Getting Rid of Chinese Characters?

Every time Brad sees me typing Chinese on the computer screen, he gets so fascinated and stands there looking while trying to work out how those complicated "symbols" appear. He always comments after a while: " there is no way I can learn how to write those symbols".  "why do you Chinese make life so hard by inventing and keeping such a complicated literal system?"

I've heard similar comments on Chinese characters a lot; actually I never teach my beginner level Mandarin students how to write Chinese characters just to make sure they build up confidence and interest in Mandarin language through having conversations (which seems easier for them) first.

There are about 2000 simplified Chinese characters - not too many. These characters indicate the meaning of the word by its components. Not like western alphabetical language system, Chinese characters can not be spelled based on their pronunciation which has nothing to do with the meaning of the word itself. So that is the hard part, remembering individual characters.

About 100 years ago, some revolutionist in China suggested to get rid of the Chinese character system, arguing that instead of using the character set Pinyin, which is the actual pronunciation of the characters, should be adopted. Pinyin system is based on the 26 letters of the alphabet and this revolutionist thought that this would bring China in line with the western world faster.

While I was reading the book " Mr. China" today, I found from the book an excellent story of how this suggestion of getting rid of Chinese characters failed in China.

In response to that revolutionsit's suggestion, a professor at Beijing University wrote a short, nonsensical but intelligent story.  It told of a poet, called Gentleman Shi, who lived in a stone house and became addicted to eating lions. He went in search of them and found ten in a market, but realized that they were all dead when he got home.

(I"m not typing the whole story in Chinese characters here, but every character in the professor's story is pronounced "shi" even though they look different and have different meanings. So in Pinyin or phonetics it became:)

                Shi shi shi shi shi
Shi shi shi shi shi shi, shi shi shi, shi shi
shi shi. Shi shi shi shi shi shi shi. Shi shi,
shi shi shi, shi shi shi shi shi. Shi shi, shi
shi shi shi shi, shi shi shi shi shi, shi shi
shi shi shi shi. Shi shi shi shi shi shi shi
shi shi. Shi shi shi, shi shi shi shi shi shi,
shi shi shi, shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi,
shi shi, shi shi shi shi shi shi shi.
                                  Shi shi shi shi!

It obviously doesn't make any sense even to a Chinese person if they read the story in phonetics. However, if a Chinese person read it in Chinese characters, it makes perfect sense!

The professor's point was clear; like it or not, Chinese can't be reduced to an alphabet. The characters are here to say."

What a smart story! I absolutely love it!

If you want to practise writing Chinese characters or want to download the right software to be able to read and type Chinese characters onto your computer, please refer to China Resource Center

Comments

[Brad]

The funny thing about that article and the story of Shi, is that whenever Sabrina and I watch a Chinese movie (I read the sub titles) I always comment that it sounds like everyone is talking just like that, shi shi shi. For me, thats just what it sounds like, but for Sabrina and all Chinese speakers I guess in the context it all makes sense.

[Emmanuel]

Definitely is not like this. First, there are three types of Chinese words that sound like"shi" and these are "si, xi, shi", are ponounced in a slightly different way and have totally different meaning. Second, the Chinese language has four tones. Meaning that each one of the above "shi" may be pronounced under four different tones and have four different meanings. In total it may be possible to get 3*4 = 12 words that sound "shi". However, all these can be clearly expressed and distinguished in Pinyin, but this is something the professor forgot to mention...Let's do not forget that similar cases we have in every language, where the same word may have multiple meanings.

[Destin Hubble]

I would like to reiterate the strength of the former point. Pinyin accurately depicts every distinction made by a chinese speaker in speech. In other words, if a person can understand someone telling this story, they can understand it by reading *accurate* Pinyin. I'm not exactly sure how you can teach Chinese without using characters or Pinyin with tone marks included.

Unfortunately, what I have said above is not always true. Although Pinyin always accurately represents speech, speech does not always accurately represent meaning. Sometimes Chinese speakers have to write down characters to be able to communicate a word or in the least, they have to describe the word they are trying to communicate in a redundant fashion. The biggest example I can think of is names. Often in English, we have to ask how to spell a last name but much more often in Chinese, you have to spell (describe the characters of) the name. I've always felt this redundancy and reliance on written word is unfortunate and symbolizes a fault in the system.

I may sound harsh, but I love Chinese. Mostly, I just can't stand the fact that China didn't anchor to Pinyin when they had a chance 100 years ago. I'm convinced that Chinese would be the universal language by now if they had done so. Anyone I've ever spoken to that has decided not to take Chinese, is because of the characters.

[Andrew Parke]

I may be in the minority here, but I decided to learn Chinese specifically because of their characters; had Chinese adopted pinyin as its sole written system, I would not have even bothered trying to learn the language.

I am a very visual learner, and reading / writing Chinese (mostly using traditional characters) is far more sensible to me than speaking it.