Computer keyboards have 26 English letters, and the preferred language for computer software and website development and operation is English. The popularity of the Internet has further consolidated the status of English as an international common language, which makes other languages feel pressure. Although Chinese has the largest population, it has a low degree of internationalization, and there are far fewer countries that use Chinese and use it as a second language than English-speaking countries. There are many sayings about the backwardness of Chinese and the alphabetization of Chinese characters. It seems that the foundation of our China culture is dying.
This is a superficial understanding of China’s backwardness and beatings in modern times. A comprehensive comparison of languages in various countries will show that Chinese is not only backward, but also the best language in the world: Chinese characters are standardized and beautiful, with many elements of word formation, many ways of word formation, flexible word formation and word formation, rich syllables, large language capacity, simple grammar and fast and clear expression.
According to Wikipedia’s statistics on the major languages in the world, this paper takes Google Translation as an example: "Why don’t they speak X?" Look at the glyphs of the characters in major languages, analyze the composition of the characters, and analyze the phonetic syllables to compare the major languages, so as to identify the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese:
The number of native speakers in countries with phonetic syllables composed of language examples
Chinese Jane: Why don’t they speak Chinese?
Why don’t they speak Chinese? Nearly 200 pictographs and more than 800 phonemes can be combined into words, and words can express meanings. 23 initials ×33 finals =759 ×4 tones =3036 syllables, and the actual number of syllables with tones is 1315. Sino-Tibetan Language Department, China, Singapore and Malaysia, 1.1 billion.
Why can’t they just speak English? 26 letters, only the left and right structures can be combined to form a word meaning, but not the upper and lower ones. phonography has 28 consonants and 20 vowels, with a maximum of 560 syllables, and actually uses about 400 syllables. Indo-European languages, Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and India, etc., with 330 million, are the most widely used international lingua franca.
Spanish ?Cómo que no hablan espa?ol? 29 letters, only left and right one-dimensional combination, phonography is clumsy in meaning. New words are frequent and have poor stability. 24 consonants, 5 vowels, up to 120 syllables, Indo-European family, Spain, Latin America, 300 million, the second international lingua franca.
Indy/Urdu has 44 letters, which can only be combined left and right in one dimension. The font is irregular, ugly and difficult to write and recognize. There are 11 vowels and 43 consonants with a maximum of 473 syllables, so it is not bad to use half the syllables actually. Austronesian family, India, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, 500 million, low degree of internationalization.
There are 28 letters in Arabic, which can only be combined in one dimension, and the font is irregular, which is ugly and difficult to write and recognize. There are 28 consonants and 12 meta-phonetic symbols, with a maximum of 236 syllables, and the actual use will not reach 236. Non-Asian languages, 200 million people in the Middle East and North Africa.
Bengali is not displayed. Look at the picture:
51 letters, only left and right one-dimensional combination, irregular font, ugly and difficult to write and recognize. 11 vowels, 40 consonants, with a maximum of 440 syllables. austronesian family, Bangladeshi and Indian 185 million.
Portuguese porqueeles no falam portuguê s? 23 letters, can only be combined left and right, can’t combine five vowels up and down, namely a,e,i,o,u, and there are 18 consonants, with a maximum of 90 syllables in Indo-European languages, Portugal, Brazil, Angola and Mozambique, 160 million.
Russian почемуониеговорятна?. 33 letters can only be combined in one dimension. phonography is easy to read, but clumsy in meaning. Among them, there are 10 vowels, 21 consonants and 2 silent symbols, with a maximum of 210 syllables. Indo-European Slavic Language Family, Russia, Belarus and other Russian Federation countries, 160 million.
Japanese なぜらはがせなぃのですか? Square Chinese characters are mixed with cursive scripts of hiragana and katakana, and there are 50 hiragana and katakana, which are neither fish nor fowl, and the syllables used are more than 100 Altaic languages, with 125 million in Japan.
German warum sprechen sienicht einfach Deutsch? 30 letters can only be combined in one dimension. phonography is easy to read but clumsy in meaning. There are 11 vowels and 23 consonants, with a maximum of 253 syllables, and fewer syllables are actually used. Indo-European language family, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland, 100 million
French pourquoi, tout simple, neparlent-ils pas franais? 26 letters, only left and right one-dimensional combination, phonography ideographic clumsy. 7 vowels, 20 consonants, up to 140 syllables. Indo-European language family, France, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland and Haiti, 75 million.
Korean? 40 letters, two-dimensional combination, phonography is clumsy in meaning. 21 vowels and 19 consonants, with a maximum of 399 syllables. Altaic language family, South Korea and North Korea, 60 million.
Thai? 76 letters, only left and right one-dimensional combination, ugly and difficult to write and recognize. There are 44 consonants, 32 vowels and 5 tones. There are 7040 syllables, and the pronunciation is simple. South Asian language family, Thailand, 50 million, low degree of internationalization.
Advantages: 1. Chinese characters are regular and easy to recognize. The glyphs of English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German and other alphabet languages are mostly round, with few strokes but difficult to recognize. The English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German and other alphabet symbols lack the function of pictographic meaning, and their semantic symbols-words are a combination of a few letters, which are prone to alexia. The glyphs of Chinese characters are square characters, and the glyphs have the function of pictographic meaning. The number of alexia patients in Chinese is the lowest in the world.
Indi-Urdu, Arabic, Bengali
The characters of languages such as Thai and Thai are very irregular, ugly and difficult to write and recognize, and their inherent defects greatly hinder the interest in learning these languages. In the wave of language internationalization, these languages will be eliminated and marginalized more and more.
Korean characters are also square characters, but they belong to phonography. Like English and other alphabet languages, phonography is easy to read and clumsy to express meaning, and Korean characters are difficult to recognize, and many people suffer from Korean alexia.
Japanese is a mixture of square Chinese characters, Hiragana with Chinese strokes and Katakana with Chinese cursive script, which is quite a mixture of block letters, running script and cursive script. It is neither fish nor fowl. If it is not the reason of Japan’s developed economy, there are not many people who are interested in learning Japanese.
In typesetting, letters and characters can only be arranged horizontally but not vertically, which is not as flexible as Chinese typesetting.
Advantages 2. Chinese characters have many elements and ways of word formation, flexible word formation and word formation, large language capacity and good stability.
The radicals of Chinese characters are equivalent to letters, and a single Chinese character is equivalent to words. A Chinese character takes up less space than a word, and there are more than 1,000 Chinese character-building parts, including 200 beside the shape of meaning and 800 beside the sound of sound (the "List of Parts of Modern Chinese Commonly Used Characters" published by the State Language Committee has 512 parts, but this list does not exhaust all Chinese character parts). In other languages, there are few word-forming elements: 26 English letters, 26 French letters, 29 Spanish letters, 23 Portuguese letters, 29 German letters, 44 Hindi letters, 28 Arabic letters, 33 Russian letters and 40 Korean letters … How can such few letters compare with the word-forming elements of Chinese characters?
There are more word-formation ways of Chinese characters than alphabetic languages. Alphabetic languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, French, Arabic and Indian can only form ideographic symbols-words with left and right structures, but not with upper and lower structures, and the number of word-formation letters is small, which will inevitably lead to long words. In addition to left and right word-formation, Chinese characters can also form words with up and down, up and down, left and right sets of up and down. Chinese characters can be easily combined into 200 * 800 * 2 = 320,000 Chinese characters by four ways: left and right, up and down, up and down, left and right, and up and down. In fact, in order to avoid confusion, Chinese characters are rarely combined with repeated radicals, and only one of them is selected for combination once. If you have nothing to do with composing Chinese characters, you will find that a large number of radical combinations are not used, which leaves a broad space for the transformation of Chinese characters. If the number of English letters increases by five times to 130, the number of English vocabulary combinations will be five times larger, and the thickness of English dictionary will be much smaller. Even so, compared with more than 1,000 radicals and two-dimensional combinations in Chinese, English is still far behind, and other alphabet languages are similar. Chinese has a large capacity, and there is a lot of room for transformation and upgrading, so there is no need to overthrow it.
Alphabetic language is one-dimensional boring password information, Chinese characters are two-dimensional pattern information with integrated form and sound, and the expressive function of English letters is very weak. English letter combination is coding, while reading English is decoding. Although the alphabet language is easy to learn at first, it is not easy to learn fine because of its huge word system.
Two-dimensional Chinese makes the best use of plane space. Many Chinese characters are just a picture. Who can read the information from the picture faster than the information from the password? In Anglo-American society, patients suffering from "alexia" can’t read and write English, which is ultimately caused by the one-dimensional cryptology of English, but there is no "alexia" in the Chinese world. The expressive force of Chinese characters makes reading very convenient, so we can capture its characteristics and map its meaning at a glance. One-dimensional string cipher pinyin characters can’t do this anyway.
Pinyin has sacrificed its ideographic ability, resulting in its non-intuition. Alphabetic language is a symbol of sound, a low-level form of words, and a one-dimensional password. Two-dimensional Chinese characters are 80% pictophonetic characters, and pictophonetic characters express sounds and meanings. This combination has the greatest expressive power that plane space (paper) can give, which is undoubtedly superior in information expression. The two-dimensional nature of Chinese characters determines the diversity and flexibility of their input methods, which is far more inspiring than the "one-dimensional" password-based pinyin language, while the foundation of alphabetic language is not good, and it is difficult to improve it without completely reinventing it.
In the face of knowledge explosion, Chinese can cope with it easily, while English and other alphabetic languages are tired of it. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, French, Japanese and Korean languages should constantly invent new words to adapt to new things, such as Rockets, Computers, Cinema, etc., but Chinese does not need to invent new words, just need to combine words into new words. Isn’t "rocket" an arrow driven by "fire" and "computer" a human brain that uses electricity? The "cinema" is just a "courtyard" where "electricity" is used to cast "shadows". But English can’t be combined like this, otherwise it will be "too long". For example, the rocket group will become "Fire-Driven-Arrow", the computer will become "Computational-Machine" and the cinema "hall-where-to-see-shade-projected-by-electivity" and so on. If you have to combine words to achieve your goal without increasing the length, you can only rely on abbreviations, such as taking the prefix HWTSSPBE to represent the above-mentioned cinema phrase. There are a lot of incredible abbreviations in English. People’s perspective is limited, and too long words will reduce the readability of the article and the reader’s understanding ability.
Chinese can easily deal with similar things, but English coinage is often a new and unrelated symbol, such as pork pork, mutton mutton, beef beef, lard lard lard, sheep oil suet and butter talon. This is how hundreds of thousands of words in English come from. The English dictionary is much bigger and thicker than the Chinese dictionary, and the English vocabulary has exceeded 400,000. It is expected that the spread will exceed 1 million in the middle of the next century, and the 11,200 Chinese characters in Xinhua Dictionary will be used for thousands of years.
The stability and continuity of Chinese characters are incomparable to English and other alphabetic languages. Today, it is not difficult for us to read Laozi’s Tao Te Ching. Nowadays, it is difficult for people to read Shakespeare’s original works, not to mention the poems of Chaucer, an English poet 400 years ago.
Advantages 3. Chinese phonetics are richer than alphabetic languages, and the expression is faster, clearer and more powerful. Chinese characters can express meaning with one sound, while words in other languages often have multiple sounds to express meaning. Chinese has more syllables than English.
There are 23 Chinese initials: b p m f d t n l g k h j q x zh ch sh r z c s y w;
There are 33 Chinese vowels: a an ao ai ang o ong ou e en er ei eng i ia iu ie in ing iao ian iang ong u un ua uo ue ui ü n uai uan uang.
23*33=759 syllables. According to the Chinese Pinyin scheme, some initials and finals cannot be combined, but there are actually 415 syllables. If four tones are added, there are 4*415=1660 syllables with tones, and the actual standard pronunciation with tones is 1315.
English has 28 consonants (equivalent to Chinese initials) and 20 vowels (equivalent to Chinese vowels, English long vowels and short vowels are really unnecessary):
English has 560 syllables in theory, but only 400 syllables are actually used. English words need polysyllables to express their meanings (monosyllabic words are rare), while Chinese words only need monosyllables to express their meanings. There are more vowels in Chinese than in English, and English consonants and vowels are more similar and laborious than Chinese initials and vowels. Therefore, Chinese pronunciation is clearer and louder than English. In the simultaneous translation of languages, Chinese is often finished and English is not finished.
Why do the more kinds of sounds, the faster the speed of thinking and expression? Suppose a person can only pronounce two sounds, A and B. If there are only 400 things to be expressed in the world, then the 400 sounds of English correspond to 400 things one by one, and the person who can only pronounce two sounds will have to express one of the 400 things with nine pronunciations, because the nine times of two are only more than 400. For example, the British use’ I’ for’ I’, while people who only have two voices may use abbababba for the concept of’ I’. It takes about 0.25 seconds for an average person to pronounce a sound, and it takes 2.25 seconds for a person who only knows two sounds. This shows that the fewer syllables, the harder and slower the expression. The 400 syllables in English are only one-third of the 1315 syllables in Chinese, which is the reason why Chinese is faster than English and other alphabetic languages. Japanese uses 100 different sounds, while Chinese uses 1315 sounds, so many Chinese characters have to be expressed in two or three sounds when Japanese people read them. We assume that all words in Japanese are expressed by two sounds, that is to say, in the same time, the information that Japanese people hear is only half that of Chinese.
In the comparison table of major languages, only Thai has more syllables than Chinese, and the pronunciation of other alphabet languages does not exceed that of Chinese. Although Thai is rich in pronunciation, it is ugly and difficult to write, which is the congenital defect of Thai, which makes it unable to compare with Chinese. So it seems that it is great for our ancestors to create Chinese characters.
Advantage 4: Chinese grammar is simpler than alphabetic language. Verbs in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German and French are tense, nouns are plural, such as English. After verbs, we add ing to indicate progressive tense and ed to indicate past tense, which changes the spelling and reading methods of words. Chinese is not so clumsy, and the tense problem is easily solved by using the word "positive" in the progressive and "le" in the past. Chinese nouns don’t have plural numbers, which is not as troublesome as adding an S after nouns in English, and changing F into V when it ends in F, etc.
Some people say that Chinese grammar is simple and phrases and sentences are flexible, which shows that Chinese’s thinking is not rigorous. On the other hand, why make the language so troublesome and rigid? Language is first and foremost a tool, which is powerful, flexible and simple to use. Isn’t it the characteristics that an excellent language should have?
Disadvantages of Chinese
Although Chinese has many innate advantages, it also has shortcomings. The disadvantages of Chinese are as follows:
Disadvantages 1. Chinese is recognized as the most difficult language to learn.
This is the most difficult language ranking in the world according to the statistics of the United Nations Department of Science, Education, Culture and Health:
1- Chinese 2- Greek 3- Arabic 4- Icelandic 5- Japanese
6- Finnish 7- German 8- Norwegian 9- Danish 10- French
Chinese is difficult to learn for foreigners whose mother tongue is alphabetic language. The biggest problem in learning Chinese is the difficulty in getting started. There are more than 200 phonetic symbols and more than 800 phonetic symbols in Chinese, which is much more difficult than getting started in languages with only dozens of letters. Although it is difficult to get started in Chinese, it is easier to learn general knowledge than alphabetic language. The literacy standard of Chinese characters is 1500 words, and college students in science and engineering generally master 2000 Chinese characters. With these 2000 words, everyone can read books, newspapers and engage in scientific research. But in the English-speaking world, you can’t read newspapers without mastering 20,000 words, and you can’t read Time magazine smoothly without 30,000 words. Professionals who graduated from college 10 years ago generally know 80,000 words.
Chinese is more difficult to learn than people with alphabetic languages. In today’s world, most countries are one-dimensional alphabetic languages, and polysyllabic words with less than 50 words are used to express meanings. They have not learned Chinese that can express meanings by two-dimensional combination of single sounds, so it is difficult to learn because the system of complete Chinese is completely unfamiliar. Generally speaking, there are few elements in a thing, and it is easy to get started, but its function is not strong. These are two sides of the same thing. Chinese has the advantages of large information capacity, concise and rapid expression, clear pronunciation and fast expression, which are characterized by many elements, many ways, flexible word formation and word formation, and rich syllables. However, this feature must have its weakness that it is difficult to get started. English and other alphabetic languages have few words. Although it is easy to start, there are a lot of shortcomings behind it. Once they learn Chinese, the accuracy and efficiency of Chinese are more attractive than other languages.
The difficulty of learning Chinese is mainly reflected in:
Chinese characters emphasize meaning over pronunciation, and the pronunciation rules of Chinese characters are destroyed too much. Learning mainly depends on rote memorization. There are too many hidden rules in Chinese, and polyphonic words and transliteration words (pictophonetic words used for different pronunciations by one sound) destroy the pronunciation rules too much, just like there are as many hidden rules in China society. Learning Chinese characters mainly depends on time-consuming and laborious rote memorization, which greatly delays the time of learning Chinese and discourages the enthusiasm of learning Chinese. It takes foreigners several times as long as other languages to learn Chinese well. Letters-based languages are mostly phonetic languages. It is easy for foreigners to learn similar languages, but the rules of Chinese are too broken. It is not only difficult for foreigners to learn Chinese, but it is also difficult for Chinese to learn Chinese well.
The main culprits that break the rules of Chinese pronunciation are polyphonic characters and transliteration characters, which aggravate the complexity of Chinese characters. There are 250 polyphonic characters in common use, so there are more transliteration characters. Transmutation characters are used by a phonetic side for many words with different pronunciations: for example, "yao yao", "jiao Dong" and "rao Rao" all use them, but their pronunciations are different, just like "Yao Yao". Polysyllabic characters and transliteration characters can be eliminated by reforming Chinese characters, so that one character has one sound, and pictophonetic characters have the same pronunciation as phonetic characters. The disadvantages of Chinese rote memorization are also found in alphabetic languages.
Homophones and homonyms are a headache, and the tone is often bad for foreigners. Homonyms can be reduced, but homonyms can’t be eliminated, because there are fewer syllables in Chinese characters, 3,500 commonly used Chinese characters, and 1,100 commonly used Chinese syllables, with an average pronunciation of 3.18 Chinese characters. There is no guarantee that one word can be pronounced, but homonyms can be reduced. The tone of Chinese characters is worried about foreigners, so there is no way. There is no way to change the four tones, so we have to learn to adapt.
Chinese characters are complicated in word formation and have many strokes, which makes it difficult for foreigners who are used to the alphabetic language to write. Some Chinese characters have bloated strokes and even we in Chinese don’t like them, such as:
The cancer-ridden whip is beside the thin Tibetan food, and the pot is filled with a cry, a cry, a cry, a cry, a cry, a cry, a sauce, a cry, a cry, a cry, and a cry.
The structure of these Chinese characters is either upper, middle and lower, left, middle and right, or the left and right structures are nested with upper and lower structures, and the strokes are bloated and repetitive, so it is very necessary to simplify them in the system transformation of Chinese characters.
Disadvantages 2. The degree of internationalization of Chinese is not high. This is the ranking of the number of second language users made by linguist George Weber in 1997:
French (190 million) English (150 million) Russian (125 million) Portuguese (28 million)
Arabic (21 million) Spanish (20 million) Chinese (20 million)
German (09 million) Japanese (08 million)
Chinese is a sad reminder. Only 20 million people regard Chinese as a second foreign language. In the ranking of the number of language-using countries, Chinese is not prominent either:
English (115) French (35) Arabic (24) Spanish (20) Russian (16) German (9)
Mandarin (5) Portuguese (5) Hindi/Urdu (2) Bengali (1) Japanese (1)
Comprehensive influence of major languages:
Chinese has not achieved the corresponding international status at all. One of the reasons is that China’s international influence is far less than that of English-speaking countries, which is the result of long-term despotism in China and China, and the other is that foreigners who have their own system of Chinese find it difficult to learn.
The scripts of China’s neighboring countries, such as Korean and Vietnamese, have been established and standardized in the past 200 years. They are deeply influenced by Chinese, but it is very short-sighted to imitate English and other one-dimensional alphabet languages without exception. When China is developed, will these countries take pleasure in imitating Chinese?
Disadvantage 3. The simplification and simplification of Chinese characters have not been unified, which is caused by historical reasons. Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and overseas Chinese, and simplified Chinese is used in Chinese mainland. This problem is not too big, and there are similar problems in Spanish. In the near future, after the democratic reunification of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan with the mainland, the simplified and traditional Chinese characters will be unified, and a comprehensive reform of Chinese characters will be ushered in, so that the problem of difficult Chinese learning will be alleviated and the internationalization of Chinese characters will be improved.
