> It's a perfect recipe for success. And I just wonder why other countries can't apply the same recipe.
Because in capitalistic market economies you need to compete. This is a law of nature! Or something like that… /s
I would indeed like to see how this works in reality on side in China. But China has one big issue: Its written language. This is something that makes me really fear the idea to go there. If they would just manage to finally switch to some proper writing system, so even dumb boys like me could learn it, I would invest some time and try to learn the language. But as long as you need to memorize thousands of signs (and can't even use a dictionary…) this is really off-putting. I'm dyslexic and have already problems to write correctly in my mother tongue (German), and had a very hard time to learn English. The second most useful language to put effort in would be Chinese, sure. But this writing system, oh boy…
The Chines are smart and have a powerful government. Why can't they make this Pinyin finally happen? It would make learning reading and writing likely even easier for the still illiterate people on the Chines country side. (And no, I don't buy the argument that you need the signs to distinguish meaning for things that sound alike. The spoken language has no signs and it still works fine. And the whole language is anyway very context depended, so you need to think about the meanings of words or phrases quite precisely anyway.)
Well I was formally diagnosed with dislexia and ADHD, which is worse.
I can tell you what I did. I worked hard, read a lot, taught myself to finish projects. And I did lots of accomplishments and way more than my peers without ADHD.
No, I'm not trolling. This is honestly me true opinion.
And no, I don't believe in the "more efficient" argument. I was told that before, and I've played with quite some translations, and came to the conclusion that written Chinese isn't "more efficient" than say English or German. It's maybe ~20% to max. ~25% more concise. That's not a big win.
In the end that's not even surprising to me. To get some amount of information over you need some encoding that can be processed and understood by human brains, and I guess there is more or less some kind of natural limit to how "compressed" information can be before it gets incomprehensible for the average human. If you compare translations of longer texts in different languages and writing systems you will notice that all of them are more or less the same in length. Some are a little bit longer, some are a little bit shorter, but all in all it's the same magnitude. It's not like the same content can be expressed in one language a few times more concise than in another.
-- A quick test with the help of deepl.com | Chinese translation --
-- German translation | by deepl.com as I'm lazy --
Nein, ich scherze nicht. Dies ist ehrlich meine wahre Meinung.
Und nein, ich glaube nicht an das Argument "effizienter". Das hat man mir schon mal gesagt, und ich habe mit einigen Übersetzungen gespielt und bin zu dem Schluss gekommen, dass Chinesisch nicht "effizienter" ist als etwa Englisch oder Deutsch. Es ist vielleicht ~20% bis maximal. ~25% prägnanter. Das ist kein großer Gewinn.
Letztendlich ist das für mich nicht einmal überraschend. Um eine gewisse Menge an Informationen zu erhalten, braucht man eine Kodierung, die von menschlichen Gehirnen verarbeitet und verstanden werden kann, und ich schätze, es gibt mehr oder weniger eine Art natürliche Grenze dafür, wie "komprimiert" Informationen sein können, bevor sie für den Durchschnittsmenschen unverständlich werden. Wenn Sie Übersetzungen längerer Texte in verschiedenen Sprachen und Schriftsystemen vergleichen, werden Sie feststellen, dass sie alle mehr oder weniger gleich lang sind. Manche sind etwas länger, manche etwas kürzer, aber alles in allem sind sie gleich lang. Es ist nicht so, dass derselbe Inhalt in einer Sprache ein paar Mal prägnanter ausgedrückt werden kann als in einer anderen.
-- Korean translation by deepl.com | just to try out some other "compact" signs --
아니요, 트롤링이 아닙니다. 이것은 솔직히 제 진심입니다.
그리고 저는 "더 효율적"이라는 주장을 믿지 않습니다. 저도 그런 말을 들은 적이 있고, 꽤 많은 번역을 해본 결과 중국어 문장이 영어나 독일어보다 '더 효율적'이지 않다는 결론에 도달했습니다. 적게는 20%에서 최대. 최대 ~25% 더 간결합니다. 이는 큰 이득이 아닙니다.
결국 그다지 놀랍지도 않습니다. 어느 정도의 정보를 전달하려면 인간의 두뇌가 처리하고 이해할 수 있는 인코딩이 필요하며, 일반인이 이해할 수 없을 정도로 정보를 '압축'하는 데에는 어느 정도 자연적인 한계가 있다고 생각합니다. 다른 언어와 문자 체계로 된 긴 텍스트의 번역본을 비교해 보면 모든 번역본의 길이가 거의 같다는 것을 알 수 있습니다. 어떤 것은 조금 더 길고 어떤 것은 조금 더 짧지만 대체로 같은 크기입니다. 같은 내용을 한 언어가 다른 언어보다 몇 배 더 간결하게 표현할 수 있는 것은 아닙니다.
-- Russian translation by deepl.com | trying out some alternative western script in a different language family --
Нет, я не троллю. Это мое искреннее мнение.
И нет, я не верю в аргумент "эффективнее". Мне говорили это раньше, и я играл с некоторыми переводами, и пришел к выводу, что китайский язык не "более эффективен", чем, скажем, английский или немецкий. Он, может быть, на ~20% максимум. ~25% более лаконично. Это не большая победа.
В конце концов, меня это даже не удивляет. Для того чтобы передать какое-то количество информации, вам нужна кодировка, которая может быть обработана и понята человеческим мозгом, и я полагаю, что существует более или менее естественный предел того, насколько "сжатой" может быть информация, прежде чем она станет непонятной для среднего человека. Если вы сравните переводы длинных текстов на разные языки и системы письма, вы заметите, что все они примерно одинаковы по длине. Некоторые немного длиннее, некоторые немного короче, но в целом это одна и та же величина. Не то чтобы одно и то же содержание можно было выразить на одном языке в несколько раз лаконичнее, чем на другом.
-- Japanese translation by deepl.com | another eastern language with sings --
My conclusion: Yes, Chinese is the most compact one. But like I've said, it's the typical ~25% less, so not a big difference. To my surprise Japanese is almost as "chatty" as German. (But OK, their writing system—or better said their three mixed writing systems—is even more crazy than Chinese, which is at least somehow consequent, even that's historically not true). It's also interesting to see that Korean seems to strive a very good balance. It's quite concise, but the writing system is much much simpler than the Chinese or Japanese one.
The other thing is how long it would take to read the text aloud in all the different languages. Chinese is quite concise when written, yes, but it's actually not when spoken out. Reading even a few signs aloud takes some time…
Honestly learning mandarin is not as difficult as you might think. There's a lot of structure and rules that allow you to "memorize thousands of signs".
Of course it requires work, it's a language that's very different from English.
Also, the ROI (in terms of new potential conversation partners) is probably larger for mandarin than for any other language just because of its sheer size and non-overlap with English speakers.
The person you're responding to already mentioned variations in pronunciation. There's also the problem of homophones. Then there's the even bigger problem of reading speed. You can comprehend a lot at a glance with characters, which you can't do with pinyin due to homophones. And the biggest problem is losing access to existing literature. While the 繁体/简体 gap can be easily overcome, at least for reading, the character pinyin gap is pretty much impossible to bridge.
--Japanese translation by deepl.com modified by me.--
いいえ。トロールではありません。本当の意見です。
24 characters compared to 35 in translation posted above. I think it is a better translation but not because of the written language. I think it is more idiomatic of how a native person would speak, though I am not a native speaker and others more knowledgeable may disagree.
My point is that you should not judge from the alphabet or dictionary how concise a language is. And you certainly should not go off a saas translation (although I think deepl is very good).
Sure it is! But Pinyin is more or less what you need to spell out, and there you can see that Chinese is actually not a very "compact" language. But it makes no big difference at all, imho. Human languages seem to have a more or less common "information density".
My point is: I would really like to learn the language. But the writing system is just off-putting.
This is imho an unnecessary high barrier to entry. OTOH I can understand why it isn't an issue for China. They don't "need" any foreigners. They have enough people.
Hanzi is necessary because there are many regional dialects with significantly different pronunciation (and thus different pinyin, or even none), but mostly the same spelling.
It takes a while to learn for sure, but it's not that hard. The relationship between the written and spoken language isn't that much worse than in English. And at least the grammar is trivial.
Because in capitalistic market economies you need to compete. This is a law of nature! Or something like that… /s
I would indeed like to see how this works in reality on side in China. But China has one big issue: Its written language. This is something that makes me really fear the idea to go there. If they would just manage to finally switch to some proper writing system, so even dumb boys like me could learn it, I would invest some time and try to learn the language. But as long as you need to memorize thousands of signs (and can't even use a dictionary…) this is really off-putting. I'm dyslexic and have already problems to write correctly in my mother tongue (German), and had a very hard time to learn English. The second most useful language to put effort in would be Chinese, sure. But this writing system, oh boy…
The Chines are smart and have a powerful government. Why can't they make this Pinyin finally happen? It would make learning reading and writing likely even easier for the still illiterate people on the Chines country side. (And no, I don't buy the argument that you need the signs to distinguish meaning for things that sound alike. The spoken language has no signs and it still works fine. And the whole language is anyway very context depended, so you need to think about the meanings of words or phrases quite precisely anyway.)