Why I think the Chinese writing system is TERRIBLE

so when a writing system relies on a secondary  notation system in order for it to even be viable   in our modern society I think that's a red flag  that there's something fundamentally flawed about   it in the first place hey guys and welcome back  to another episode of ABChinese this video is   going to be more relaxed it's also going to be  an opinion piece so don't take anything I say as   facts this is just an opinion you've probably  already seen the title and I want to preface   this by saying that I absolutely love Chinese okay  otherwise I wouldn't be on YouTube making videos   about the Chinese language and teaching others  about it and I certainly wouldn't be studying it   myself if I didn't have an interest in it but  recently I've been thinking about the Chinese   writing system objectively in the past few months  I've done research and I've made three different   videos on the writing reforms of the 1950s both  on pinyin and two videos on simplified characters   which if you haven't seen those videos yet please  go check them out I spent a ton of time on these   videos and I think they turned out great so  definitely worth a watch but as I was reading   about these reforms and like the things that the  reformers are trying to solve and the challenges   they were facing it got me thinking that Chinese  does have a lot of problems with the writing   system like you wouldn't reform a language  unless he thought there was something wrong with   it right you wouldn't really reform something  if you didn't think you could make it better and   optimize it so that's how I reached the conclusion  that the Chinese writing system is absolutely   terrible now before anybody comes and burns me  at the stake let me explain by what criteria I'm   judging the Chinese writing system on I'm only  talking about how good Chinese characters are as   a writing system as a tool as a communications  device I don't care about how beautiful it is   how much history is behind it any of that and it  really does line up like if you think about all   the positives that people say about the Chinese  writing system about Chinese characters they   always point to how beautiful it is how unique  it is how much history culture and ancient wisdom   there is inside these characters but nobody ever  says that Chinese characters are intuitive they   never say it's easy to learn they never say it's  easy to use instead they complain about how it's   not phonetic how even native speakers forget how  to use them and not just once in a while but often   so let's just go over some of the problems I see  with Chinese characters and why it's a terrible   writing system the biggest problem I see with the  Chinese writing system is that it's not alphabetic   now this may be cool for like westerners who  want to learn Chinese because it's like exotic   and like unique it's one of the last languages on  Earth that's not an alphabet but it doesn't change   the fact that alphabetic systems are superior  by almost every metric especially in our modern   society in the 21st century just consider the fact  that without pinyin a secondary notation system   you wouldn't even be able to input Chinese into  your phone or your computers the problem lies in   the fact that speech is linear and an alphabet  system is also linear one letter goes after   the other and it keeps going along the flow of  time like in spoken speech but Chinese writing   doesn't follow that convention yes each block is a  syllable but the makeup of the block is completely   random there are some rules in the way that  Chinese characters are built but theoretically   they're so free that you could create an infinite  amount of Chinese characters and there's simply   not enough rules about where the strokes have to  go for you to be able to systematically input it   into a computer using a keyboard so when  a writing system relies on a secondary notation   system in order for it to even be viable in our  modern society I think that's a red flag that   there's something fundamentally flawed about it  in the first place so we can talk a little bit   more about how Chinese writing and technology is  completely incompatible there are technically some   ways to input Chinese that aren't pinyin for  example you could use handwriting input which   is just literally using your finger to trace out  the characters but that's super slow or you can   use wubi (五笔) input which if I'm not mistaken is  based off of using stroke order to input the   Chinese characters but nobody knows how to use  that and the fact that nobody uses it I think is   a testimony to how unintuitive and difficult it  is to use compared to pinyin or zhuyin so pinyin   is what they use in mainland China as a notation  system for the pronunciation of characters zhuyin   is what they use in Taiwan but fundamentally they  are the same when you input with pinyin or zhuyin   which is what most people do you are basically  typing out the pronunciation of of the character   you want to input which at that point the computer  guesses what character you meant to input that's   right the computer guesses what characters you're  trying to input just think about how ridiculous that sounds   now you could say that this problem is diminishing  because as technology gets better especially as   AI gets better computers and you know even your  smartphones are getting really good at figuring   out what you mean to say just think about how  good autocomplete is now for English it's the   same thing with Chinese it's getting really good  at knowing what you mean to type out but this also   leads to a different problem and that problem is  that Chinese speakers now are typing so much on   their computers and on their phones that they  have forgotten how to write Chinese uh Asian   boss did a great video on this where they went  to the streets of Shanghai and they did their   classic interview style and they asked Chinese  speakers to write out some pretty easy Chinese   words and yet these people were struggling to  remember how to write these characters this is   a real phenomenon in China they call it tí bǐ wàng zì which  means lift up your pen and forget how to write the   character so if you're struggling to remember how  to write Chinese characters don't feel bad it   really is that difficult the second big problem  I see with Chinese that was a problem even long   time ago is the fact that Chinese writing is not  phonetic so if you think about why pinyin was   invented or all the romanizations that happened  before pinyin check out my video on the history   of pinyin to learn more about that then you realize  that all these romanization methods for Chinese   were basically created because Chinese characters  were not phonetic so they needed to create another   system of writing to record the pronunciations  of Chinese characters the very first missionaries   that went to China from Italy that they learned  Chinese there and they created the very first   romanization systems they didn't do it because  they want to impose their Western ideology on   the Chinese people they did it for themselves  because they had to record how to pronounce all   these Chinese words they were learning they didn't  have audio recorders back then they had to put in   writing and that's a problem with Chinese writing  because in most writing systems it both records   the meaning of the word and also the pronunciation  of the word like in like in English okay although   you could argue that not all of these words in  English have perfect phonetic representations   but for the most part a word in English shows you  how to read it how it's pronounced but a word in   Chinese does not show you how it's pronounced so  think about young children learning English when   they're learning how to read they can sound out  a word that they don't know in other words they   don't know this word but based on how it's spelled  they can take a guess at how to read it how to   pronounce it you can't do that in Chinese you see  a new word you don't know what it means guess what   you also don't know how to pronounce it this is  also one of the reasons why it's so difficult to   remember how to write Chinese characters because  when you're using a writing system that's phonetic   you can use the pronunciation the sound of the  word to help you remember how to spell it out but   when you're using a writing system like Chinese  that's not phonetic you cannot use the sound of the   character to try to help you remember how how to  write it the only thing you have to go by is your   memory of what it looks like the shape of it the  silhouette of it and try to fill in the gaps good   luck with that but the funny thing is the very  fact that Chinese writing is not phonetic may have   been the reason why it survived so long in history  so in the context of history this may have been a   positive attribute and my reasoning for this is  because each Chinese character merely represents   one syllable and one idea but it doesn't really  matter which idea you can map it to any idea   this made it extremely adaptable and able to be  mapped to different languages for example this   is why Japanese Korean and Vietnamese have all  historically used Chinese characters for their own   languages even though their languages are spoken  completely different from spoken Chinese and even   with the so-called dialects of Chinese some of  which are as different as French and Italian they   all use the same Chinese characters and they're  able to use the Chinese characters because Chinese   characters are that adaptable and this is just my  guess but I think this is the reason why China was   able to maintain such large Empires at multiple  points in history think about the Qing Dynasty the   Ming Dynasty or even the very first Qin Shi Huang who united  China this all happened because they had a unified   writing system unlike Europe for example which is  extremely fragmented despite its already smaller   size every nation in Europe or every civilization  in Europe had their own spoken language they had   their own writing language and they drew borders  based on what they spoke and what they wrote   but in China even though a lot of people spoke  different languages at least everybody was unified   under the same writing system and perhaps Qin Shi Huang who was  the first emperor to unify China knew something   about this because under his rule guess what he  did he created a language reform he created the   small seal script which was a different script at  the time unified the writing system for everybody   under his Empire maybe in hopes of keeping it  unified so it's a double-edged sword on one hand   the non-phonetic nature of Chinese made it really  adaptable and survive a long time in history but   on the other hand it also means that it's very  generic in a sense like it's not perfectly suited   for Mandarin Chinese Chinese characters are not  perfectly suited for Cantonese they're not suited   for hokkien it works for all of them but it's not  customized to any of them so where do we go from   here this is how I see it right now as many of  you know I practice Chinese calligraphy but when   I practice Chinese calligraphy I'm not writing  Chinese characters as a writing system I'm writing   it in appreciation of the art the culture and  possibly even the history behind these characters   okay so I think it's important that we recognize  the positive attributes of Chinese characters the   deep meaning the history and the wisdom behind  them and yet recognize that purely as a writing   system it kind of sucks so Chinese characters  as a writing system and Chinese characters as   Chinese culture and traditional history whatever  they can exist separately that's why I support   simplified Chinese characters despite most of  them being meaningless scribbles because it's   a more intuitive system slightly I would only  recommend you learn traditional characters if   you truly want to learn traditional characters for  the cultural value of it let me put it this way so   a lot of supporters of traditional Chinese will  bring up the argument that traditional characters   are more meaningful they're more impactful  uh classic example I hate to bring this up but   um the character for love In traditional Chinese  has a heart component to it whereas in simplified   they kind of remove that and doesn't have it so  then they would argue that well this character   is a lot more meaningful in traditional characters  and in simplified it's so meaningless but you know   what I would say to that if your understanding of  love is dependent on how you write the character   for love then I would argue that you never  understood love in the first place like nobody   knows what the origins behind the English word  love but it doesn't detract from our ability   to love or our ability to feel love or understand  what it is so this is really just a silly argument   and we should all just put it to rest please  nobody bring up the heart in love ever after this   I will personally continue to learn traditional  characters but that's only because I want to learn   the fullest extent of the Chinese language and  culture but it's not for everyone obviously and   even though I say simplified Chinese as a writing  system is slightly better than traditional I   think both of them are still actually not as  good as English English is a better writing   system than Chinese overall and Korean is probably  better than both of them but again these are all   just my opinions so if you disagree with them feel  free to leave a comment in the comment section and   we can even have a little debate in the comment  section I think that'd be pretty fun so thank you   for watching I hope this video wasn't too negative  or discouraging I still think I still think that   Chinese is an amazing language to study and to  learn so I'll see you guys in the next one bye bye

Channel: ABChinese

Views: 76,668

Keywords: is Chinese hard to learn?, Are Chinese characters hard to learn?, How many Chinese characters do you need to know, How does Chinese writing work

Id: yFoePMJz_Lw

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022