I mean, that is used on learner’s texts and in some physical places to foreigners and stuff to know how it’s pronounced, but you don’t have pinyin or hiragana over every character everywhere. There are some characters that can have like 5 pronunciations that depend entirely on context and memorization when we could have only 1.
Take 人 for example, you have the kunyomi pronunciation hito, then two onyomi pronunciations, jin and nin. Well, that’s only three pronunciations, not a lot huh, well, then there are characters like 生 (life, genuine, birth, etc) who have all of these:
Kun: い.きる、 い.かす、 い.ける、 う.まれる、 うま.れる、 う.まれ、 うまれ、 う.む、 お.う、 は.える、 は.やす、 き、 なま、 なま-、 な.る、 な.す、 む.す、 -う
On: セイ、 ショウ
You get the point, it’s just pointless. I think something similar should do to languages that have gendered nouns, that’s so fucking stupid and consumes so much of my time, why the hell do I want to memorize if a chair is feminine in Spanish, masculine in German and what the hell do I know in French.
Well, language learning would be easier if languages were created in a vacuum. I try not to make judgements on whether a feature is pointless or not because it gets in the way of my learning. Because I’m not really interested in linguistics so these questions go over my head.
But good luck. Millions of people can learn it, you just have to endure the frustration of a new system. I’m sure that in a few years this will be more natural to you. Maybe it will actually make sense, who knows haha.
Yeah, I mean, I understand that, but at the same time we have the power to consciously modify it, that is exactly what the government did with the simplification… also there are movements in Spanish adopted by feminists called “lenguaje inclusivo” (invlusive language) where people are adding an -e for neutral gendered people and so on, if we could do that to all nouns it would be basically what I’m proposing, you can still use -o and -a for masculine and feminine if you need to.
I mean, I am a native Spanish speaker, pretty much fluent in English, intermediate in German and a beginner in Chinese, so yeah, I get used to, just saying it can be easier.
inclusive language is more meant to adress professions and how you adress a person.
the use of different genders is completely arbitrary and every language that has them took advantage of it in a few situations to reduce the needed lexicon
Yeah, but that is only because we want it to work only for that, we have the potential to use to eliminate gendered nouns; the system is the same. And yes, it is arbitrary, and I am a native Spanish speaker and I can assure you the possible advantages are not bigger than the advantages of a simplified Spanish, the homonyms can be identified from context anyway.
I’m sure there are reasons I don’t understand to keep the writing system the way it is. Maybe it’s a case of “it’s not easy but we understand it and we have good literacy rates… let’s keep it this way”.
Except this isn’t really a problem in chinese. Sure there are many homophones but in general. Most 漢字 have one to two readings. Using your example, 人 is rén and 生 is shēng in 普通話. Meanwhile 重 can be read as zhòng or chóng. I’m not sure if this applies to the other languages in the sinitic family.
As for japanese the sheer number of kun readings is to Japanese overloading the few “simple” kanji to represent many words, it’s also not a real issue as almost always see okurigana to hint towards which specific reading you are using e.g. 生む vs 生える. Or the context informs which reading as in 生卵, i.e. the なま reading is only used as a prefix and so on.
The problem only kinda worsens with reading reforms as peoplr start the pack the simpler kanji with more readings when they’re used instead of the proper character. E.g. 函数→関数, both are read かんすう but the right is prefered because 函 is non 常用漢字
Native speakers and language learners alike build an intuition for the whole “Which reading should I use?” problem.
I mean, that is used on learner’s texts and in some physical places to foreigners and stuff to know how it’s pronounced, but you don’t have pinyin or hiragana over every character everywhere. There are some characters that can have like 5 pronunciations that depend entirely on context and memorization when we could have only 1.
Take 人 for example, you have the kunyomi pronunciation hito, then two onyomi pronunciations, jin and nin. Well, that’s only three pronunciations, not a lot huh, well, then there are characters like 生 (life, genuine, birth, etc) who have all of these: Kun: い.きる、 い.かす、 い.ける、 う.まれる、 うま.れる、 う.まれ、 うまれ、 う.む、 お.う、 は.える、 は.やす、 き、 なま、 なま-、 な.る、 な.す、 む.す、 -う On: セイ、 ショウ
You get the point, it’s just pointless. I think something similar should do to languages that have gendered nouns, that’s so fucking stupid and consumes so much of my time, why the hell do I want to memorize if a chair is feminine in Spanish, masculine in German and what the hell do I know in French.
Well, language learning would be easier if languages were created in a vacuum. I try not to make judgements on whether a feature is pointless or not because it gets in the way of my learning. Because I’m not really interested in linguistics so these questions go over my head.
But good luck. Millions of people can learn it, you just have to endure the frustration of a new system. I’m sure that in a few years this will be more natural to you. Maybe it will actually make sense, who knows haha.
Yeah, I mean, I understand that, but at the same time we have the power to consciously modify it, that is exactly what the government did with the simplification… also there are movements in Spanish adopted by feminists called “lenguaje inclusivo” (invlusive language) where people are adding an -e for neutral gendered people and so on, if we could do that to all nouns it would be basically what I’m proposing, you can still use -o and -a for masculine and feminine if you need to.
I mean, I am a native Spanish speaker, pretty much fluent in English, intermediate in German and a beginner in Chinese, so yeah, I get used to, just saying it can be easier.
inclusive language is more meant to adress professions and how you adress a person.
the use of different genders is completely arbitrary and every language that has them took advantage of it in a few situations to reduce the needed lexicon
Yeah, but that is only because we want it to work only for that, we have the potential to use to eliminate gendered nouns; the system is the same. And yes, it is arbitrary, and I am a native Spanish speaker and I can assure you the possible advantages are not bigger than the advantages of a simplified Spanish, the homonyms can be identified from context anyway.
I’m sure there are reasons I don’t understand to keep the writing system the way it is. Maybe it’s a case of “it’s not easy but we understand it and we have good literacy rates… let’s keep it this way”.
Yeah, I mean, this mostly affects non natives, since you don’t usually have a lot of trouble learning the spoken part of the language.
Except this isn’t really a problem in chinese. Sure there are many homophones but in general. Most 漢字 have one to two readings. Using your example, 人 is rén and 生 is shēng in 普通話. Meanwhile 重 can be read as zhòng or chóng. I’m not sure if this applies to the other languages in the sinitic family.
As for japanese the sheer number of kun readings is to Japanese overloading the few “simple” kanji to represent many words, it’s also not a real issue as almost always see okurigana to hint towards which specific reading you are using e.g. 生む vs 生える. Or the context informs which reading as in 生卵, i.e. the なま reading is only used as a prefix and so on.
The problem only kinda worsens with reading reforms as peoplr start the pack the simpler kanji with more readings when they’re used instead of the proper character. E.g. 函数→関数, both are read かんすう but the right is prefered because 函 is non 常用漢字
Native speakers and language learners alike build an intuition for the whole “Which reading should I use?” problem.
It would make more sense if Japanese always used kana.
Why would you want to kill Kanji? Follow Stalin’s recommendation to Mao, keep the characters!