Punctuation and abbreviations in Chinese

[website]

I am sure this has been discussed many times before, but don't

you think Chinese would be easier to read if it had more punctuation? Although China now uses question marks, periods, commas, and exclamation marks, I think Chinese would be much easier if it also used spaces between the words. Everything I now read looks like it's a big jumble of words. For example, it's difficult to know when a writer wants to say "beautiful country" or "America". It would be easier for readers if they saw 美 国 for "beautiful country" instead of always seeing 美国 for both meanings. It's even more confusing when writers abbreviate 美中国公司

for USA-China Company instead of 美国中国公司. How can readers know the company's name doesn't mean "Beautiful Central Country Company"?

Am I wrong? With the tones and characters, Chinese must be one of the hardest languages in the world.

[madizi]

It seems to me that it depends on how long do you already learn Chinese language. After a few years you get used to some abbreviations. Especially if you read Chinese newspapers or websites. And some dictionaries have frequently used abbreviation.

So, I don't see any use of spaces between words.

It's all just practice, practice, practice,...... drill, drill, drill

and persistence ( )

[Quest]

It would be easier for readers if they saw 美 国 for "beautiful country" instead of always seeing 美国 for both meanings. It's even more confusing when writers abbreviate 美中国公司

for USA-China Company instead of 美国中国公司. How can readers know the company's name doesn't mean "Beautiful Central Country Company"?

beautiful country would be 美丽的国家, 美国 is always the US.

US-China Company would be 中美合资公司.

I dont think Chinese is hard to read without spaces. However, as Ala and Pazu have pointed out, it would help if proper nouns/scientific/technical terms are underlined in a text.

[liuzhou]

Chinese would be easier to read if...

The logical extension of your argument would be that Chinese would be easier to read of they didn't write in Chinese!

No nation has designed or modified its language or writing system to suit foreign learners. You are just going to have to learn it and stop looking for short cuts. There is no babel fish!

As has been said. Practice, practice, practice!

[XiaoMa]

I totally agree with liuzhou, i wouldn't favour a change in any language to suit foreigners, that will change a culture. Language is an integral part of a culture. I doesn't matter if it is the writing system or grammar.

[Bob Dylan Thomas]

not to mention the problem, freqeuntly touched upon previously on this board, that "words" are a fairly false concept anyway.

for example: is Commander in Chief a word? What if we put hyphens in there, Commander-in-Chief? Well, there are still spaces... but if we pluralise it, there would be nothing too strange about hearing someone say

"Commander-in-Chiefs" in my opinion. yet purists might say it should be Commanders-in-Chief because they're all different WORDS.... even though when this phrase is uttered no-one really thinks of it as a commander, who is in the position of chief or whatever. so has it become a word?

(if you're unconvinced, try it with "attorneys general"/"attorney generals", the latter of which is frequently heard, even though general is an adjective here and attorney is a noun. or maybe they'vbe become one "word"? just think, if we didn't stick a space between them then we wouldn't be in this mess).

as for making this more relevant to chinese: think of how, in written chinese especially, a "new" word can be made up by contracting two seperate ones. how do we know where the word is? for example, the other day i saw in the paper 图挽 which took me a while to figure it was a contraction of 试图 挽救, to try to rescue. you won't find 图挽 in the dictionary, but you will find 初中, which is 初级中学, junior high school. who then decides whether we stick a space between 图 and 挽 but not between 初 and 中？ it sounds like website wnats to start writing 初 [space] 中 which would be a bit silly.

[Lu]

Yes, with more spacing and less abbreviations Chinese would be easier to read for foreigners who don't master the language very well yet. The same goes for English, and probably for all languages in the world. It's not necessary, though, Chinese is perfectly readable once you've learned the language and gotten used to the abbreviations and all.

[Claw]

I think spaces in Chinese would make it harder read. Each character in Chinese is already a contained unit that takes up the same amount of space as any other character. Adding spaces between every few characters would probably decrease reading speed since they won't be lined up neatly anymore. Even if you do make the space the same size as a character in order to line everything up, the eye has to continually make big jumps in order to read.