn less in the primary years and more in the high school years).

By Grade 6, we already grasped about 800-1,000 Chinese characters. I started to read classics like "Water Margin" and "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" in that year. Of course, I didn't know some of the vocabularies. What I did was I skipped it and guessed the meaning (like how we read some English literature).

But when I re-read them in Grade 7,8,9,......gradually I understood all of the content.

Well, it is well nigh impossible for a 6th Grader in US school to comprehend Shakespeare's works though.

[ala]

It is just like sometimes I forget a seldom-used 12-letter English word. After looking up in the dictionary, the memory is refreshed.

That is hardly illiterate.

Forgetting a 12-letter English word is a little different from forgetting a character, as I'm sure the Chinese vocabulary size is larger than 3000. I doubt a literate English speaker would forget how to write the uppercase letter Q (relatively rare, z and x are probably rarer, but you use them as variables all the time).

[Ian_Lee]

Now I suspect the reasons why some posters dislike Chinese characters were based on the unhappy experience they encounter in their school years.

I don't know what is on the syllabus of Chinese language in Mainland. But I think that for vernacular Chinese literature, probably they learnt writings from Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Lao She etc.

But for God's sake, all their writings are very unintelligible for High School kids.

All those writings were not in my Chinese Literature syllabus during my time (Don't know about now).

I remember I learnt writings of Hu Shih, Liang Qichao and Zhu Zi Qing etc. in High School. I loved their writings so much (which were very riveting and succinct IMHO) that I bought their collection for extracurricular reading.

Frankly speaking, until today I still felt Lao She's "Rickshaw Man" hard to digest.

[pazu]

I doubt a literate English speaker would forget how to write the uppercase letter Q (relatively rare, z and x are probably rarer, but you use them as variables all the time).

Isn't it a laughable comparison by comparing a Chinese character to an alphabet? Hoho!~

Allah~~~~~~~

Even though I may forget how to write one or two characters occasionally, it's hardly possible that I can't write a good passage using all the other Chinese characters I remembered.

[ala]

Isn't it a laughable comparison by comparing a Chinese character to an alphabet? Hoho!~

hehehe. Actually that was my point, but with words vs. characters.

[pazu]

Today when I browsed randomly at http://dmoz.org/Science/Social_Sciences/Language_and_Linguistics/Graphemics_and_Orthography/ , I found a very interesting website called "Writing System Topics by Vivian Cook" (http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~vcook/wstopics.htm)

There's a section about some English native speakers' mistakes (collected from essays by adult English students studying at university in England) at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SpellingMistakes/MistakesNative.htm , while I'm not trying to say that Englsih is as dificult as Chinse, but just look at those funny examples and I think it's forgivable if a Chinese forgot how to write SNEEZ in Chinese.

I've chosen some examples below, I think it's really rare if a Chinese could write that wrong in Chinese. Note that the following mistakes were collected from essays by adult English students studying at university in England.

aproved / 認可 / 认可

asses (assess) / 評定 / 评定

bare (bear) / 忍受

booring (boring) / 悶 / 闷

carrier (career) / 事業 / 事业

come (some) / 一些

two (to) / 二

I don't think Chinese and English can be compared in all aspects, but if I come and say, "English alphabets are objectively harder, even for British" and quoted some mistakes here, "oh see, I can't imagine a Chinese kindergarten could write TWO in Chinese wrong while a British university student wrote it as TO !" This is what I said in my previous post as "unfair comparison".

[sm_sung]

It must be noted that although Chinese do forget how to write characters, the most frequently used characters are seldom forgotten, characters like 我，的，得，你，没. Forgetting a rarely used character once in a while doesn't interfere much, one can always use pinyin(which I personally prefer), a similar sounding character, or simply rephrase the sentence.

"Sato Hideo, head of the Research Section for Historical Documents, National Institute for Educational Research in the Japanese Ministry of Education, has estimated that public school graduates, who now receive nine years of compulsory schooling, retain a recognition knowledge of the 1,945 kanji but soon forget how to write all but 500 or so" (DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy).

I'm pretty sure that the average literate Chinese can reproduce at least 1000 characters from memory. The reason Japanese can write only 500 or so characters, I suspect, is because of the existence of hiragana and katakana. If a Japanese forgets a kanji, he'll probably just say "What the heck, I'll just write it in hiragana(or katakana)". A Chinese would probably say "I better look it up". Though pinyin exists, many Chinese would dread writing pinyin together with hanzi, for obvious asthetic reasons. However, as hiragana and katakana are accepted as components of written Japanese the initiative to write in kanji just isn't as strong for the Japanese. This would mean that a Chinese constantly mantains his ability to write hanzi, while a Japanese would unconciously let it slip away.

(Characters) an incommensurability with the rest of the alphabetic globe.

Maybe I'm being a little too sensitive here, but I found this akin to saying "Everyone else uses alphabets, so the Chinese must do the same". If characters suit the Chinese language well, should they be abolished just to make world writing systems more uniform(alphabetic)?

Pazu your solution regarding the "third tone rule" was excellent, , however I'm afraid there are more inconsistencies than just that.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Examples:

一天(pronounced as yi4tian1, not yi1tian1)

一条(pronounced as yi4tiao2, not yi1tiao2)

一点(pronounced as yi4dian3, not yi1dian3)

一看(pronounced as yi2kan4, not yi1kan4)

第一, of course is pronounced as di4yi1.

不少（pronounced as bu4hui1）

不会(pronounced as bu2hui4, not bu4hui4)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The situation also gets a little more complicated when more than two third tones appear together. How should the following sentence be pronounced :美女等我好久.

I asked a couple of my friends(native speakers) and I got several different responses including:

-mei2nu3deng2wo3hao2jiu3

-mei2nu3deng2wo2hao2jiu3

-mei2nu2deng2wo2hao2jiu3

Which one correct would be the correct written form?

When I first started learning English, I was amazed by number of words that were used in the language as well as the 'wonderful' spelling system(Imagine my horror when I saw the FULL Oxford English Dictionary ). To this day, I still find it an arduous task comprehending Old English, both in its written and spoken forms. In contrast, Chinese to me is one of the easiest languages to learn . No inflections, plurals, tenses, conjugation, straightforward word order, and feminine/masculine nouns.(No offence to any non-Chinese out there who have been losing their voices practising tones or deprived of precious sleep memorizing the "nonsensical, absurd, ridiculously difficult squiggles" that make up the written language).

[shibo77]

What a topic!!

Shibo

[Taibei]

Forgetting a rarely used character once in a while doesn't interfere much, one can always use pinyin(which I personally prefer), a similar sounding character, or simply rephrase the sentence.

Or just use pinyin and skip the characters.

It's worth noting that most people already write Mandarin in pinyin -- they're just using this as an intermediate step in having a computer translate this into Chinese characters.

I'm pretty sure that the average literate Chinese can reproduce at least 1000 characters from memory. The reason Japanese can write only 500 or so characters, I suspect, is because of the existence of hiragana and katakana. ... This would mean that a Chinese constantly mantains his ability to write hanzi, while a Japanese would unconciously let it slip away.

The numbers are getting smaller all the time for not just Japanese but Chinese and Taiwanese as well. Computers are doing more and more of the work for people in supplying the correct character form, making it harder and harder for people to remember them on their own. This is becoming pronounced in Taiwan and will become increasingly so in China as computerization there widens.

Maybe I'm being a little too sensitive here, but I found this akin to saying "Everyone else uses alphabets, so the Chinese must do the same". If characters suit the Chinese language well, should they be abolished just to make world writing systems more uniform(alphabetic)?

They don't fit Mandarin or any of the other Chinese languages particularly well, which is in part why they are so damn hard, to borrow Moser's phrase.

I regret not having the time lately to join in this discussion more. Keep up the good work, ala.

[dmoser]

Pazu writes:

while I'm not trying to say that Englsih is as dificult as Chinse, but just look at those funny examples and I think it's forgivable if a Chinese forgot how to write SNEEZ in Chinese.

I know this isn't going to convince anyone, and I've already covered this issue in one of my earlier posts, but here goes:

You give the examples of college students misspelling common words in English. And of course this is lamentable, but not surprising. We know kids today are lousy spellers. But I want you to note something. In your post, you yourself misspelled several words. You wrote "English" as "Englsih", "difficult" as "dificult", "Chinese" as "Chinse", and "sneeze" as "sneez". This is no big deal at all -- I misspell words all the time, and make zillions of typos. And your mistakes presented me with no problem whatsoever, because the phonetic quality of English allows you to make guesses about spelling. These guesses enable you to communicate your meaning, even if it is far from orthographically perfect. As I said earlier, my six-year-old daughter can write "Do not disterb", and we all understand her cute misspelling completely, because English gives her an error-tolerant medium to write in. With a few rules, she can attempt almost ANY new word with a little guess work. If she forgets how to write "disturb", she can make a reasonable guess "disterb", and we all understand her. But if her Chinese counterpart has not yet studied the second character in darao 打扰, there is no way for her to make an educated guess about how to write it. She simply can't put the first stroke down on paper. And if she learns to write it, but forgets, there is no rule to remind her of the correct way to write it. Misspelling a word and miswriting a character are similar phenomena, but FORGETTING how to write a word is a different matter in the two languages, because the English principle is rule-based (though inconsistent), whereas the Chinese principle (for the most part) is rote memorization. That is a key difference.

So OF COURSE it's forgivable if a Chinese person forgets how to write "sneeze" in their own language. It's much harder for a human to remember such information. I'm amazed that Chinese people do so WELL in remembering characters. Relatively speaking, English orthography is just easier in this regard. And note that, in a sense, the English college students didn't totally "forget" how to write the words in question -- rather, they forgot (or never knew) which particular sound-to-spelling rule was the appropriate one for the word in question. You can see that their misspellings are NOT random guesses. They are more or less sequential representations of the phonetic information in their heads. And in English, that's GOOD ENOUGH to accomplish the goal of communication. (Though you may reveal your lack of familiarity with the written language by all your spelling errors.)

In the case of my Beijing University students who forgot how to write "sneeze", it was not a matter of writing down a cuobiezi. Rather, they just couldn't remember all the components in the character, and so they couldn't get the character down on paper. There was no phonetic rule-of-thumb that could prod their memory. So the writing process just BROKE DOWN. This seldom if ever happens in English, as evidenced by your very post, with its misspellings. You may not have even been aware of some of the misspellings -- you don't HAVE to be. As long as "dificult" corresponds to the string of phonemes roughly in the way that "difficult" does, we can all decode your message perfectly. And the fact that you can write English as well as you obviously do shows that you have done a good job of learning the spelling rules of English, as chaotic as they are.

This is not a matter of embarrassment, or shame, or unfair comparisons with Chinese students and English-speaking students. Chinese characters are simply a harder system to master and retain, and there is no shame in experiencing difficulty with it. Go back and look at my earlier post. I'm not talking about adult, college-educated Chinese speakers who merely mis-wrote a character or two. I'm talking about speakers who COULD NOT complete a representation of the word on paper. Remembering a few details or radicals of the target character does not allow you to complete the process of writing a character. Whereas imperfect knowledge of spelling conventions DOES, nevertheless, allow the English speaker to get the sound down on paper. Surely this difference is obvious, no?

I hope this clarifies my point.

David Moser

[pazu]

But I want you to note something. In your post, you yourself misspelled several words.

Didn't you find it interesting that all the obvious typo mistakes concentrate in one paragraph only? I thought the message was clear, I did them deliberately, sorry for trying to be sarcastic, but I was surprised that you didn't get the message.

[pazu]

Whereas imperfect knowledge of spelling conventions DOES, nevertheless, allow the English speaker to get the sound down on paper. Surely this difference is obvious, no?

I know what you wanna say, but by saying that a Chinese just can't write down their idea on paper if they forget how to write a character, is indeed quite wrong in daily life. I hope you can understand that I'm not trying to defend the Chinese but I talk it out of my personal experience.

I remember when I was in the primary school we had a dictation (yes, a typical part of the education in HK~). My teacher said, "不較別人遜色" and saw if any of us could write it down, only one could do it. All the others wrote 信色, the character was wrong, but the message was still quite clear. Isn't it the same as the careless typo mistake in English?

In daily life, especially in a diary, most people (okay , though actually most people don't keep diaries...) will just write another character down with the same sound if they forget how to write a character. And it's an easy job in Chinese because homophones are enormous.

During travelling I keep two diairies, one online and one personal, I never try to correct any mistakes (or proof-read) the personal one because it's not necessary, and I'm sure there're many typo mistakes. The online one, however, is very different. Every time I finish writing that, I have to proof-read to make sure I haven't made any silly mistakes, and if I forgot how to write a word, I have to check the dictionary before I put it on the internet.

Your friend forgot how to write "pillow", and it was vital for her to ask probably she was writing it for the TV. A mistake like this should not be tolerated on a TV, but I think it's the same for "pilow".

I agree that Chinese characters are definitely more difficult to learn, but I still doubt it if there's really any big difference between Chinese kids and their Western counterparts in overall reading and writing performance.

I think it's a bit off-topic to discuss how a child brain works, but never underestimate it. In a suitable environment it's not common to see a little kid who can speak 2 or 3 languages in Asia, while most of their counterparts in the US and UK can speak only one tongue. I guess it's the same for learning characters when you're young.

PS: Can the admin (Mr Quest) help sm_sung to edit his messge?

The line "我， 的，得，你，没，有，很，欢， 他，她，们，门，要，大，小. " is too long and stretches this message page longer than it should be.

[dmoser]

Dear Pazu,

Reading your reply makes me think that I may be underestimating the

flexibility and cleverness of Chinese speakers in getting around these

problems when writing diaries, etc. I'm sure you're right, there are many

ways to fudge around and solve the problem of remembering characters.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that this problem routinely paralyzes the Chinese written culture. So yes, your point is well taken. Indeed, the writing system couldn't have survived the 20th century if the opposite was the case.

Your example of the homophone substitution 信色 is quite interesting. And since the result is a homophone, there indeed would be no more confusion than when an English-speaking child writes "It is just two hot today." But to equate this with a misspelling in English is not quite right.

The substitution of a homonym is like throwing up your hands and saying "I give up. Here's a totally wrong character, with a wrong meaning, that substitutes for the right sound, and you figure out the correct morpheme." A spelling mistake, by and large, still provides BOTH the correct meaning and the correct sound (with occasional exceptions like "two" and "too".) But I nevertheless agree with you that a homonym substitution can serve as a personal aid in reminding one of the intended meaning.

Also you wrote:

Your friend forgot how to write "pillow", and it was vital for her to ask probably she was writing it for the TV. A mistake like this should not be tolerated on a TV, but I think it's the same for "pilow".

My feeling when watching these people go through this process is that it is NOT like an English person misspelling a word. What happens is they start to write the character, and are suddenly stumped. The pen just stops. They mutter to themselves. They try a few strokes to see if they can remember. Then they'll ask someone. Or leave it blank. Maybe they'll suddenly remember, and maybe they won't. But the writing process definitely comes to a halt until they can come up with some solution. I don't see them simply jot down a homonym character, but maybe they do that, too. I'm not saying that some people (such as you perhaps) have found solutions to this problem. I'm just saying that in my daily experience, the Chinese I observe who encounter the problem just stop dead in their tracks.

By contrast, if I can't remember how to spell "shish kebab" (which I couldn't earlier today), I simply write "shishkebob" (which is what I did) and zoom ahead. I hardly paused in my confusion. Maybe some English speakers experience a total meltdown when trying to write a word they aren't sure of, but I've seldom seen this. And my daughter certainly is undeterred by ignorance, as she writes all kinds of silly nonsense to me (even by email!!) with wacky spellings, all of which I can understand.

But when I ask my Beijing third graders to write 平衡 (as I did the other day), they just shrug and say "Teacher, we haven't learned that one yet!"

That brings me to another point you keep avoiding, and I assumed it's just because you basically agree. But when I read this, I wasn't sure.

I agree that Chinese characters are definitely more difficult to learn, but I still doubt it if there's really any big difference between Chinese kids and their Western counterparts in overall reading and writing performance.

First, what you say is a little contradictory. How can characters be more difficult to learn, and yet there is no big difference in reading and writing performance? Second, I think you've sort of side-stepped my main point about kids learning the scripts. Let me make it clearer.

With the rules my 7-year-old daughter has, she now can write almost anything she can say. And that even includes nonsense words. If I say "blug" or "ploop", she can make a good guess as to how to write these sounds. But lots of new words to her are equally nonsense. She doesn't yet know what a car muffler is, but if she hears the word, she can make a stab at it: "mufler", "mufflur", "muflir", anything that gets the phonemes down. This also means it's relatively easy for her to remember the actual spelling when she learns it, because --- and here is the crux -- the sound of the language reinforces the spelling and VICE VERSA. So there's a tight reinforcement loop that aids the process.

For Chinese kids, this is not the case. There is no sound-to-orthography reinforcement loop. They just have to memorize the new forms for new words/morphemes, and there are no rules that can help them. This makes it not just a little bit harder, but quite a bit harder to learn.

Another way of highlighting this: As I've said, I sometimes teach English to third graders in Beijing. I can give them new words orally, and very often the kids can instantly write the word correctly in English. The other day I remember I gave them the words "magic", "handgun", "million", "spooky" and "cheese", and a surprising number of the kids correctly guessed the spelling of most of these words. Of course, I got many items like "majik", "chease", "millyen", and "spuky", but that's my whole point.

They were able to guess about as well as my daughter could, i.e. they were well on the way to being able to write about anything they could say in English. As for Chinese, I don't think we could ask them to just start writing homophones characters for every new word they hear. That would make Chinese characters into a syllabary, which they are not.

There is very very little hard empirical evidence for any of this, so my contention that it takes longer for Chinese kids to reach an easy level of written fluency in their native language is largely anecdotal. It would be interesting to see comparative surveys of grade school essays from Chinese kids and Western (alphabetic) kids.

Sorry to go on such a tirade, and I apologize if I seem to be beating up on the Chinese script so much. I actually love Chinese characters, to tell the truth. I think they're beautiful, aesthetically mind-boggling, and quite fun. Also culturally deep and significant. But this is an issue fraught with such confusion, obfuscation and misdirected nationalist sentiment, that it probably does deserve all the attention it gets. Also, having a little girl that is about to embark on learning both of these scripts to some extent, I sort of have a vested interest in the answers to these questions.

[pazu]

Dmoser, I like this thread because it challenged many traditional thoughts in my mind, keep me thinking what have in my mind, and I'm trying to organize them and write down here.

Yes I understand your points, as I've said so from my very first post in this thread, that sometimes Chinese can be difficult to write, but somehow I can't agree much that it meddles my ability to write or create. I know it sounds very contradicting, but I'm talking out of my personal experience. Hmm........

Let me use two of my recent experience, one in English and the other in Chinese.

I forgot how to write the lower part of Fan (樊), I wrote something and tried a few combinations. 木爻木 , with 示, no; with 小, no; with 大, done!

As to why I could figure it was something 示, 小 or 大, I think it's because I learnt the character as a shape, as a form, rather than something arbitrary. The clue is, from my impression, the lower part is "lighter", it's something with lesser strokes.

Here's another example (from me) in English, a few days ago I tried to use the word "adequate", I wrote it as "adaquate", I thought it looked strange, I knew it was something strange in the part "ada", I tried to figure out the sound, /ae de .../ , I put some other alphabets, eda / ade, immediately I know it was "adequate" because it didn't look strange.

Dmoser, I think this is what you say. In the above cases, I probably have a better chance to guess "adequate" right, rather than "樊" because of the sound connection. But somehow because of the obvious visualizing effect of Chinese character, when I wrote 樊 I will be so sure that I got the character right without checking the dictionary, this can be something different from English (also Chinese~).

There're some words which are difficult to "figure them out" by yourself. In my biology class in secondary school, I learnt the word "dessication". This is a hard word for me (and I think it's the same for many native speaker too) because I don't know if it should be dessicate or desiccate, this is something very difficult to guess from the sound, not even the shape of the word. I remember very clearly of this single example because my Biology said, "remember it's double S because water is so vital that a dessicated plant will die and die (死了又死 Sei ... Sei)!"

While I agree this is a very interesting but rare example, but I don't know if the problem of a single character will meddle my ability to write or create, I'm saying in a case without any dictionaries. I just think messing up a character isn't the same as the lack of writing ability (again, it sounds contradicting).

And I do agree that we're just talking about "theories" without much empirical facts. I also want to know some related surveys.

For example, how many words (instead of "characters") can children write and read with proficiency at the same age in different countries?

[sm_sung]

PS: Can the admin (Mr Quest) help sm_sung to edit his messge?

The line "我， 的，得，你，没，有，很，欢， 他，她，们，门，要，大，小. " is too long and stretches this message page longer than it should be.

Alright, it's done.

[dmoser]

Dear Pazu,

Yes, I find this thread interesting, too. Since we do have so little scientific evidence, our anecdotal examples are rather interesting.

Your last message with the "adaquate"/樊" comparison reminds me of another aspect of all this. Some people are probably better at processing visual information, while others prefer to use algorithms, rules, and procedures. This suggests that some people -- whether Chinese or Western -- are better at memorizing and writing characters, while some may be bad at it, but feel more at home remembering spelling rules. The former might find the Chinese system quite natural, the latter would be likely to always be forgetting characters. Just a theory.

We do know that there are two different styles of mathematical thinking.

Some kids excel at algebra, while others prefer visual, geometric tasks.

There are some proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem that are purely logical, and others that can be expressed completely visually with geometric shapes. I always found the latter convincing and easy to understand, whereas the former eluded me. So maybe I'm more visual. I should have been born in China!

Anyway, I appreciate your patience in trying to sort these things out.

Yours,

David

[sm_sung]

sm_sung wrote:

Forgetting a rarely used character once in a while doesn't interfere much, one can always use pinyin(which I personally prefer), a similar sounding character, or simply rephrase the sentence.

Or just use pinyin and skip the characters.

It's worth noting that most people already write Mandarin in pinyin -- they're just using this as an intermediate step in having a computer translate this into Chinese characters.

Well, I don't know how many people actually know how to type in Chinese but you are definitely right in saying that most people who type in Chinese would use pinyin as an intermediate step. However, to me a Chinese text written in pinyin is like a scribbled note written in English. Easy to write, hard to read. Of course, I don't read pinyin as often as characters, but I still feel that the high degree of homophony in Chinese would make me a slower reader if it weren't for the characters.

They don't fit Mandarin or any of the other Chinese languages particularly well, which is in part why they are so damn hard, to borrow Moser's phrase.

And why don't they? One character represents one morpheme and has one sound, most of the time. I wouldn't say they are perfect but don't see any obvious flaws either.

[sm_sung]

And the fact that you can write English as well as you obviously do shows that you have done a good job of learning the spelling rules of English, as chaotic as they are.

In a suitable environment it's not common to see a little kid who can speak 2 or 3 languages in Asia, while most of their counterparts in the US and UK can speak only one tongue.

I don’t think it’s as much a question of ease and environment as it is of education policies in the countries concerned. In many Asian countries, English is a school subject, and its learning is encouraged actively through government policies. (Note: Pazu hails from Hong Kong, one such place). How many UK and US schools (not run by Chinese communities) have Chinese as a compulsory second language? I’m betting less than 10, and that would be being very, very, optimistic. Thus, it is not surprising at all if the average Asian high school student can speak English better than the average American high school student can speak Chinese.

Put simply, knowing English can take a Chinese further than knowing Chinese can take an English-speaking person. Because of this, there are many more people studying English in China than there are people studying Chinese in English-speaking countries.

Note: China’s economic boom has sparked interest in Chinese language courses all over Asia.

Let’s imagine for a moment that the status quo were reversed. I suspect many Chinese speakers would be contented with being monolingual and wouldn’t bother to pick up English. Those who do bother will become highly frustrated with the many more sounds in English, the relatively complex grammar and the largely arbitrary spelling system. One of them might even decide to vent his frustrations by writing an article entitled “为什么英文这样难?”(Why is English so damn hard?) and distribute in on the web. (Just a joke dmoser, no offence intended, I actually enjoyed your article very much).

[dmoser]

dear sm_sung,

One of them might even decide to vent his frustrations by writing an article entitled “为什么英文这样难?”(Why is English so damn hard?) and distribute in on the web.

Well, THAT'S for sure. If only a few dedicated egghead Chinese ever tackled English, one of them would certainly write such an article. And the biggest complaint would be the stupid, irrational spelling. I sympathize with Chinese people trying to learn English.

[Green Pea]

I’ve read this long thread and I must generally agree with dmoser. I think his key point is the spelling rule set system of English is far more efficient than Chinese. It is much easier to remember several dozen rules than thousands of characters.

I don’t know how many spelling rules there are, but let’s say 100. An English student needs to learn 100 spelling rules to be able to spell 98% of words (a made up figure for demonstration). A student of Chinese will have some shortcuts, like radicals. Let’s say for the sake of argument these will give one a 5% chance of getting the character, but generally one will have to memorise all of say 4,000 characters. Which is easier when learning to write: memorise 100 rules with a 98% predicative accuracy or 4,000 characters with only 5% predictive accuracy?

What is interesting is why the number of commonly used Chinese characters tops out at 3-5,000. I would argue that beyond 5,000 the memorisation task is just too overwhelming…most can’t remember that many for practical usage. The system of writing Chinese just breaks down. English spelling rules do not breakdown. When using the English spelling rules, one will still have mistakes. The system is far from perfect. However, if you are trying to compare mistakes in one written language versus the other, you are missing the point.